1 Elected Local Bodies, Space, and the Governance of Market Expansion in Rural India Forthcoming in Geoforum 1 Dolly Daftary Departing from scholarship related to democratic decentralization which has largely treated the phenomenon through the lenses of comparative politics, public choice and participatory governance; I identify democratic decentralization as a form of state restructuring of rural spaces during an era of market expansion. Drawing upon political geography and critical governance studies and based on multi-site ethnographic fieldwork in India, elected local bodies are identified as mediators of market-society conflicts, builders of infrastructure to overcome spatio-temporal barriers to the movement of capital, and legitimators of new property regimes at the geopolitical margins. Market expansion by means of democratic decentralization is a window onto the transformation of statehood during second wave economic reforms in India, and unsettles the premise of grassroots democratization advancing distributional justice in the locality. Keywords- panchayats, development, neoliberalism, capital, Gujarat, state transformation 1 Accepted version of manuscript forthcoming in Geoforum: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.04.011