To Punish, Parent, or Palliate: Governing Urban Poverty through Institutional Failure

Abstract

Studies of poverty governance typically emphasize the punitive subjugation or paternalistic disciplining of the poor. Much work combines elements of these approaches, and recent studies depict relations between institutions as premised on collaboration or burden shuffling. Despite the precarity of poor people’s existence, the role of life itself in governance is conspicuously absent in this literature. Using an ethnographic case study of a syringe exchange program serving unhoused people who inject drugs in Los Angeles, this article theorizes palliative governance to describe forms of regulation that neither punish nor parent, but simply try to keep very poor subjects alive through a series of stopgap measures. Rather than collaborate or burden shuffle, exchange workers supplement, contest, and co-opt other governing institutions. An analysis of palliative governance broadens our understanding of how institutions interact with subjects and each other, while revealing the paradoxical ways states both expose and protect bare life.