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From Informality and Formality to In|formality: Troubling Absolutism in Policymaking

Joanna Mason (Menzies Centre for Health Policy and Economics, University of Sydney, Australia)
E. Lianne Visser (Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Lindsey Garner-Knapp (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Tamara Mulherin (Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, UK)

Informality in Policymaking: Weaving the Threads of Everyday Policy Work

ISBN: 978-1-83797-281-4, eISBN: 978-1-83797-280-7

Publication date: 3 December 2024

Abstract

This opening chapter introduces key debates in relation to informality in policymaking, laying the theoretical and conceptual groundwork for the individual empirical chapters, beginning with a provocation for how informality can alternatively be understood. Through illustrating where gaps in understanding within current literature exist for how informality acquires meaning, and the physical and material relevance for how it manifests across contexts, this chapter introduces the three thematic clusters that thread through the book’s chapters: boundaries, knowledge mastery and networks. In doing so, it briefly positions each chapter in relation to these flexible and overlapping categories, drawing attention to how each chapter presents a different understanding of informality. Key to this chapter is our contention that while informality escapes definition, without binary or fixed conceptualisations of this concept we are better able to take in its fluidity and envisage how it is interwoven in everyday policy work and its human and non-human enactment. Underpinning this contention is a key contribution of this work, a proposition for a re-conceptualising of informality and formality as in|formality. Methodologically, this chapter argues that informality is better ‘shown’ than ‘told’ – and that this can be achieved through interpretive and socio-material approaches woven through disciplines that foreground narrative, ethnographic and creative approaches to research.

Keywords

Citation

Mason, J., Visser, E.L., Garner-Knapp, L. and Mulherin, T. (2024), "From Informality and Formality to In|formality: Troubling Absolutism in Policymaking", Garner-Knapp, L., Mason, J., Mulherin, T. and Visser, E.L. (Ed.) Informality in Policymaking: Weaving the Threads of Everyday Policy Work, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 3-20. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83797-280-720241001

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2025 Joanna Mason, E. Lianne Visser, Lindsey Garner-Knapp and Tamara Mulherin