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.
Negotiating Urban Formalities
These approaches do not offer new ways of thinking about the everyday negotiation of regulation and transgression, but they provide novel routes to approaching informality. To recall, my objective was to open up a framework that facilitates operationalizing informality, or, more precisely put, the negotiation of irregular housing practices in an analysis of urban bureaucracies in a Western liberal state. Understanding the enactment of regulations in the agentic, relational, and situated ways outlined earlier has three crucial implications for conceptualizing informality.
First, as this approach accounts for how all governing actors understand rules and how they ought to be applied, in this reading formality and informality acquire meaning in relation to the subjective conceptions through which regulation and transgression are negotiated. That these actors’ understandings of formality and informality are always constituted in specific situations makes it necessary to define and theoretically approach formality and informality in relation to these understandings “on the ground.” Resisting the assumption that regulations could always be implemented in straightforward ways moves analytical attention away from processes of compliance and toward an analysis of the ways in which rules are translated to specific urban situations, i.e. to the interpretive mechanisms that are the ordinary stuff of policy implementation. In this way, phenomena one could label as informal when analyzed at a different scale or from a different angle appear as cogent or necessary solutions – at times the only way through which rules can be emplaced. These are then not processes lying outside of the state; rather, they point to the multiple ways in which the state regularly becomes performed.
Second, this approach changes understandings of informality regarding how and by whom power is thought to be mobilized in the transgression and regulation of order. Capturing informality through the quieter grammars of power leveraged in negotiations (rather than through the powers of domination and resistance) requires us to consider all actors and their multiple and ambivalent roles in one analytical frame, i.e. to register both how civil society participates in processes of regulation and how the urban bureaucracy works by interpreting rules. In this way, studying informality points to processes of cooperation, where interests of regulators and those being regulated frequently converge. Moreover, this perspective brings everyday politics of inclusion and exclusion into the analytical frame. In contrast to conceiving of informality as “heroic” resistance against the state, accounting for the multiple roles people take up in everyday governance opens up to empirical scrutiny how processes of bordering become reproduced in state–civil society negotiations as well as between groups and individuals on both “sides.” As Chapter 6 explains at length, the power to define criteria of incorporation and exclusion – when dwelling becomes acceptable and when it crosses a line – is in part mobilized by the gardeners themselves. This approach thus facilitates exploring how the flexibility of the law and the negotiability of informal arrangements lend themselves to the further marginalization of those already multiply excluded.
Finally, the relational conceptions of state enactment presented here provide a different perspective on the potential of change through “informal” everyday interventions in processes and sites of governance. Informality is frequently associated with transgression and change. Scholars of informality regularly ask if and how these moments become emancipatory. Similarly, the relational reading perused in this book renders the state open to transformation through the work involved in negotiating regulations. In this, “little things pile up” (Povinelli, 2011) to produce continuous change, as Chapter 5 will illustrate. But my conception offers a different reading of the ways in which these “piles” emerge: it leads to an account of change wherein transformation emerges as all actors concerned maneuver through the “structures” they enact. Moreover, from this perspective, transgression is not necessarily emancipatory. Rather, the ways in which actors maneuver around boundaries depend on the power inequalities that imbue spaces of negotiation, as well as on the conditions in which negotiations are set – limiting participation for some, benefiting others, and thereby frequently reproducing entrenched inequalities.
To be sure, this approach moves my frame of reference away from informality. If we understand these negotiations as the normalcy of the state, what meaning does the concept of informality convey in a description of regulatory transgression? Instead of presupposing the existence of formality and deriving the concept of informality from it,