Prelims

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Informality in Policymaking

Title Page

Informality in Policymaking: Weaving the Threads of Everyday Policy Work

EDITED BY

LINDSEY GARNER-KNAPP

University of Edinburgh, UK

JOANNA MASON

University of Sydney, Australia

TAMARA MULHERIN

Northumbria University, UK

AND

E. LIANNE VISSER

Leiden University, The Netherlands

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL.

First edition 2025

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

Individual chapters except chapter 6 © 2025 The authors.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Chapter 6, Visualising Informal Repair: Exploring Photographic ‘Routines’ in Ethnographic Methodology copyright © 2025 Neha Mungekar, is Open Access with copyright assigned to respective chapter authors. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

Cover Art and section images: Emma Weale, 2023.

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ISBN: 978-1-83797-281-4 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83797-280-7 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83797-282-1 (Epub)

Endorsement Page

Being able to think and act in the moment, as any administrator and politician knows, is the hallmark of being an effective practitioner. It is the only way to tame the intrinsic uncertainty and unpredictability of the organization and its environment. This insight, which is backed up by a sizeable literature - on practice, know how, tacit knowledge, improvisation, wisdom, administrative discretion, informal organization, playing the system – backs up this everyday observation. Yet, in policy analysis and political science this practical common sense is inexplicably ignored. Instead, the formal aspects of organizations – institutions, laws, rules, procedures, constitutions – are considered the standard of epistemic and social authority. One of the many achievements of this book is it brings the voice of practice back into the conversation. It invites us to think in a non-dualist way about the formal-informal distinction. Another strength is the all-female line-up of contributors, which in itself is a commentary on the hegemonic distribution of epistemic authority in policy research. Nine detailed, carefully researched case studies demonstrate that only a thorough immersion in the formal aspects of policy and organization allows the practitioner to improvise on the spot to get things done and successfully solve problems, and also what that means for the organization. I expect this book to be a lasting contribution to bridging the divide between the formal and informal aspects of public policy and administration.

Hendrik Wagenaar (Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna; Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global governance, University of Canberra)

Brilliant and insightful, this forceful intervention challenges the taken-for-granted assumptions and paradigms in public administration and governance. This book tells an alternative, less-told story of in/formality in policy studies, one that is grounded in feminist methodologies, contextualized practices and localized knowledges. Broad in its scope, the book details how informality is used to negotiate boundaries, transfer knowledge and maintain infrastructure using a fascinating array of visual, material, and ethnographic methods. It is a must-read for anyone wishing to develop a complete understanding of how governance actually works on the ground.

Ayesha Masood (Associate Professor, Suleman Dawood School of Business, Lahore University of Management Sciences)

This edited collection is an insightful reminder of the unseen interstitial spaces and occasions where the (hyphenated) work of doing policy gets done. Beautifully presented and full of rich ethnographic accounts from a range of contexts, a great read for practitioners, managers and academics alike.

Rob Wilson (Professor of Digital Social Innovation, Manchester Metropolitan University)

This book vividly presents how informality gains shape in the daily practice of professional policymakers. The refreshing approach goes beyond binary thinking and considers the complex intertwining of informality with formality. It will be a key resource for anyone interested in informality in policymaking, and recommended reading for those who want to understand how informality always seems to elude definition.

Martijn Koster (Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University)

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables

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About the Editors

Lindsey Garner-Knapp, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Lindsey’s work bridges academia and policymaking and she is committed to building and maintaining connections in both worlds to facilitate research that addresses real-world problems and supports informed policymaking practices. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh in Politics and International Relations and a Researcher at the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy. Broadly, her work explores international trade policymaking focusing on the multiplicity of heterogeneous actors involved in these entanglements and how they (re)assemble throughout the processes. With her background in anthropology and public policy, Lindsey draws on a variety of qualitative approaches to better understand policymaking in situ highlighting the affects of the human and nonhuman relations. As a practitioner, she has experience in policymaking processes as a policy analyst and policy advisor to multiple regional and city governments in Canada and the United Kingdom.

Joanna Mason, is Research Fellow with the Menzies Centre for Health Policy and Economics, University of Sydney, Australia. Joanna conducts research across the broad fields of public policy, health policy and public administration. Using interpretive and actor-centred approaches – and drawing on her public sector experience in policy – her work contributes to macro policy debates through a focus on the micro-setting and the practical challenges encountered by policymakers. Recent ethnographic work addressed expectations for policy practitioners to utilise academic research in view of the evidence-based policy paradigm which was conducted within the national-level civil service, the Australian Public Service. A recent publication explores how policy ethnography and the sense-making journey that follows can usefully deploy an anthropological orientation that attends to underlying methodological, theoretical, analytical and conceptual precepts and practices. Currently, her work examines health policy and governance focusing on reform to primary care through a comparative study of Australia and Canada.

Tamara Mulherin is a Lecturer in Organisational Studies with the Newcastle Business School at Northumbria University, having completed her PhD in Politics at the University of Edinburgh. She has been a Research Fellow with the Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh, and the Social Work, Education and Community Wellbeing Department at Northumbria University. Her doctoral research was an inter-organisational, multi-sited ethnographic study into health and social care integration in Scotland, exploring how collaborative practices were enacted for the implementation of new legislation. She has more than 25 years of experience in the public and non-government sectors in roles, including management, planning, policy, evaluation, service delivery and community development, across a multiplicity of domains, e.g., mental health, health inequalities, homelessness, social care and domestic violence. She is interested in posthumanist public sector organising, mundane governance and infrastructuring of care, collaboration-as-practice and repair practices in the context of public sector reform.

E. Lianne Visser is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Originally trained as an anthropologist at Utrecht University, and with experience as a public policymaker, she is fascinated by the mundane, tacit and often informal practices through which abstract concepts such as policy, governance, and accountability are performed and brought into being. Her research and teaching focuses on customisation and responsiveness by street-level workers; the changing relationship between street-level and policy departments; and mundane aspects of the work of street-level workers, managers and policymakers. She also writes about qualitative, ethnographic methods and practice theory. Her research has been published in leading international journals such as Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Administration Review, Public Administration and Public Management Review.

About the Contributors

Lisa Marie Borrelli works as an Associate Professor at the University of Applied Science – HES-SO Valais -Wallis, Institute of Social Work, Switzerland. Her research interests circle around the broader concepts of exclusion and banishment, including a focus on how non-citizens’ rights are restricted by states in the fields of migration law, welfare policies and public administration. She follows an ethnographic approach and is interested in qualitative methodologies to study the decision-making of (non)state actors, bureaucratic practices, policy discourses and legal case work.

Claire Bynner is a Lecturer in Social Justice and Community Action at Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. She has been working in the fields of public policy, democratic innovation and community development as a practitioner and academic for over 20 years. Her academic interests are in participatory democracy, local governance and place-based approaches to poverty and inequality. Her current research examines the community and voluntary sector response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. She is co-editor of the book COVID-19 and the Voluntary and Community Sector in the UK: Responses, Impacts and Adaptation, published in 2022.

Kristin Anabel Eggeling (PhD 2019, University of St Andrews, UK) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen and a Visiting Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). Kristin teaches and writes about diplomacy, digitalisation, global tech policy and qualitative and ethnographic methods in Political Science and International Relations. In 2023, Kristin was awarded the Anthony Deos Early Career Award for the emerging scholar in the field of Diplomatic Studies by the International Studies Association (ISA).

Evelijn Martinius works as a doctoral researcher at the Department of Organization Studies at the Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands. Her research examines the management of underground public infrastructures in urban regions in the Netherlands. She is interested in sensory methods such as ethnography and writes about imagination, routines and grassroots pioneering solutions to overcome issues with bounded manageability in societal transitions.

Neha Mungekar is a PhD candidate at the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT), affiliated with the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Currently, she is engaged in the Water4Change project, investigating how to nurture informal governance capacities for transitioning to water-sensitive cities in India. Her professional background encompasses significant roles as an urban designer and environmental photojournalist. Her academic and practice interests are centred on exploring the power dynamics associated with the distribution and allocation of water resources, particularly within the context of the Global South. Her research integrates complex systems thinking and anthropological approaches to provide nuanced insights into water governance and its implications for diverse stakeholders. Her key expertise lies in facilitation, knowledge brokering and consensus building through innovative participatory strategies.

Peregrine Schwartz-Shea is Professor Emerita, Department of Political Science, University of Utah. She published her early research using experimental methods and rational choice theory. Shifting theoretical interests led to research focusing on methodological practices in political science and interpretive methods. With Dvora Yanow, she is co-editor of the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods, and their coauthored Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes (2012) is the first volume in the series. She is past president of the Western Political Science Association (2012–2013) and recipient of two mentoring awards. She received a National Science Foundation grant to co-organise the Workshop on Interpretive Methodologies in Political Science (2009) and served on the Ad Hoc Committee on Human Subjects Research (2017–2020), which produced research ethics guidelines for the American Political Science Association. Since 2020, she serves on the editorial board of American Political Science Review and its Advisory Board for Research Ethics.

Meera Sudhakar works as an interdisciplinary researcher studying policy issues in the domain of water and energy. She completed her doctoral studies from National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India in 2022. Her research has focused on tracing changes to policy ideas and institutions that structure energy and water politics in the context of environmental limits.

Larissa Versloot is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen and an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University. Her research interests are in multilateral cooperation, diplomacy, EU foreign policy and the maintenance of trust in world politics. Her work has been published in International Affairs and Review of International Studies.

Dvora Yanow is political/organisational ethnographer and interpretive methodologist. Dvora explores the generation and communication of knowing and meaning in policy and organisational settings. Her current project – working title The Treachery of Categories – explores category theory and state-created categories for immigrant integration policies and race-ethnic identities. Other interests include social science research ethics and their regulation, work practice studies and science/technology museums and the idea of science. Her most recent work is ‘Interpretive policy analysis: Origins and current challenges’ (forthcoming, Elgar). With Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, she has co-authored Interpretive Research Design (2012), which launched their co-edited Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods, and co-edited Interpretation and Method (2nd ed., 2014). She has held fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and the Käte Hamburger Institute for Global Cooperation Research and visiting positions at the Danish Institute for International Studies, Vienna’s Institute for Advanced Studies and Shenyang’s Northeastern University (China), among others.

Foreword

What if we began our thinking about public policy here, with conversations in corridors and coffee rooms, with a tap on the shoulder just before the meeting resumes, out on a site visit or with piles of paper on the passenger seat of the car? Not with the political, legislative, ideational, organisational or financial parameters of decision-making but with the physical, material, haptic, affective, familiar, embodied, situated, provisional, contingent and emergent, with the encounter and the casual conversation? For isn’t this in fact where policy begins, along with most other human things?

That’s not to claim that policy is anything but a public, formal affair, documented and institutionalised – for if it weren’t recognisable, repeatable, replicable and communicable in some stable form it would fail in its essential functions. By the same token, however, understanding how something which is none of these things, how something essentially and necessarily informal comes in the end to be formal, must be essential to our understanding of what policy is and the work it does. For policy is not a priori formal but has been made so: it is no more and no less than the formalisation of what has been informally problematised, proposed, argued over and agreed. So why don’t we begin with people engaged with each other rather than with that vague, abstract, ultimately ethereal and ephemeral thing we call policy? And then go on in this way, drawing attention to the continued work of informal interaction in sustaining the form and function of policy, in nurturing it, making sense of it, assessing it, perhaps resisting it or putting it into practice.

For that’s what’s happening here, in this book. Its argument is not that we must now turn our attention wholly to the informal or that we should in any sense look away from what we took to be policy and its principal characteristics. It is, instead, that we might ask how the formal and the informal are mutually constitutive in the making of policy. It’s not ‘either/or’, it’s ‘both/and’ or perhaps ‘not only, but also’; it’s to say the formal is only part of the story. It’s precisely not to construct a new binary, a dualism of formal and informal, but it is to draw new attention to the boundary between the two and to the ways it might be drawn differently in different contexts. Its purpose is to posit a new holism, however hesitant and unsettled, in our thinking about public policy.

There’s no surprise that it’s these authors who should begin here, with the informal. They were and are themselves first of all practitioners – policymakers and public officials – and they’re writing about a world they know from experience, working if not living in it, sharing its values at least in part, having been socialised into its norms, acquired its assumptions and habits of thought, having become skilled in its established ways of doing things and so able to pass as experts, authorities. They’ve then entered another world of teaching and research and found the one they came from reflected back to them, represented in theories and models and approaches and frameworks, in carefully crafted case studies, in books and journal papers, that is in relentlessly formal ways. This book results at least in part from that friction, from wanting to show and say what their world is really like, how policy really happens.

It’s no accident, either, that these stories of the informal should be told by embracing ethnographic methods, by researchers engaging in close and sustained relationships with those around them (more formally known as ‘participants’). For those relationships themselves, like those among others we call ‘policymakers’, are constantly shifting between the informal, sometimes casual, sometimes private and even intimate and varying degrees of legal and professional formality. Nor is it any surprise that their authors should be women, sensitive to the ways different spaces of policy work differently because they are – at least informally – differently gendered.

So we might wonder about the origins and production of this book in the same way we wonder about the origins and production of policy (because of course research, like policy, is a text-based practice). It’s been produced by a network of practitioner-researchers with shared if not common interests, that shared interest being in part in discovering what interests they have. It’s come from a sense of something missing, first intuited then argued and explicated, in myriad conversations, in the idea for a book, in loose formulations, reformulations and re-visionings, in calls for contributions and expressions of interest, in playing with titles and drafting proposals, in writing and reading the papers themselves, commenting and revising, agonising over an introduction, more writing, more reading and more discussion. And so in the end, a text becomes settled, material and fixed – formal, perhaps – only in order that it should go out in the world, prompting more talk and perhaps more writing.

This book tells us other things about the informal, though they are as germane to social life in general as they are to public policy more specifically. They are that the informal is intrinsically social, always a form of interaction and therefore invariably conventional and rule-bound: that is to say that the informal happens in normal ways. Yet it can also be a source of the new, of the unscripted, critical and questioning.

Richard Freeman

Edinburgh

September 2023

Acknowledgements

Where do we begin to express our gratitude to the people who have seen this endeavour to its completion? Positioned around the ‘shareable workbench’ (Braidotti, 2019, p. 146), we believe we have much to be thankful for. We are thankful to the people, things, and ideas that have all helped this book materialise, and as a collective accomplishment, it is vital to acknowledge the entanglements with these others through which this book emerged.

To our contributors:

As editors, we welcomed the chapter authors into our community as co-creators of this book and as peers who were equally committed to exploring informality and formality differently. Our approach with all of the authors throughout this book’s making was built on multiple forms of engagement along the way. We were fortunate to be a part of the development of such a generative group of authors without which this book would not be possible. In particular, we appreciated their trust in joining with us to work within and expand the universe of the concept of in|formality. We are grateful to them all for the profound ways in which they have thought with and through the concepts, and concomitantly, their diverse perspectives and expertise enriched the construction process and the content of this book.

We want to acknowledge Richard Freeman as the lively conduit through which we came together and are very thankful for his generous and fitting Foreword. He recognises our positionality and our ‘pracademic’ efforts as producing the conditions for the empirical theorising of the ‘both/and’ of the in|formal, mutually constitutive making of policy and our embrace of ethnographic methods as a method of inquiry most amenable for ‘mak[ing] things visible, audible, tangible, knowable’ (Gherardi, 2019, p. 202).

Additionally, we owe a large debt of gratitude to Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea for their Afterword reflections and thoughtful consideration of this book’s intentions and empirically how it seeks to show this through ethnography. They identify our efforts from the outset to patiently sit in a muddle of the in|formal, not trying to solve it but to take time to consider incommensurability. Their sensitive assessment of each chapter, how they can be read in various ways and the implications are invaluable. We also want to thank them both for their constructive advice regarding the book structure, which we regard as substantively enhancing this book’s academic quality. Also for their attentive suggestions which helped us to solve the bumps in the road we encountered during the publication process.

To our organisations:

We want to thank our respective universities, as educators and employers, for their flexibility, time and space, both as doctoral students and scholars working on this book. Special thanks goes to Leiden University for providing funding for the purchase of the artwork images used throughout this manuscript.

To the peer reviewers:

We appreciated the anonymous peer reviewers who provided constructive feedback on the initial book proposal, as well as John Boswell and Helen Dickinson’s challenging and valuable insights on the introductory chapter. All these comments alerted us to how this book’s themes may be received by those within the policy field and ultimately have helped improve the quality of this book and its contribution.

To the editorial team at Emerald:

We are grateful for Emerald Publishers and their support in the development of this book. From the outset, Iram Satti, as the then Commissioning Editor, welcomed and encouraged our efforts. This encouragement continued under the stewardship of Daniel Ridge, Lydia Cutmore, Brindha Thirunavukkarasu and Lauren Kammerdiener as the production process evolved. They took a risk working with us as a group of – at the time – PhD students with little experience as editors but have been invaluable to our development and to what the book has become. Their accommodating and diligent work has helped ensure this book meets academic standards and is ready for publication.

For the artwork:

Emma Weale, as the artist-weaver, has been both open and giving of her time and practice in taking on the commission of creating a tapestry and its accompanying images for our book cover and section breaks. She listened closely to apprehend what we were trying to achieve, capturing a weaving in the making and as a completed work. The images of her work are a testament to the beauty of the weaving, which we think metaphorically aids communicating the in|formal.

And on a personal level:

As we have foregrounded, the making of a book is an endeavour multiplied that emerges from varied collaborative interactions, but it is also underpinned by the support of family, friends, and mentors who have provided encouragement and understanding throughout the process. We want to express our gratitude for their patience, encouragement, and belief in our ability to undertake the project. We also want to share that as doctoral students and early career scholars (ECRs) that it is possible to ‘grasp the nettle’ and collaboratively produce academic texts.

Tamara – Given my feminist praxis, the collective approach to this scholarly project has reaffirmed to me what can emerge when shared interests, curiosity, and collective writing, diffracted through our respective experiences, come together. To have the opportunity to build our writing together as an editorial team of incredible and diverse capabilities has been generative, supportive and creative.

Lindsey – There are moments in our lives where we each have the opportunity to do something new and create something amazing – this book has been that for me. As ECRs, we experienced adversity in getting here, but we shared a vision, worked together, and found the most amazing support system with our interlocutors making this collective dream a reality. Together we learned, thought, grew, shared, supported, and wrote – I am grateful for every moment.

Lianne – Making this book has taught me how to do academia differently, write academia differently, present academia differently. To be able to share this book is the culmination of this collective, creative endeavour.

Joanna – Bringing this book to fruition has been a rewarding experience that invigorated, enriched, and extended how I thought about policymaking. The project came about at a crucial stage in my doctoral journey, with the resulting friendships and collegial relationships taking me through this uncertain transition and creating the potential for new, collective endeavours into the future.

As it goes out into the world, we hope we have conveyed through this book what it means to incorporate diverse practitioner sensibilities into scholarly knowledge-making, indicative of what’s possible in a collective effort to do academia otherwise. In occupying a feminist standpoint, we attempt to express through the chapters that the ruse of the Eurocentric bifurcated lens through which we encounter the world diminishes our sense of the possibilities and potentialities held within circumstances which unfold. Ours then is the story of relational text work, attuned to the political in the mundane, of co-labouring as a form of care in our writing, that we think brings to life the everyday policy work enmeshed in the in|formal. Accordingly, even as the creation of this book has come to an end, we are all aware that our inquiry into in|formality continues. For, as Donna Haraway (2016) explains,

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (p. 12)

Tamara, Lindsey, Lianne and Joanna

April 2024