Orchestration of Markets and Bureaucratic Knowledge Production in the Moscow Transportation Reform

Abstract

This article examines the role of bureaucracy in the process of reforming Moscow’s transportation system. With reliance on the intellectual history of neoliberalism, the concept of “orchestration,” an institutionalist economics, and an empirical case study, I argue that a market embodies itself in the form of bureaucracy. The agency in the provision of norms and regulations, calculations and forecasts, orders of economic exchange, and knowledge production concentrates in the hands of bureaucrats regardless of their formal attachment to state or private entities. Bureaucrats define fundamental issues of how markets should function; they design and control the system of money redistribution. The case of dismantling Moscow’s trolleybus system provides fruitful data on the agency of bureaucracy in transportation reform under the label of implementing “best practice” scenarios favourable to a neoliberal toolkit.