State-citizen Relations Research Articles

Eminent Domain and Expropriation Laws: A Century of Urban and Regional Planning in Mexico

This article analyzes two aspects of Mexican law that are relevant for planning practice in the country—eminent domain and expropriation. This article shows that the transition in Mexico from a semi-authoritarian to a democratic electoral political system brought not only substantial variability in the application of laws across states but also in planning practice. Democracy has generated a national debate about property rights issues and has reshaped the State–citizen relationship.

The social credit system in China: a model of constitutionalism for the era of crises

This paper focuses on the probable transformative effects of the application of the Chinese Social Credit System and similar projects in the realm of public administration on constitutional rights and freedoms, balances in citizen-state relations, and the model of statehood. The starting point of the research is the assumption that the Social Credit System, despite its specifically national Chinese peculiarities, can be seen as a reflection of a broader tendency towards the use of reputational information, techniques of ranking (grading) and risk management in the process of exercising the state power. To test this hypothesis, the author analyzes the actual experience of the Social Credit System’s introduction in the People’s Republic of China, compares this project with e-government projects, and proposes the umbrella-term of “social-credit mechanisms” to describe procedures and means of social control, based on the permanent collection and analysis of reputation data relating to persons. It is argued in this paper that the introduction of social-credit mechanisms to the practice of public administration ultimately leads to the emergence of a gap between formally enshrined rights and the actual ability to exercise them, between the legal capacity of a person and the ability to realise this capacity in certain legal relations. Examining the prospects of introduction of reputation-based social-credit mechanisms to the public administration, the author notices the probability of discrimination against persons who took a false step. As is demonstrated in the paper, the use of reputation data and social ratings by state authorities may result in the gradual differentiation in quality and scope of public services depending on social ratings (grades) of their addressees. This state of affairs may signify the birth of a new caste society and the end of the principle of equality before the law. According to the conclusions made in the paper, projects akin the Chinese Social Credit System reflect the global tendency towards the formation of a new type of constitutionalism. In the framework of this new constitutionalism the main emphasis will be shifted from citizens’ democratic participation in the execution of state power and the citizenry’s political subjectivity to ensure public safety and social stability. The issue of social-credit mechanisms’ introduction to the process of public administration is de facto an issue between the values of freedom and the values of security — the issue of choosing between political subjectivity and guaranteed biological existence.

Public Management Measurement Tools: the Case of the Single Management Progress Form (FURAG) as a Measurement Tool of the Integrated Planning and Management Model (MIPG)

This article presents part of the results of an investigation that analyzes the functionality of the Single Management Progress Form (FURAG) as an instrument for measuring the institutional performance of Colombian public organizations in reference to the Integrated Planning and Management Model (MIPG). The research has an exploratory and descriptive scope, with a quantitative and qualitative approach. It was developed through the elaboration of a questionnaire which reliability was measured through Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient. Evidence of content validity was also measured, through the judgment of six experts, and evidence of construct validity, by means of a factor analysis. The sample was composed of the heads of planning and internal control of 143 entities at the national level that had been subject of the application of the FURAG in the last 3 years and that have a complete institutional performance index. The results show favorable advances of the tool in terms of institutional performance, management for results and compliance with the functions and objectives proposed in its creation. They also show the importance of establishing this type of measurement tools in public entities, as they contribute to the analysis of these variables and improve the State-citizen relationship.

Tax

Paying tax or avoiding tax is part of everyday life across the globe. But what kinds of payments are taxes, and how do fiscal systems shape society? Taxes are often conceived of as a nexus of state-citizen relations and an intrinsic part of a social contract where they are exchanged for political representation and a level of state protection. But ethnographic evidence demonstrates that separating out taxes from other payments is not straightforward, and the motivations for paying tax, or collecting tax, are far from universal. In addition to shaping national and international economies, taxes construct social and political relations which cast citizens and communities in particular roles, such as ‘contributor’ and ‘wealth creator’, or ‘dependant’ and ‘scrounger’. As such, taxes are political tools that are wielded in processes of governance. Yet fiscal systems are also crafted from the bottom up, through taxpayer action and taxpayer logics, and gain meanings from the broader historical and cultural contexts in which they exist. In recent years, and in the context of multiple financial, environmental, and health crises across the globe, discussions about how we might build better futures have put the spotlight on taxes as a tool for redistribution. The logics that drive new tax policies and laws are embedded in specific concepts of tax justice and tax competition, as well as the relation between the sovereign state and the international community. Tax is a locus of many important themes, both academic and political. Understanding tax is crucial to understanding our societies.

Anatomy of a right to shelter struggle in an authoritarian regime: Dikmen Valley

The Covid19 pandemic has unveiled the cruciality of cities for people, not for profit. Many urban scholars and activists have long addressed the social costs driven by profitable redevelopment of urban space in an increasingly top-down manner, the most significant of which was the mass displacement of low-income and socially marginalized people. Housing activism mobilized in areas targeted for redevelopment received broad attention as struggles against neoliberalism. Nevertheless, this focus on the market-led processes and attendant sufferings may overlook state attempts at drawing people into urban redevelopment and people’s negotiations with that, as well as their contestations over exclusion. Focusing on the evolution of Dikmen Valley’s right to shelter struggle within the increasingly authoritarian regime in Turkey, this update contributes to the rethinking of rights-based struggles over housing by reframing state-citizen relations, as well as challenging the priorities of the market.

The temporal regimes of HIV/AIDS activism in Europe: chrono-citizenship, biomedicine and its others

ABSTRACT HIV/AIDS is known to have fundamentally transformed fields of biomedical research, the governance of health, and state–citizen relations. Based on research that was developed to analyze these transformations within HIV/AIDS activism at the European-level, we offer the term chrono-citizenship to describe the influence of time in constructs of citizenship. We argue that the temporal regime of biomedicine, or modes of governance that depend on biomedical understandings of time, have come to dominate HIV/AIDS narratives, policies and programs. Building on oral histories and three years of fieldwork in spaces of European-level networks and health-governing bodies, we suggest that citizenship in the field of HIV/AIDS has been defined through multiple, intersecting and, at times, antagonistic temporal regimes. To illustrate this, we expose the regime of loss, through which mourning, often denied space in the present, bears potential for new forms of subjectivity and community; the regime of sustainability, which centers the planning and surveillance of budgets over service provision in a climate unfriendly to human rights; and the regime of chronic crisis, in which persistence becomes a form of political agency against ongoing exclusion and disappointment. As we show, unearthing varied temporalities helps to denaturalize biomedical understandings of time, and invites a rethinking of the foundations needed to reach the ‘end of AIDS’ sought by civil society, UNAIDS and other health-governing bodies.

Accelerated fragility: exploring the supply–demand nexus in health facilities in rural Burkina Faso

AbstractIn Burkina Faso, political turmoil, escalating insecurity and a looming pandemic challenge the population's trust in the state. This article contributes to the debates about state–citizen relationships in fragile countries by connecting local health-seeking practices with the global trends of datafication and a strong focus on the fight against malaria in this part of Africa. Drawing on long-term research engagement in Burkina Faso, I examine the health-seeking practices of rural citizens and look into diagnostic routines and reporting in two rural dispensaries. I show how the routinization of diagnostic procedures combined with a strong national and global political focus on the fight against malaria create what I term a ‘supply–demand nexus’ in which rural citizens selectively ask for the health services that they know the system can supply. I argue that the routinized diagnostic practices that mainly focus on malaria serve as a ‘technology of invisibility’ by not capturing other important diseases among the rural population. Finally, I ask whether the limited healthcare services in the current context of political insecurity, instability and a global pandemic spur a process of further fragilization of the social contract between rural citizens and the state.

The Role of Housing Finance Actors in Regenerating Delhi’s Unauthorised Colonies: An Examination of State–Citizen– Market Boundaries

Semi-formal settlements like Delhi’s unauthorised colonies (UACs), which await regularisation by the state, are characterised by aspirations for housing improvements and enhanced property values. Frustrated by the rigid regulatory frameworks that operate in the binaries of legal/illegal, formal/informal, planned/unplanned and having limited influence over processes of regularisation, UAC residents use ‘transversal logics’ (Caldeira, 2017) to negotiate planning regimes, credit markets and local politics to improve housing, which become their ‘action space’ to meet aspirations for social mobility. This article investigates the role of finance and networks of credit in autoconstruction, with a focus on the work of market actors in navigating market–citizen and market–state boundaries, foregrounded against the relatively well-studied politics of state–citizen relations. It finds that landowners and housing finance institutions, as well as actors within them, navigate regulatory boundaries through innovative partnerships and creative workarounds, and by strategically deploying collective and individual identities. Even as cities like Delhi endeavour to become planned world-class utopias, a multitude of actors continue to reshape the city’s peripheral landscapes through the assertion, dissolution and spanning of multiple boundaries—regulatory, individual–collective, state–citizen, citizen–market and state–market.

Post-pandemic transformations: How and why COVID-19 requires us to rethink development.

COVID-19 is proving to be the long awaited 'big one': a pandemic capable of bringing societies and economies to their knees. There is an urgent need to examine how COVID-19 - as a health and development crisis - unfolded the way it did it and to consider possibilities for post-pandemic transformations and for rethinking development more broadly. Drawing on over a decade of research on epidemics, we argue that the origins, unfolding and effects of the COVID-19 pandemic require analysis that addresses both structural political-economic conditions alongside far less ordered, 'unruly' processes reflecting complexity, uncertainty, contingency and context-specificity. This structural-unruly duality in the conditions and processes of pandemic emergence, progression and impact provides a lens to view three key challenge areas. The first is how scientific advice and evidence are used in policy, when conditions are rigidly 'locked in' to established power relations and yet so uncertain. Second is how economies function, with the COVID-19 crisis having revealed the limits of a conventional model of economic growth. The third concerns how new forms of politics can become the basis of reshaped citizen-state relations in confronting a pandemic, such as those around mutual solidarity and care. COVID-19 demonstrates that we face an uncertain future, where anticipation of and resilience to major shocks must become the core problematic of development studies and practice. Where mainstream approaches to development have been top down, rigid and orientated towards narrowly-defined economic goals, post-COVID-19 development must have a radically transformative, egalitarian and inclusive knowledge and politics at its core.

The unique role of the Chinese government in the protection of overseas citizens

How to optimize China’s protective mechanism for overseas citizens has become the top agenda of China’s public administration. A comparison of the evacuation policies of China and the US in the 2010s reveals that the Chinese government’s operations attach more importance to the actual effects of evacuation and the feelings of citizens, while considering the responsibility of citizens and cost burden less. This generous evacuation policy can be partly rationalized by China’s domestic factors, such as the “Going Global” policy, its contemporary image as a populous rising power, and its traditional family-country narrative, which generates a familial conception of state–citizen relations and encourages the government to take extra responsibility for citizens. While the familial conception of state–citizen relations is conductive to building national identity and cohesion, it blurs the dividing line between civic responsibility and governmental responsibility, undercuts the efficiency of public administration, causes waste of public resources, and overburdens governmental agencies. As China’s industrialization and urbanization progress, how to revise the long-established familial conception of state–citizen relations and establish a responsible civil society based on contractual rule of law has become an urgent issue. Points for practitioners This study highlights the parental role of the Chinese government in the protection of overseas citizens and attributes it partly to the traditional family-country narrative, which generates a family conception of state–citizen relations. While this conception is conductive to building national identity and cohesion, it causes waste of public resources and overburdens governmental agencies. It is necessary to revise the long-established conception and cultivate a responsible civil society to improve the efficiency of public administration in contemporary China.

State territorialization at the margins: Property formalization and paperwork in the Ethiopian Somali frontier

This paper scrutinizes property formalization as an integral part of state territorialization and demonstrates how bounded spaces are fused with political authority. Despite a long history of contestations over land in the Ethiopian Somali frontier, state law gained significance as a regulatory frame to grant and secure property rights of ethnic Somalis in the city of Jigjiga. In the city's land registry archive, this increased the amount of paperwork through which the relation between the Ethiopian state and Somali citizens has been remade under ethnic federal rule. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Jigjiga, this paper examines the writing practices and performances of land governance experts at different sites of paperwork where property relations are brought on paper and drawn together into law and institutional hierarchies. It reveals property formalization to consolidate state-citizen relations in symbolic and material form: in the city's expansion area where law is entangled within an emerging property landscape, and in the city's registry archive where legal documents are preserved. On that basis, this paper captures state formation as both a cultural and material process. It does so by highlighting the mediating role of bureaucratic actors and artifacts in the inscription of the state's symbolic languages in an emerging property landscape.

Distant, opaque and seamful: seeing the state through the workings of Aadhaar in India

ABSTRACT In this paper, I aim to explore in what ways a digital identity system affects the relationship between state and citizen. Invoking ‘seeing the state’ as an analytical lens and adopting ‘anthropology of state’ as a methodological approach, I explore the changing state–citizen relationship through citizens’ everyday encounters with the state and through quotidian practices of the state mediated through material and social practices around Aadhaar, the foundational digital ID system in India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on welfare disbursement in Jharkhand, I argue, when citizens interact with the state through the workings of Aadhaar, they see the state to be increasingly distant, opaque and seamful. My overall objective is to show how the discursive practices through which the state appear in its citizens’ perception changes through the mediation of a foundational digital identity system.

COVID-19 and Health Code: How Digital Platforms Tackle the Pandemic in China.

As COVID-19 is rapidly spreading around the world, some countries have launched or plan to implement contact-tracing apps to detect exposure risks. In China, the government relies on Health Code, developed by Alipay and WeChat, for identifying people potentially exposed to COVID-19. The color-based code can determine people’s exposure risks and freedom of movement based on factors like travel history, duration of time spent in risky areas, and relationships to potential carriers. This essay discusses the rise of Health Code from a platform perspective, arguing that digital platforms are key players conducting health surveillance and mediating state–citizen relations in China. More importantly, tracing apps might become a normal practice in many countries, suggesting that platforms will be substantially adopted for health surveillance.

Contentious and institutional politics in a petro-state: Nigeria's 2012 fuel subsidy protests

This article explores relations between popular protests and institutional politics in a petroleum-dependent economy. The 2012-protest against fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria was one of the biggest popular mobilisation in Nigeria’s history, and possibly the largest in the wave of protests in Sub-Saharan Africa. This article uses perspectives of contentious politics that bridge structure and agency through a focus on relational dynamics between protests and institutional politics. This article makes four interrelated claims of how the protests are conditioned by and contribute to institutional politics: First, the protests builds on a historical trajectory of labour-led subsidy protests that in itself form part of institutionalised politics. Second, the 2012-protests were historically large due to the particular context of a decade of democracy and oil-led growth, without a popular sense economic justice and real political participation. Third, while new actors came to the scene in 2012, intra-movement fragmentation exposed trade union and civil society weaknesses and failure to build a sustained social movement. Fourth, the 2012-protests inspired civic agency and influenced institutional politics and state-citizen relations, especially reflected in party politics and elections.

Governance and Accountable Citizenship Through Identification Infrastructures: Database Politics of Copernicus (France) and National Register of Citizens (India)

Several governments around the world have developed new ways of registering citizens when it comes to their relations with the state administration. Contemporary practices of identification through databases open up new ways of institutional and governmental practices across various sectors. In France, the tax administration had become the flagship of the whole French e-government project. The first case study focuses on the Copernicus project, which rapidly raised concerns about the implications of identification practices for taxpayers/citizens/households/individuals through unique identifiers. The Indian case study focuses on the National Register of Citizens as a citizen identification infrastructure, the processes of trying to categorise a diverse demography into citizens and non-citizens, and the subsequent issues that arise around different claims to citizenship. Taking these two case studies, this article discusses two national databases in France (tax administration) and India (citizenship), respectively, as examples of contemporary state practices around digital identification infrastructures as a form of database politics to enforce accountable forms of citizen practices through which different forms of data driven institutional and sociotechnical processes are marking new changes in the state–citizen relationship, both in France and in India.

The People's Bowling Palace: Building Underground in Late Communist Leipzig

In 1987 a recreational centre called the Bowlingtreff arose at the centre of East German Leipzig without knowledge from central authorities thanks to 40,050 hours of volunteer labour. What can this incident of apparent optimism tell us about state–citizen relations as they had evolved on the eve of revolution? Rather than ‘ostalgic’ evidence of socialist paradise lost, this article shows how, overcoming years of bureaucratic proscriptions, dedicated local authorities built ‘off the record’ to prove to the people that they could attain something; and residents disillusioned with communism were eager to build a piece of the ‘imaginary West’ in their dying city. Ultimately, however, the bowling palace demonstrated system dysfunction and whetted Leipzigers’ appetite for the ‘real’ West.

Cultivating beneficiary citizenship in urban community gardens in Metro Manila

This paper introduces ‘beneficiary citizenship’ as a way to understand a form of urban citizenship that has emerged from shifts in state–citizen relations. Through the case of state-initiated urban community gardens in Metro Manila, it examines beneficiary citizenship as conditionally granting urban dwellers welfare, entitlements or recognition in the city in return for their transformation into good, responsible citizens. Beneficiary citizenship captures the dual forces of neoliberal technologies of government and alternative citizenship claims that are simultaneously present in various participatory and community-centred state projects. Case study gardens established in a resettlement housing project, in a poverty reduction programme and in a gated village in Metro Manila all seek to cultivate good citizen traits deemed worthy of being granted recognition in the city through a transformation of self and the community. Yet, beneficiaries in these projects also use their good gardener/citizen subjectivity to mobilise ends different from those intended by garden projects as technologies of government. Community gardens therefore become spaces where urban dwellers articulate citizenship by combining various strategies granted by their participation in the projects, exceeding attempts to order and contain urban life.

Adopting microblogging solutions for interaction with government: survey results from Hunan province, China

Authorities in the People’s Republic of China communicate with citizens using an estimated 600,000 Sina Weibo microblogs. This study reports on a study of Chinese citizens’ adoption of microblogs to interact with the government. Adoption results from trust and peer pressure in smaller-network ties (densely knit, pervasive social networks surrounding individual citizens). Larger-network ties (trust in institutions at large, such as the Chinese Communist Party, executive organizations, the judicial system, the media, etc.) are not associated with the adoption of microblogging. Furthermore, higher levels of anxiety are correlated with lower levels of use intention, and this finding underlines the impact of the Chinese authority’s surveillance and control activities on the lives of individual Chinese citizens. Based on these findings, we outline a theory of why citizens use microblogs to interact with the government and suggest avenues for further research into microblogs, state–citizen communication patterns and technology adoption. Points for practitioners Our research identifies trust in individual civil servants, citizens’ anxiety and peer pressure as drivers of Chinese citizens’ intentions to use the Weibo microblogging platform to interact with the Chinese government. This insight allows practitioners to better understand citizens’ drivers and obstacles in the use of social media in state–citizen relations in China.

Circuiting parents’ voice: Parenting discussion groups and institutional healing in northeast Paris

The discussion group is a common form of parenting support offered by associations in the pluri-ethnic, working-class neighborhoods of northeast Paris. Situated in a larger formation of voice that hails marginalized parents to speak, professionals engage with these discussion groups as potential social ‘transistors’: simultaneously circuiting parents’ voice inwards to restore parents’ agentive capacities and amplifying it outwards into an audible collective voice aimed at impacting state–citizen relations. In order to reach this double effect, professionals deploy ‘paralinguistic techniques’, which produce and combine intimate and civic, normative and alternative (semi-)public speech contexts. As a result, discussion groups emerge as pedagogical instances of a ‘Republican’ public sphere and its reworkings. Against the backdrop of anxieties of a disintegrating Republic and failing institutions, discussion groups highlight a desire for new conduits of citizenship, as well as the ways in which marginalized residents are called upon to invest these with their voice.

Comments on the `Report by the Committee of Experts on Non-Personal Data Governance Framework'

This paper contains our comments to the Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India, on the Report by the Committee of Experts on Non-Personal Data Governance Framework. The Report seeks to draft policy to facilitate the development of a framework for non-personal data governance in India. To this end, the Report suggests (a) enacting a law that will enable the State to access NPD for various public purposes, (b) mandating relatively free exchanges of data in the private sector, to be supervised by a Non-personal Data Authority, (c) providing greater control over NPD to citizens, while recognising certain new concepts such as that of community harms that may arise from processing of NPD. We argue that while many of the recommendations in the Report are seemingly well intentioned, they may be tough to actualise. Specifically we comment on (a) the lack of clarity of certain basic concepts and definitions, (b) the need for a more decentralised system of data governance, (c) the need to revisit extant open data frameworks, (d) the problems that may arise in the State-citizen relationship such as enhanced surveillance, (e) implementation of data localisation norms, and (f) establishment of a non-personal data authority. We suggest that the issues that arise in the context of governance of NPD require a deeper exploration of the problems, solutions and potential consequences before undertaking regulatory intervention at the scale proposed.