Everyday Governance Research Articles

Enhancing the Competences of Female Village Officials in Zhanjiang from the Perspective of the Sociology of Knowledge

This study investigates the socio-cultural and institutional challenges faced by female village officials in Zhanjiang, using the sociology of knowledge framework to explore how tailored training programs can enhance their competences. Qualitative data, collected from participatory observation, semi-structured interviews, and training documents, were analyzed, revealing that context-specific and gender-sensitive approaches to knowledge selection, application, and transmission can empower the female officials to bridge the gap between theoretical concepts and everyday governance. Additionally, participatory methods like role-playing and case studies, adopted by the training can help the female officials apply new skills to real-world governance challenges. The findings also suggest training content needs to align with the socio-cultural realities of female village officials, particularly in aspects related to leadership, dispute mediation, and rural development. By focusing on the interplay between formal, codified knowledge and local, tacit knowledge, the study contributes to the literature on in-service training, rural governance, and gender studies.

‘Don’t call us vulnerable!’: Rethinking flood vulnerability and community-led governance

ABSTRACT Traditional views on flood vulnerability often present a simplistic government-community relationship, portraying communities as passive recipients of aid. This perspective overlooks the dynamic agency of urban residents in shaping their own governance structures. Recent research challenges this binary thinking by revealing how communities actively manage flood risks. However, the intricate interplay between government absence and community-led actions, and their role in everyday governance, remains underexplored. Drawing on scholarship in flood vulnerability and community-led governance, this paper examines the experiences and management strategies of flood-prone residents in Dansoman, Accra, using interviews, focus groups, and “follow-along participant observation.” Three key themes emerged: “anticipate and navigate,” “collaborate and compensate for,” and “rupture and replace.” These themes illustrate how residents acquiesce to, reconfigure, or challenge government roles in flood management, establishing self-governance through community-led initiatives. These efforts often legitimize and strengthen community resilience, sometimes even usurping and replacing state authority. The findings underscore the need to recognize community agency in managing flood risks and compensating for insufficient government support through solidarity and self-help. Policymakers can enhance flood management by incorporating these community-driven insights, fostering more effective, inclusive, and sustainable strategies that reflect the fluid, evolving relationships between government and communities.

Untapped transformative potential in decentralised groundwater systems that improve households' resilience in India's water-scarce urban environments

Off-grid, decentralised water infrastructures are increasingly being promoted to help cities meet their water delivery targets and build resilient water systems in the face of changing water availability. Against this background, this paper examines how integrating off-grid, decentralised groundwater systems with centralized piped supply helps water utilities and urbanites achieve transformative resilience under conditions of chronic water scarcity in the secondary city of Tiruppur, India. Empirical findings on users' water access practices from off-grid systems like municipal or private borewells to remain resilient, their role in the everyday governance of these systems, and the costs of building resilience through borewells—obtained through a participatory action research project where 94 households recorded month-long water access using a ‘water and waste calendar’—reveal that Tiruppur's public borewells are an affordable and mostly inclusive resilience building measure but are far from being transformative. Moreover, diverse arrangements for their everyday governance unevenly enable user participation, impose invisible costs on female members of borewell-reliant households, and create differentiation in service quality across the city. The paper argues that the potential to achieve transformative resilience through off-grid sources like borewells remains untapped in Tiruppur and concludes with some reflections to pursue just and inclusive resilience.

Introduction: Development practice, power and public authority

AbstractDrawing upon research across multiple countries, the papers in this special issue explore how public authority dynamics affect development and humanitarian practices and processes. Some focus on places commonly labelled as in crisis or understood to be subject to multiple overlapping crises, where responses to epidemics, persistent conflict and migrations are in progress. Others examine how public authority dynamics affect the everyday governance of development in outwardly more stable contexts. The seven empirical papers are complimented by a conceptual framework for analysing how power permeates the foundations of public authority dynamics. Viewed together, they illuminate why exclusions, coercion and violence are often used by those claiming the legitimacy to govern, and how grasping what this may mean for well‐intended interventions or reform efforts remains a challenge for practitioners. However, they also point towards a pressing need for outsiders to recognise their own roles in constructing and legitimising, sometimes harmful, forms of public authority in the places they work. And they suggest the first step is to confront a reluctance to acknowledge public authority dynamics in their official depictions of programmes' progress, learnings and impacts.

Vital infrastructures

Sustaining lives in urban environments depends on infrastructures – buildings, water pipes, sewers, energy distribution, or roads, among others. Their availability is particularly acute in Africa due to rapid urbanization, entrenched inequalities and persistent resource constraints. At the site of my ongoing research, Namibia’s capital Windhoek, the legacy of colonial segregation coupled with low incomes and lack of affordable housing have led to the mushrooming of ‘informal’ settlements with insufficient formal infrastructures. In these conditions, the necessity to satisfy basic needs, as well as aspirations of improvement, lead the residents to rely on improvisational skills, co-presence, and social relationships to innovate do-it-yourself (DIY) solutions as well as to appropriate, bypass and complement formal infrastructures. These arrangements are ‘vital infrastructures’ in two senses: both as facilitating and regenerating lives in the city, and as relying on the energies of the residents for their operation (which blurs the categories of provider and user). I argue that such vital infrastructures are a major force in the making of cities and urban lives, in Africa and beyond. While their immediate purpose is to solve practical problems, the social, transactional and political patterns that they entail lead to profoundly relational, co-constructed infrastructures and everyday governance.

Stewardship and everyday governance: Managing materialities in a south‐eastern village community, Estonia

AbstractThis article examines landscape stewardship from the perspective of landscape biography and focuses on different outcomes on how individual and collective stewardship connected to local place attachment and historic understandings are leveraged as local knowledge in sustaining locally important landscapes. The analysis is based on semi‐structured interviews with local people and active residents in three neighbouring villages of south‐eastern Estonia. Particular attention is paid to their place attachment and self‐actualisation in landscape materialities, such as housing, village centre, water bodies and village borders. To bring the diverse types of knowledge connected to landscape stewardship to the forefront, the study suggests careful differentiation between neo‐endogenous community governance and place‐based wisdom of local stakeholders. This differentiation indicates that stewardship should be identified as a micro‐policy term that is oriented towards a collective platform of the information exchange for local capacity building. This would lead to multiple and resilient place‐based know‐how related to territories, political networks and associated land use discourses.

Situating the urban poor in informal settlement within Jakarta’s water governance shift to remunicipalisation

The emergence of remunicipalisation in the past five years has brought a refreshing perspective to the water governance debate in Jakarta. By embracing the principles of equality and sustainability, water remunicipalisation has the potential to serve as a form of governance, particularly for the urban disadvantaged residing in informal settlements, which bear the disproportionate burden of persistent water inequality. This study aims to examine water governance through the lens of the urban poor in informal settlements and assess to what extent water remunicipalisation holds transformative capabilities for existing unequal systems. Employing an analytical framework that combines environmental justice, feminist political ecology, and everyday governance, the analysis will concentrate on aspects such as distribution, recognition, participation, scale, and multiple identities. Focusing on the case study of Penjaringan, an informal settlement in Jakarta, this research will explore the diverse experiences of water inequality as it intersects with gender, tenancy status, and social relations. While remunicipalisation has shed light on the issue of water inequality and generated momentum for governance reform, it must also encompass the lived realities of the urban poor in informal settlements. The intricacies of the remunicipalisation process in Jakarta impede discussions on the underlying structural causes of injustice, such as misrecognition and misrepresentation. Consequently, there is a failure to analyse the manifestation of water inequality across various governance scales and establish a more inclusive governance framework. This research further proposes the expansion of water remunicipalisation critiques beyond distribution alone to include recognition, participation.

Organizations’ perspectives on whistleblowing: evidence from interviews with unregulated companies

PurposeWhistleblowers are individuals who detect and report misconduct in an organization. They help to mitigate organizational misbehavior and resulting damages effectively and relatively quickly. Whistleblower protection has not been systematically required in the European Union (EU), leaving many large organizations unregulated. This study aims to get in-depth insights into how unregulated organizations design, handle and view whistleblowing with the advent of a novel EU Whistleblowing Directive.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted 17 semistructured interviews with a diverse group of organizations headquartered in Germany and inductively analyzed them following Grounded Theory. Linking the Grounded Theory to the legal endogeneity model, they developed seven perspectives that help to explain how organizations view whistleblowing.FindingsIn trying to make sense of the role of whistleblowing in the organization’s governance, organizations and their managers assume different perspectives. These perspectives guide their approach to whistleblower protection in the context of evolving regulation with little regulatory guidance. Perspectives vary in the degree of supporting whistleblowing regulation, from viewing whistleblowing as a natural, everyday governance tool to denying it and fearing denunciation. Most organizations exhibit several perspectives.Originality/valueLittle is known about day-to-day whistleblowing practices from the perspective of organizations. The authors fill this research gap by providing initial evidence on how organizations approach whistleblowing and the EU Whistleblowing Directive. Identifying organizations’ perspectives may help us understand how ineffective or noncompliant whistleblowing systems emerge and how organizations can improve.

‘My body tells me to stay here’: Materiality, identity and everyday politics in Wentang Town, China

This paper explores the relations of materiality, identity formation and everyday politics in the governance of geothermal resource in contemporary China. Drawing on ethnographic data, we found that the materiality of geothermal water in its lively and dynamic forms plays agentic roles in discourse constructions, embodied experiences and material practices, shaping the socio-natural politics. The social relations, contestations and conflicts are rooted in the ontological differences of geothermal water as understood by the competing actors. The study of geothermal water contributes to recent debates on the agency of materials in urban political ecology studies as well as exploring everyday politics by highlighting the multiplicity and heterogeneity of actors and the ways in which identity formations are mobilized in everyday governance. This paper sheds light on the heterogeneous configurations of urbanization processes and resource governance.

The mismatch of narratives and local ecologies in the everyday governance of water access and mosquito control in an urbanizing community.

Mosquito-borne disease presents a significant threat to urban populations, but risk can be uneven across a city due to underlying environmental patterns. Urban residents rely on social and economic processes to control the environment and mediate disease risk, a phenomenon known as everyday governance. We studied how households employed everyday governance of urban infrastructure relevant to mosquito-borne disease in Bengaluru, India to examine if and how inequalities in everyday governance manifest in differences in mosquito control. We found that governance mechanisms differed for water access and mosquitoes. Economic and social capital served different roles for each, influenced by global narratives of water and vector control.

Everyday governance in areas of contested power: Insights from Mozambique, Myanmar, and Pakistan

SummaryMotivationHow do poor and marginalized people solve problems and claim rights and entitlements in places affected by conflict and where state authority is contested? Understanding such processes is important as the numbers of poor people living in difficult settings grows, yet existing research on governance in conflict largely misses a “citizen's eye” view of these processes.PurposeThe article focuses on “everyday governance” from a citizen's perspective. What do engagements with the multiple state and non‐state actors that prevail in such settings look like? We present insights from longitudinal research in conflict‐affected areas in Mozambique, Myanmar and Pakistan.Methods and approachResearch was undertaken in two phases over the period 2017–2021. Researchers developed an innovative method, “governance diaries,” in which we interviewed the same set of poor and marginalized households over a period of a year, capturing an unfolding citizen's eye view of governance. We subsequently used the same method to include key intermediaries to whom households went with problems.FindingsWe find that in most instances poor and marginalized households did not rely on the state or other formal or external authorities to resolve problems. Mostly, they simply “lived with” those problems, or resolved them through “self‐provision”—mutual aid and community action. When they did go to authorities, they used “governance intermediaries”—actors that connect people with authorities or mediate between households. These intermediaries played a central role in local governance, using their networks and deploying a range of strategies with a focus on local resolution of problems.Policy implicationsThese findings challenge some core assumptions of contemporary development practice. First, development programmes tend to focus on improving state‐run services, rather than engaging with the diversity of how public goods are governed on the ground. Second, policies assume that people can go directly to authorities with their problems, and do not take into account the role that intermediaries play. Finally, the highly diverse networks of governance actors that matter to specific places challenges the common focus on formal systems rather than informal practices.

Mental health coverage for forced migrants: Managing failure as everyday governance in the public and NGO sectors in England.

High-income countries (HICs) which are said to have "reached" universal health coverage (UHC) typically still have coverage gaps, due to both formal policies and informal barriers which result in "hypothetical access". In England, a user fee exemption has in principle made access to treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health conditions thought to be caused by certain forms of violence universal, regardless of immigration status. This study explores the everyday governance of this mental health coverage for forced migrants in the English National Health Service (NHS) and NGO sector. Fieldwork was conducted in two waves, in 2015-2016 and 2019-2021, including six months of participant observation in an NGO and 21 semi-structured interviews with psy professionals across 16 NHS and NGO service providers. Further interviews were conducted with mental health commissioners and policymakers, as well as analysis of grey literature. Despite being formally covered for certain types of mental health care, in practice asylum seekers and undocumented migrants were often excluded by NHS providers. Undocumented migrants were also often excluded by NGO providers. Several rationalities linked discursive fields to practices developed by psy professionals and other street-level bureaucrats to govern coverage, in a process of "managing failure". These rationalities are presented under three paired themes which draw attention to tensions and resistance in the governance of coverage: medicalisation and biolegitimacy; austerity and ethico-politics; and differential racialisation and decolonisation. Rationalities were associated with strategies and tactics such as social triage, clinical advocacy, obfuscation, evidence-based advocacy and silencing critique. The concept of "health coverage assemblage" is introduced to explain the complex, unstable, contingent and fragmented nature of UHC policies and programmes. Misrecognition and underestimation of the everyday work of health professionals in promoting, resisting and reproducing diverse rationalities within the assemblage may lead to missed opportunities for reform.

Creative counter-discourses to the “green city” narrative: practices of small-scale urban agriculture in Hanoi, Vietnam

ABSTRACT As a central component of the “green city” narrative, urban agriculture is gaining importance in urban planning and global sustainability agendas. In Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam, the “green city” is core to the state’s urbanisation agenda, with a green corridor envisioned as part of the city’s Master Plan for 2030. We investigate the patterns and processes of small-scale urban agriculture underway in this green corridor to better understand whether this type of agriculture actually intersects with, and is supported by, state plans. We frame our paper in conceptual debates around food safety and everyday governance, while supporting our analysis with data from interviews with resident gardeners and officials, as well as the mapping of urban gardens in seven wards in and alongside the green corridor. We pay attention to practices and motivations of residents who maintain small-scale vegetable and fruit plots (the most prevalent form of urban agriculture), and the challenges and constraints they face. Our work reveals the temporary and interim status of urban agriculture in Hanoi, highlighting the contradictions within Vietnam’s “green city” discourse. Nonetheless, urban residents still undertake urban agriculture, negotiating or compromising with state officials, to meet their demands for fresh and safe food.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Semantics of Tea Drinking: Online Writing and the Shaping of Counter-public Spheres in Xi Jinping's China

AbstractRecent discussion concerning the Chinese government's autocratic practices has been orienting public attention toward the large scale of its surveillance apparatus. Observed from afar, the integration of digital and material infrastructures for discipline and control–whether in the form of factory/detention complexes in the Xinjiang region, face–recognition technology, or the Great Firewall–cannot help but convey the impression of a faceless authority acting upon statistics and data. Yet data and statistics refer to individuals and communities, whose interactions with the powers that be are negotiated daily on concrete grounds, such as over a cup of tea. The expressions hecha 喝茶 (drinking tea) and bei hecha 被喝茶 (being asked for tea) long ago acquired a chiefly political connotation and are now commonly used to imply being approached by the State Security Police for a forced interrogation. As the everydayness of the expression suggests, this type of state interventions in civil society attests, in Foucault's terms, state power's “capillary form of existence, the point where [it] reaches into the very grain of individuals.” This article makes use of an extraordinary corpus of online texts presenting firsthand accounts of bei hecha experiences to explore questions of everyday governance and governmentality in contemporary China. Adopting a text–based approach to matters conventionally pertaining to the realm of political science, it argues for an understanding of hecha ji texts (written recollections of tea–drinking sessions) as a distinctive form of writing that is functional to the construction of counter–public spheres of dissent in the tightening authoritarian environment of Xi Jinping's China today.

Governance gap? Vale's corporate action and socioenvironmental conflicts in an international perspective

Mining transnational corporations (TNCs) can be seen as engines of several forms of dispossession and violence in the lives of affected populations. Through the exploitation concession, TNCs go on to exercise governance functions in the political order of the territories where they settle. This contribution is the result of empirically-driven work motivated by national and international activity of the Brazilian mining TNC Vale S.A. in three host countries where it operates: Brazil, Canada, and Mozambique. It demonstrates how the everyday governance of the population affected by the TNC go beyond territories of weak states and has two main aspects: the “government role”, where the corporation acts as provider of services traditionally performed by the government; and the expanded exercise of corporate power in the political order using coercive as well as cooperative and participatory governance mechanisms. Contrary to the supposed prosperity that comes with mineral abundance, a joint analysis of Vale's presence in the three contexts reveals scenarios of conflict emerging as resistance from the affected populations to counter the dynamics of corporate governance and violence that the mining project generates.

Learning health systems in low-income and middle-income countries: exploring evidence and expert insights

IntroductionLearning health systems (LHS) is a multifaceted subject. This paper reviewed current concepts as well as real-world experiences of LHS, drawing on published and unpublished knowledge in order to identify...

Labour Mobility and Informality: Romanian Migrants in Spain and Ethnic Entrepreneurs in Croatia

Post-Weberian definitions see the state–individual relationship as a “do ut des” one. The state grants protection, education, medical care, and its citizens contribute labour, compliance, and taxes. When this does not occur, it is generally accepted that the citizens are deviating from state goals. However, there are cases where lack of compliance stems from the fact that society members do not feel protected by formal structures, and they rely on informal ones to replace, supplement, or even compete with state institutions. The starting point of this article is that this lack of support may result from enhanced labour mobility (and migration) across Europe, and may enhance the creation and persistence of informal practices. Taking advantage of two case studies, Romanian migrants to Spain and ethnic entrepreneurs in Croatia, we observe how governance is constructed and provide two novel interpretative frameworks. First, we explore the use of informality (informal practices) to suggest that apparently insignificant actions that are repeated routinely and without much thought, are a way to contribute to the construction of the political and that everyday governance should receive more attention. Second, we use this claim to argue that a better understanding of informality can help identify governance areas where interventions are more urgent. These are the spheres of public life where it is possible to identify a larger gap between the wishes of a state and the ways citizens actually act as they informally avoid or bypass its rules.

Strengthening community-based adaptation for urban transformation: managing flood risk in informal settlements in Cape Town

ABSTRACT Urban citizens increasingly need to adapt to climate risk. This is especially the case in informal settlements that have limited state engagement and are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Community-based adaptation (CBA) in the informal settlement has the potential to support the transformation that re-shapes power relations as well as reducing climate risk. This paper explores how multiscalar governance in Cape Town can either empower or undermine CBA to flooding in informal settlements. Drawing on urban political ecology, the analysis reveals significant tension around differing ideas of the temporality of informal settlements, as well as token community inclusivity in participatory planning processes. While everyday governance practices have been used by the City of Cape Town at the local scale, a local community-based organisation has used insurgent planning to envision and enact a more just city. A community designed and spear-headed reblocking process (rearranging shacks in a settlement to allow for flood drainage and service delivery) is a powerful example of CBA and represents the potential of community-based organisations to take steps towards transformative action. In order to enable more widespread urban transformative CBA, it is important to address the drivers of vulnerabilities and underlying power dynamics of political decision-making to destabilise the status quo and move towards real adaptation.

Conservation is Development in the Forests of Nagarahole Tiger Reserve, India

The relationship between conservation and development has undergone extensive scrutiny, primarily because of their outward antagonistic appearance. Recent work points to their complex intermingling, such as the potential economic benefits of conservation. In this article, I argue that conservation is an inherent part of the development regime. I argue this by describing conservation practices in Nagarahole Tiger Reserve that rely on scientific governance, an essential mechanism of the development regime. I trace this regime from its inception in the colonial period through forestry operations to its continuance in the conservation regime instituted post-independence. However, despite their co-evolution, this relationship is neither simple nor straightforward. I show how everyday governance draws on customary practices and experiential knowledge of local communities inhabiting Nagarahole. This aspect is devalourized in the official governance regime to the extent that these communities are disenfranchized from their lands. By establishing conservation as development, I suggest that conservation projects should be subjected to the same level of scrutiny and examination usually allocated to development projects, which are associated with exploitation, control and drastic modification of the landscapes we inhabit.