Everyday Governance Research Articles

GOVERNING URBAN AGRICULTURE: Formalization, Resistance and Re‐visioning in Two ‘Green’ Cities

AbstractAs municipalities across the global North highlight urban agriculture as a marker of their ‘greenness’, how can we best understand how the spaces and practices of urban food production are governed? This article develops an analysis of urban agriculture as a complex site of governance in which numerous interests engage. We underscore the politics of governance, through which some actors resist the imposition of a narrowly normative and exclusive notion of urban agriculture and against which they envision and enact alternatives. The article contributes to efforts to transcend the often dichotomous framing of urban agriculture as radical or neoliberal, formal or informal, political or post‐political by employing ‘everyday governance’ and ‘everyday resistance’ as lenses through which to focus on the prosaic practices of engaging with, pushing back against, and stepping beyond the imposition of hegemonic models of urban agriculture. We argue that the co‐constitutive, ‘braided’ nature of urban agricultural governance is revealed through attention to the manifold forms of negotiation and resistance to formal urban agricultural governance. Moreover, our perspective highlights the ways that some practitioners are excluded by, challenge, or re‐vision formal definitions of urban agriculture. We draw on the cases of Portland, OR and Vancouver, BC to illustrate our argument.

Theorizing Public Participation and Local Governance in Urban Resilience: Reflections on the “Provincializing Urban Political Ecology” Thesis

Urban political ecology (UPE) infuses Marxism with poststructuralism and constructivism to explore the dialectic relationship between nature and society in urban environments as well as the economic aspect of an urban socioecological system. Nevertheless, the literature on southern urbanism has urged UPE to become more “provincialized” to reflect the diffuse forms of power and everyday governance influencing the planning of cities in the Global South. This article reviews and reflects on this wave of debates raised by critics who have positioned postcolonial thinking as an alternative to Marxist political economy, in which UPE is rooted. It also identifies those works that might help provincialize UPE differently. Without rejecting the Marxism, another set of approaches draws influence from the strategic-relational approach (SRA) to examine environmental issues in ways that destabilize conventionally economic determinist UPE. In addition to involving corporate elites and city officials, a UPE framework incorporating the SRA is capable of bringing the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community leaders, and environmentalists in everyday governance to the front. The article contends that the latter framework adds weight on public participation and local governance in different geopolitical contexts without losing sight of the social inequalities caused by state-led or privatized programs in the quest for urban resilience.

Research on Politics of Disaster Risk Governance: Where Are We Headed?

This thematic issue aims at unravelling how the global consensus towards a shift to risk reduction and inclusive disaster governance evolves in everyday governance practices, where roles and responsibilities are evolving and negotiated, permeated by politics of power and legitimacy. It identifies three different dimensions of disaster governance. The first is the formal dimension: the way governance arrangements are designed or meant to work. The second is ‘real’ governance: the way in which formal governance arrangements manifest and evolve in actual practice. The third is invisible governance: an amalgam of household and neighbourhood-level activities and networks for disaster response that happen outside of the gaze of the formalized governance arrangements. The 21 articles in this issue address the politics of governance based on thorough empirical work, while theoretically contributing to several themes relating to the politics of disaster governance. The outcomes of the thematic issue are: 1) The three governance dimensions are useful to reveal what the roles and room for manoeuvre is of different actors, including governments, international community, experts, non-state actors and affected communities; 2) Technical solutions for risk reduction and disaster response crucially rely on socio-technical, political, and administrative systems and processes and hence need to be adjusted to the specific context; and 3) The political nature of disaster governance calls for a deeper understanding to advance accountability to affected populations.

Everyday visuality and risk management: Representing (in)security in UN peacekeeping

ABSTRACT Visuality is a central aspect of everyday security governance. In the recent visual turn in International Relations, however, the more mundane and routine visualities of security have been widely neglected. To address this gap, this article proposes a framework for analyzing the messages of security and risk conveyed by different modes of visual representations, ranging from press photos and educational images to outwardly appearances. Taking the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) as an example, it shows that everyday visual representations reflect and contribute to security risk management in four ways: (1) They assist in the construction of self and other identities with regard to security, (2) they help to identify potential vulnerabilities, (3) they are used to educate people how to detect, assess, and behave in risky situations, and (4) they are employed to deter violent attacks.

Pipe dreams? Practices of everyday governance of heterogeneous configurations of water supply in Baruipur, a small town in India

This article compares a networked and a non-networked artefact and the diverse practices of everyday governance around these localised configurations of water infrastructure in Baruipur, a peripheral and rapidly urbanising small town in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area. Plagued by arsenic contamination, the state has been pushing to expand and consolidate a networked piped infrastructure bringing in treated surface water. This shift threatens to reconfigure the existing diverse infrastructure configurations that are fragmented, incremental in nature. We examine the scholarship on the situated and embodied forms of Urban Political Ecology to understand how everyday social relations and plural practices at the level of the town, the ‘para’ (roughly neighbourhood), and the household shape socio-material artefacts. The shift in the socio-technical configurations, in turn, lead to new forms of power coalitions, network conflicts, and collaborations. Through an in-depth qualitative examination, we conclude that heterogeneous infrastructure configurations and everyday practices are not only gendered but also intricately embedded within intersections of social affinity, intimate geographies, and embodied class power relations in the ‘para’.

To Whom Does the City Belong? Obstacles to Right to the City for the Urban Poor in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT Due to a lack of available job opportunities in the formal sector and financial resources, in most parts of the developing world the urban poor rely on access to urban public space for earning their livelihoods. The existing literature shows that the urban poor are often evicted without relocation from public spaces by city governments in promoting a “global city” image. Within this context, this article explores how city authorities deny a right to the city for the urban poor. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, this occurs through a comprehensive and orchestrated programme to deny the poor their rights as citizens of the city, to exploit and extort them, to manipulate the political system and to stigmatise them. Focussing on poor people’s involvement in informal street vending in a case study of a slum in Dhaka, this article argues that Bangladesh’s particular form of oppressive political culture, particularly its authoritarian party system, does not provide poor citizens with even the voice required to negotiate a right to the city. The article identifies particular forms of everyday governance that lead to a complete stripping of effective political power.

Dimensions of African Statehood: Everyday Governance and Provision of Public Goods

Drawing on an expanding corpus of inter-disciplinary publications that problematize state formation in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa1, Dimensions of African Statehood scrutinizes practices of ‘ac...

Imperial Maps of Xinjiang and Their Readers in Qing China, 1660–1860

AbstractThis article explores information management in the Qing government, and the challenges confronted by the Qing authorities, through the prism of imperial maps of Xinjiang. To ensure that newly gathered geographical knowledge of Xinjiang was usable for the emperor and senior officials, technocrats and artisans in the Imperial Household Department collaborated with the Jesuits and border officials to produce maps that materialized it. Because of their utility in military campaigns and everyday governance, these maps were carefully maintained by the Imperial Household Department, which discreetly distributed them to a small coterie of Manchu and Mongol statesmen. Nevertheless, information leakage from the lower echelons of the bureaucracy challenged the department's monopoly and popularized knowledge of Xinjiang among the Han literati.

Beyond the wall: Dyking as an object of everyday governance in the Bay of Manila, Philippines

Considering the visibility of infrastructural projects as a means of coastal protection against urban sea level change, this paper draws attention to dyking as both a form of ‘defense’ and as a means of ‘dwelling’ or living with/from water. By tracing the emergence of a recent donor-funded polder dyke in Metro Manila (Philippines), the paper focuses on the infrastructural politics of coastal protection in a delta megacity, often technocratically framed as a global disaster capital. It illustrates how, as a socio-technological object, a dyke might serve as a distinct mode of governing everyday life along high density urban coastlines. Combining insights from Evolutionary Governance Theory (EGT) and infrastructural anthropology, the paper traces the materialization of the dyke as an evolving ‘living’ infrastructure, placing it against a broader canvas of urban transformations encompassing contestations around disaster risk reduction, land use, uneven livelihood access, tenurial rights, and neoliberal aesthetics. As a means of transcending the defense/dwelling binary, a typology of four interrelated frames are presented with which to trace localised meanings and practices of dyking as a mode of everyday governance, namely as: a) a line of defence for protective living; b) urban spectacle; c) a buffer zone or marker for land acquisition and; d) a fluid borderland, which at times ruptures the very material fixities and aqua-terrestrial distinctions upon which hard engineering infrastructural solutions are often premised.

Everyday states and water infrastructure: Insights from a small secondary city in Africa, Bafatá in Guinea-Bissau

A rich body of work on everyday governance and urban infrastructure has produced nuanced understandings of the situated power relations and manifold practices shaping urban infrastructure in diverse cities. However, there is little research focusing on the practices and relations of state actors, and examining how these might shape different infrastructural configurations and relate to broader processes of state formation. This is particularly the case for secondary cities in Africa. This article draws on anthropological explorations of the state and debates on local ownership in aid to examine how state practices and relations have shaped water infrastructure in a small secondary city (Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau), and how the state is constituted in this process. Based on extensive ethnographic work, this research demonstrates that in a context of aid dependency, state influence is necessarily constituted through its relations with non-state organisations. Formal state presence therefore depends on the subtle and erratic recognition bestowed on the state by non-state organisations. However, local state actors continue to shape water provision in Bafatá in fundamental ways not through following policy and regulatory frameworks, but through their (informal) decisions, practices and interactions with non-state organisations. Overall, it is argued that anthropological explorations of states open our analytical lens to the mundane ways in which states shape different types of urban infrastructure, and the ways these practices relate to broader processes of state formation, particularly in context where states appear elusive.

Territorialising control in urban West Bengal: Social clubs and everyday governance in the spaces between state and party

Analysis of politics in urban West Bengal has focussed on the near hegemonic control of political parties and the state on daily life – overlooking or under-accounting for the complex institutional assemblages that shape spaces of the political in daily life. Addressing this empirical gap, this paper examines the role of social clubs, who discursively imagine themselves to be not political in governing the city. I demonstrate the ways that clubs, as a particular socio-cultural institution, territorialise power in order to produce governable space and in turn act as both alternative to the state and party and intermediaries with them. Mobilising evidence from extensive qualitative research on governance in two small cities I seek to complicate and nuance existing narratives on everyday politics, the party and the role of clubs in West Bengal. And in doing so offer theoretical contributions to the ways we understand political subjects and the social production of the heterogeneous overlapping territories of governance that characterise postcolonial cities.

Beyond state regulation of informality: understanding access to public space by street vendors in Bogotá

Selling goods and providing services in public spaces is one of the most accessible occupations for many urban poor. However, use of public space for such occupations is often prohibited by local regulations, excluding street vendors from legally using this space for their survival. While significant research has been devoted to state efforts to control informality, less is known about the everyday governance of street vendors. This article examines how unorganised street vendors regulate access to public space among themselves. We also analyse the contestation and negotiations between state and street vendors. The article is based on a study of street vendors in Bogotá, Colombia. We argue that informal street vendors do not operate in chaos, instead the ‘quiet encroachment’ of public space is governed by nonhierachical informal social control mechanisms. Our findings call for a reconsideration of regulations about urban informal activities and public spaces.

Governance in urban and peri-urban vegetable farming in Tamale, Northern Ghana

This article uses the example of Tamale, Ghana, to examine urban food system governance, with a focus on food production. Urban and peri-urban agriculture is common in West Africa, and supports food security and livelihoods globally. The analysis is grounded in the notion of everyday governance as a process co-performed by governors and subjects. Ideas from the conceptual tools of forum shopping and institutional shopping will be used to explain the dynamics inherent in urban food governance. We focus on data pertaining to land and water, major points of contention in this context. Examples are drawn from a database comprising interviews, focus group discussions, observational records and secondary data. They show how actors take advantage of gaps and ambiguities in governance to make selections between different institutions and the governance modes they represent, for example using administrative law to challenge a chief’s prerogative to sell land. They may also select the forums in which they do this, supporting the forum shopping and institutional shopping models as presented in the literature. Our data also show situations involving partial elements and extensions of forum shopping and institutional shopping. These include institutions shopping for the support of actors; strategic inconsistency, where actors present alternative arguments within an accepted forum, and hybrid governance, where multiple institutions and actor groups co-govern while acknowledging each other. Our work explains the way in which subjects and governors co-construct governance. The confirmation of subjects’ agency, and therefore the potential power of advocacy, is salient for governors as well as governed actor groups. Another relevant implication is that transparency is essential, especially in the co-construction of hybrid governance.

Paperless Arrests as Preventive Detention: Motion and Documentation in the Governance of Indigenous Peoples of Australia

The ‘paperless arrest’ scheme is a detention regime in which motion and documentation are central to crime control and community protection. This article interrogates paperlessness as a political fantasy for policing alongside the routine documentary practices of police administration, including their effects on the movement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Operative since 2014 in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT), the paperless arrest scheme provides police with the power to take an individual into custody for up to four hours if they believe, on reasonable grounds, that the individual has committed, or was about to commit, an infringement notice offence. This article frames paperless arrests as an instance of preventive detention continuous with the long-term regulation of alcohol consumption by Aboriginal people, in relation to racialised norms of public propriety in urban space. It considers preventive detention beyond issues of legality and efficacy, examining local and material relations that organise the everyday governance of preventive detention in Northern Australia.

Everyday governance and urban environments: Towards a more interdisciplinary urban political ecology

AbstractUrban political ecology (UPE) has mainly evolved within the discipline of geography to examine the power relations that produce uneven urban spaces (infrastructures and natures) and unequal access to resources in cities. Its increasingly poststructuralist orientation demands the questioning of received categories and concepts, including those of (neoliberal) governance, government, and of the state. This paper attempts to open this black box by referring to the mostly anthropological literature on everyday governance and the everyday state. We argue that UPE could benefit from ethnographic governance studies to unveil multiple state and non‐state actors that influence the local environment, their diverse rationalities, normative registers, and interactions across scales. This would also to enrich and nuance geographical UPE accounts of neoliberal environmental governance and potentially render the framework more policy relevant.

Everyday Governance of Domestic Energy Systems

The proposed transition to a low-carbon society faces challenges, as it is occurring too slowly to achieve the goals set by international and national governmental bodies, and gaps are found between available energy-efficiency technologies and their appropriate use. The governance of domestic energy systems has attracted European research attention, and the findings illustrate how materials, competence, and meaning influence energy productivity in domestic settings and how accountability is enacted by connecting people and technologies. The present research cites Swedish examples of how energy efficiency has been improved by involving multiple local actors, such as consumers, energy utilities, property companies, and local governments. Examples are analysed through the lens of social change and mundane governance theory, illustrating how spaces and places often overlooked as too mundane to be considered in policy prove, when analysed in more detail, to be important for energy efficiency. The results indicate that “governance pairs” (e.g., “households/lighting” and “caretakers/heating systems”) are more or less successfully held together and influence accountability and governance possibilities. The present analyses demonstrate that, while governance is often portrayed in terms of causality, everyday practices involving governance pairs are messier and less predictable than anticipated. These results call for the upgrading of research into everyday life and for bottom–up approaches to energy studies. Accountability – crucial to closing the energy-efficiency gap and understood in the context of mundane governance – can advance our energy-efficiency thinking and action.

Infrastructuring the social: Local community work, urban policy and marginalized residential areas in Denmark

This article develops the concept of infrastructuring the social by analyzing the uses of local community work in Danish marginalized residential areas. Infrastructuring the social is a concept to describe how spaces are designated as problematic and marginalized and then remade through the creation and materialization of normative and instrumental relations. The article empirically demonstrates how infrastructuring the social works through enacting relations between residents, local community workers and professionals from municipalities, relations which are used to move people along normative trajectories. These trajectories are meant to transport people out of problematic areas, and into closer contact with “regular society,” such as Danish institutions, education, and the labor market. Infrastructuring the social is thus enacted from the outside in, imbued with the normative imperatives of the welfare state, seeking to rework the agency of residents and improve the marginalized residential area. The concept of infrastructuring the social nuances the trope of the “network” by highlighting the normative imperatives embedded in making relations, and goes beyond frameworks of governmentality by highlighting the practical messiness and on-going work of everyday governance.

Incongruent Waterworlds: Situating the Everyday Practices and Power of Water in Delhi

In 2011, the “Swach Delhi Swasth Delhi” (Clean Delhi Healthy Delhi) campaign designated more than 20 settlements in the capital city to receive water and/or sanitation improvements. Tracing the water initiative in Delhi’s Rampur Camp, this paper employs a situated approach to the urban political ecology of water in order to tease apart the variegated governance and lived experiences of its flows. Rather than the conventional reading of the state as having “withdrawn” from water governance in illegal colonies, my analysis reveals shifting state and non-state political assemblages as playing key roles in the everyday regulation of water in Delhi. First, I demonstrate that everyday governance is shaped by (re)configurations of specific nodes and networks of the state and other actors, which enable particular powers of reach and authority to be exercised in relation to water. Second, my findings detail the situated impacts of new governance configurations within urban spaces, revealing how water is (re-)negotiated, embodied, and socially differentiated on the ground. These findings further reveal the pathways by which situated and distributed forms of social and political power shape incongruent urban environments for the city’s residents.

Good governance? Perceptions of accountability, transparency and effectiveness in Irish food risk governance

In an attempt to govern increasingly globalised, industrialised and risky food chains, food safety authorities (FSAs) have been established worldwide as part of a catalogue of food risk governance reforms undertaken in response to continuing food crises. Despite these significant shifts in governing arrangements however, little work has been conducted regarding how consumers respond to, resist and/or engage with these new governance systems in everyday, non-crisis contexts. As such, this paper explores the everyday governance of food risk from the perspective of those whose voices typically go unheard in food policymaking processes – consumers. Drawing on empirical results from focus groups conducted with publics across the Republic of Ireland, consumer perceptions, priorities and lived experiences relating to food risk governance, and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) in particular, are explored. This analysis is couched within a normative frame of multi-scalar governance and what makes it ‘good’ or effective. Accordingly, the paper advances food risk policy debates through a lens of normative good food risk governance, including analysis of the perceived accountability, transparency and effectiveness of Irish food risk governing structures from a consumer perspective. Identifying limitations in current governing regimes, the paper concludes by critically reflecting on the opportunities and challenges for adopting more adaptive forms of governance in the multi-scalar and evolving policy context that typifies food risk.

Ponds, Power and Institutions: The Everyday Governance of Accessing Urban Water Bodies in a Small Bengali City

AbstractWhile researchers in the growing field of urban political ecology have given significant attention to the fragmented hydroscape that characterizes access to drinking water in the global South, so far the (re)production of other urban waters and its related power relations have been underexplored. This article seeks to contribute to filling this gap by exploring the everyday negotiations over access to urban water bodies, in particular ponds. These are understood as a composite resource that is simultaneously water, land and public space. This analysis draws on a case study from a small city in West Bengal, India, and is based primarily on data from open interviews with different actors with a stake in urban ponds. The article demonstrates that in a context of ambiguity of the statutory governance regime and fragmented control, the (re)production of the pondscape is embedded within complex relationships of power whereby social marginalization can be offset at least momentarily by local institutions such as neighbourhood clubs and political parties.