BUREAUCRATIC ACTIVISM AND COLOMBIAN COMMUNITY MOTHERS: THE DAILY CONSTRUCTION OF THE RULE OF LAW

Abstract

The central focus of this document is to build a theoretical map for what I call bureaucratic activism. This will lead us on a path through debates constructed around legal theory and the theory of administrative law and public administration. The study also seeks to explain why it is necessary to build and use this category to analyze administrative bureaucracies. The above allows us to shed light on the critical role of this type of bureaucracy in the implementation phase of public policies and how a critical approximation to law - like that which is represented by distributive analysis - generates a fertile analytical map to analyze the undetermined decisions of agents involved in public administration, as the effects of what law builds in everyday life.Community mothers are women who take care of other families' children. They work in Community Welfare Homes (CWH), which are a social program developed from the states agencies in order to help the first childhood. Despite being a public social policy, the CWH program has an outsourcing operation and the government gives almost no funds to the operation. In order to fulfill this aim, we undertook a case study of a number of Community Welfare Homes (CWH) in four Bogota localities (San Cristobal sur, Suba, Simon Bolivar, and San Cristobal norte) and in El Espinal (Tolima) over a period of four months, from August to November 2012, analyzing the role of community mothers as street-level bureaucrats. The study combined five different data gathering mechanisms: documenting experiences in field diaries as an ethnographic technique; semi-structured interviews with employees and expert administrative staff at the Colombian Family Welfare Institute (ICBF); observation of the workings of the Community Welfare Homes; focus groups with community mothers and beneficiaries; and a documented analysis of the different types of tasks undertaken by community mothers in their daily work and focus groups. Annex 1 presents a detailed log of the activities undertaken. In sum, the research allowed us to gather information from 19 semi-structured interviews, 90 hours and 35 minutes of observation, 3 focus groups, the documentation of informal experiences with the CWH actors in a field diary and a documentary analysis of 8 official formats generated by community mothers and reviewed by the ICBF.I want to point out that, throughout this text, I will focus on the streetlevel bureaucrats as an enclave from which to answer the question regarding how the state concretizes and manifests itself in the daily lives of citizens. The analysis of street-level bureaucracy that I propose questions the traditional schemes used to analyze the rule of law in four ways: (i) it destabilizes the Weberian view of bureaucracy as an impersonal hierarchy and recognizes the agency of public officials as the creators of governmental policy (Lipsky, 2010); (ii) it shows how the state is constructed through bureaucratic interactions that arise within complex power relations, and lead to contingent and unstable results (Gupta & Sharma, 2006); (iii) it recognizes the ways in which the law has a significant role in the construction of realities, given that legal norms emerge as the creators and distributors of our identities (Jaramillo, 2013); and, finally, (iv) it builds and proposes the category of bureaucratic activism, understood as the behavior of the street-level bureaucrat that goes beyond the norms and creates new meanings for such norms when they are implemented, in order to discover new realities of administrative law immersed in a fragmented state and some bureaucrats that deviate from the rule of law.We can use the popular label pertaining to legal theory to now refer to a scenario of legal application of which legal academia has spoken little about street-level bureaucracy.1 In this bureaucratic activism, a crisis befalls the principle of legality, which we know and which was at the center of the construction of classical administrative law (CAD). …