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