Читать книгу Housing in the Margins - Hanna Hilbrandt - Страница 17

In the last decades, Marxist, Foucauldian, feminist, and, more recently, new-materialist approaches have theorized the state beyond essentializing imaginaries of an all-powerful government: as multiple and embodied rather than bounded and located outside of the social; as a dynamic process rather than a static body; and as a metaphysical effect or a discursive construct rather than a real entity (Jessop, 2016; Jeffrey, 2013; Painter, 2007; Ferguson and Gupta, 2002; Mitchell, 1999). Although heterogeneous in focus and theoretical commitment, these traditions provide a basis from which to approach the state in the everyday enactment of urban governance through processes of negotiation. More specifically, I base my understanding of informality on accounts that focus on the agentic, relational, and situated dimensions of state enactment. Therefore, I refer to literature that places weight on: state actors and their role in negotiation processes, their normative judgments, and their social embeddedness (Tilly, 1999; Lea, 2008; Lipsky, 2010 [1980]); the legal-material situations of regulatory enactment and modalities of claim-making (Valverde, 2011; Blomley, 2014); and the embeddedness of regulating actors in both society and state institutions as reflecting back on and thereby shaping one another (Cooper, 1998; Hunter, 2015). Running ahead of myself and previewing some of the payoffs of exploring informal housing in this way, this approach provides an alternative reading of informality – one in which informality emerges out of the normalcy through which the state routinely becomes performed. In this reading, regulation and transgression depend on the subjective experience of all governing agents who juggle multiple and frequently contradictory legal orders, and where transgression and regulation frequently do not take place following formally subscribed roles. But to come to this conclusion, let me sketch out this approach and how it shapes our understanding of informality. This book’s subsequent chapters will add empirical detail and theoretical depth to different facets of the approach.

In the late 1970s, the empirical work of US political scientist Michael Lipsky (2010 [1980]) challenged assumptions about rigid state hierarchies and bureaucratic silos. Lipsky’s focus on the role of day-to-day practices, professional discretion, and individual agency of the “street-level bureaucracy” shifted accounts of state enactment toward an understanding that practitioners in public roles – through their individual lived experiences, normative judgments, and personal ways of going about their work – were central to the governance process. In his view, the implementation process at the “front line” was not simply handing down policy but constituted the policy process itself. As Lipsky wrote, “the decisions of street-level bureaucrats, the routines they establish, and the devices they invent to cope with uncertainties and work pressures effectively become the public policies they carry out” (ibid: xii, emphasis in origin). Half a century later, Lipsky’s work has been criticized as no longer speaking to neoliberal governance arrangements (Durose, 2007). Yet, the view that public policy actors put their powers to play as “persons with commitments” (Jones, 2011: 60), rather than as agents of the state, has shaped contemporary policy implementation debates.

Today’s more relational and interpretive approaches to policy implementation have sharpened the view on the agency of workers in public services (Lea, 2008; Hunter, 2015; Dobson, 2020). These approaches displace the distinctions between individuals in public policy and the social and institutional “systems” in which they work by reference to their embeddedness in and through multi-scalar social relations, interactions, and structures. Consider, for instance, Shona Hunter’s (2015: 24) conceptualization of “relational politics”:

By relational politics I am referring to the dynamic emotional process through which social categories such as gender and ethnicity get lived out, resignified and resisted in the everyday policy process and the ways they act back to reconfigure that very process itself. Thus I am claiming that despite its “under the surface,” “hidden” character, relational politics is a powerful driver for the shape of the state, the distribution of power and inequality in “it” and through “it.” (2015: 24, emphasis in original)

By tightly entangling the lived experience of practitioners and the structures of the state, Hunter’s reading of relational politics suggests two conclusions: First, this understanding renders the state open to everyday transformations. In her relational reading, policy enactment is a pre- and refigurative process, one in which practitioners effectively shape the structures that they enact. Second, a relational view on processes of regulation complicates notions of public officials. In this perspective, policy actors are, as Rachael Dobson vividly argues, neither “cast as institutional automatons who fail to resist because they don’t or can’t know any better given the saturating power of hegemonic neoliberal governmentalities” nor high-minded do-gooders, “actors doing what they can in difficult circumstances” (2020: 4). Instead, this reading lends itself to imagining street-level bureaucrats, as Dobson notes elsewhere, as “critically humanistic actors: people with varied perspectives who exercise power and agency, and who apply multiple, ambivalent and contested meanings to their constructed worlds” (2015: 694).

In this way, this perspective takes us away from explanations of informality that place weight on, for instance, “cultures of corruption,” in which the agency of public officials vanishes behind narratives of all-dominating norms. Instead, it shifts attention to the interrelations through which “governing subjects,” in Hunter’s terms (2015: 3, my emphasis), negotiate structures and situations in their everyday work. Placing the analytical focus on the workers who are doing the governing, and on their normative stance and social embeddedness, takes us closer to an understanding of informality through the ways in which local bureaucracy understands the rules and how they ought to be applied. Here, and as I find in Chapter 6, resistance, transgression, and maneuvering lie not only in the contestations of the subaltern, as some of the informality literature posits, but also in the practices of the state’s official representatives.

Focusing on the state as negotiated in sites and processes of regulation also implies recognizing, as a more permanent feature of governing, that rules are ambiguous and frequently uncoupled from the situations to which they ostensibly apply. Socio-legal scholars have gone a long way in documenting the plurality of the law and its dependence on legal interpretive practices (Blomley, 1988, 2014; Blomley et al., 2001; Valverde, 2009, 2011, 2012; Delaney, 2010). For instance, as Chapter 7 discusses in depth, for critical legal scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the law only loosely applies to the complexities of all possible real-world situations, as it results from processes of scaling up, projecting, and symbolizing such complexity in ways that provide abstractions that apply to the law’s entire jurisdiction. In further complicating the relation between the law and specific sites, critical legal studies assume the coexistence of various legal conventions on the same territory (for example, national law, urban regulations, and local normative orders), thereby undermining the narrow conception of legal formalism (Butler, 2009: 316), i.e. the binary determinism of legality and illegality. Rather, following de Sousa Santos, “we live in a time of porous legality or of legal porosity, multiple networks of legal orders forcing us to constant transition and trespassing” (2002: 437).

As different legal orders intersect, actors need to negotiate one set of rules (e.g. customary law) with another (e.g. state law). Furthermore, they need to apply multiple sets of rules to possibly contradictory real-world situations. This implies, as Melissaris notes, “being attentive both to the plurality of norms but also to the ways in which they are organized in and around practices” (2004: 58). Charles Tilly offers an insightful exploration of the ambivalent mechanisms that govern the “the intersections between abstract, centrally promoted plans and social life on the small scale” (1999: 345), or, to use the title of his seminal article, the interface between “Top Down and Bottom Up” power. Tilly’s central proposition (ibid: 350) is that the implementation of abstract projects, plans, or policies is likely to fail in the absence of routine mechanisms that accommodate, mediate, or negotiate contradictory circumstances. In this view, mechanisms such as “polyvalent performance, accommodative bargaining, category formation, intellectual brokerage and improvisation” (ibid: 345) that provide different ways of negotiating conflicting circumstances in processes of governance are central to the functioning of states. Echoing Lipsky’s (2010 [1980]) observation, street-level bureaucrats “twist” power (Allen, 2016: 15) when, for instance, they work with contradictions as they adapt rules “on the ground.” Understanding the governance and production of informal practices in these terms places more weight, as I will go on to suggest, on the routine implementation mechanisms through which all actors translate regulations to specific situations and less on the exceptional transgressions that informal housing entails. As Chapter 5 suggests, a discussion of informal housing in these terms also brings the spatial and material modalities of negotiating the city into view: the material transformations and governance of allotment huts and infrastructures are negotiated in relation to the allotments’ ambiguous legal framings.

Studying informality by focusing on the everyday negotiation of rules asks us to bring those typically not understood as doing governing work into the analytical frame. And it requires us to include them in ways that go beyond describing the antagonistic relations between state actors employing more “centered” modalities of power, such as domination or manipulation, and civil society actors working against the state through more “mobilized” and dispersed registers of power, such as upheaval or dissent.⁵ More useful for an understanding of the negotiated nature of governance is literature that has described interactive relations between state and civil society groups through quiet registers of change. Most prominently, urban regime theory has highlighted how state–market alliances penetrate municipal governance through the political bargaining and factional interest of organized interest groups (Stone, 1993; Kantor et al., 1997; Granados and Knoke, 2005). While these networks steer policy implementation through strategy, mutual recognition, and permanence, others have accounted for the participation of more dispersed and fragmented civil society groups in processes of governing (Davis, 2010; Jaffe, 2013; Schindler, 2014b; Lamotte, 2017). For instance, Ilda Lindell (2008), writing about the governance of markets in Maputo, provides evidence of “fluid” and “unstable” systems of governance characterized, as she writes, “by great uncertainty, unpredictability and precarious alliances with patrons, short-lived agreements and the constant management of conflicts” (2008: 1897). By accounting for the multiple contestations between different groups at work, this fragmented imaginary of how state power is mediated in putting governance to work provides a basis for understanding the internal contestations at play when actors negotiate informal housing.

Still, more central to an understanding of the negotiations at the core of this book are a variety of quiet and frequently dispersed registers of claim-making through which anthropologists have explored the everyday strategies of groups and individuals in processes of governance (Das and Poole, 2004; Auyero, 2010; Fourchard, 2011). These can occur in everyday state–citizen encounters, in which citizens “see the state,” in Corbridge et al.’s terms (2005), in the discursive relations in which citizens themselves enact the state (Gupta, 1995), as well as in the ways in which citizens transform the material structures that constitute “the state” (Reeves, 2009: 1283). Jeremy Brooke Straughn’s study of “consentful contention” (2005: 1602) is a useful example of these modalities of interaction. His work on the practices of citizens in East Germany led him to describe “consentful contention” as a “genre” of individualistic yet pervasive forms of political negotiation that he took to be flourishing in view of the “inherently paradoxical nature” of post-socialist states. Straughn defines “consentful contention” (ibid) as the interaction between “subordinate actors” and state representatives, in which citizens further their interest on the basis of explicit reference to the ideological commitments of the state. This supplies an analysis of state–citizen interaction that not only breaks with the binary determinism of resistance and suppression – as citizens here too enact the ideology of the state at the same time as they outwit or manipulate state representatives – but also presents actors in and beyond institutions as critical subjects in complex and fluid roles.

In the sense that it accounts for the ambiguous roles of citizens and street-level bureaucrats, the present argument is consistent with Straughn’s (2005) analysis. Negotiation, as a family of practices (including, in my reading, multiple other interactive registers of claim-making, such as modalities of bargaining, ways of adapting the law to local circumstances, the gardeners’ prefigurative politics, or ways of securing compromises) brings both “sides,” with their normative commitments, structural constraints, and situational necessities, into one frame. In offering a more relational and plural understanding of how and by whom power is mobilized and resisted, a focus on negotiation enables an understanding of informality through having a full grasp of the multiple loci and modalities of power through which governance becomes enacted and urban development transformed.