Informality in Policymaking: Weaving the Threads of Everyday Policy Work

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.

This chapter examines the informal through the accounts of a public official who had a leading role in re-making the administration of community grants in her local authority during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. This chapter explores what happens when there is a rupture to public administration processes, and the rule book is ‘thrown out of the window’. The focus is on the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the weeks following the UK government announcement of the ‘stay-at-home’ order. The analysis draws on practice theory with its focus on the ways in which policy actors engage with concrete situations and negotiate institutional contexts and configurations (Bartels, 2018; Cook & Wagenaar, 2012; Wagenaar, 2004). The analytical framework applies Wagenaar’s (2004) four key elements of public administration practice: context, action, knowledge and interaction. This chapter builds on Wagenaar’s understanding and explores how the entanglement of [in]formal practices made it possible for public officials to keep administrative systems going during the pandemic crisis.

Informality, particularly in the context of the global south, has been understood as deviations from the formal rules of the state. It is therefore often associated with illegality and weak governing capacity. This chapter examines informality as emerging in the dynamics of how change is accommodated in the practices of the sub-division, the lowest administrative unit of the state-owned electricity-supply company in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. It locates informal as an arena that admits contingent and local knowledge to guide its practices that organize accountability relations.

Diplomats are often considered to be masters of informality. Scholars and practitioners alike have long suggested that the real work of diplomacy happens in the corridor, during the coffee break and cocktail parties. But while everyone agrees that informality is a key ingredient of diplomatic work, few have explicitly explored it, and we lack a conceptualisation of how informality becomes meaningful. In this chapter, we unpack the question: through which spaces and practices is informality performed in diplomacy? Based on thick descriptions generated through ethnographic research in and around the institutions of the European Union (EU), we make two key contributions. First, we map local understandings of the term and give a grounded account of how diplomats use informality and interpret its functions. Second, we take these ‘tales from the field’ (van Maanen, 2011[1988]) and consider them in the light of theoretical debates on informality, particularly through the concept of boundary. Where and how is the boundary between the formal and informal constituted? Who has the power to draw and move these boundaries? How does it matter, politically, if something is ‘formal’ or ‘informal’? Based on our analysis, we find that informality comes in many forms and can be both politically productive and disruptive. In diplomacy, handling informality is a key diplomatic skill that is learned over time to be, eventually, mastered.

States retain (socio-political) tools to govern the lives of their population and beyond. Such governing takes place in various offices, where frontline staff need to implement policies that are created at higher levels of the administrative and political hierarchy. This chapter proposes an in-depth view on work that is being done in Swiss resident registration offices, through an ethnographic lens. Following caseworkers in their daily work routines over an extended period allowed me to trace their practices and (in)formal approaches to their work. This chapter delves into longer field note extracts that allow for deeper contextuality. Two key themes that will be engaged with, hustling and shuffling, explore the presence of informality and the consequences that such informal practices have for institutional functioning. First, insights show that a high workload combined with a lack of resources, creates an air of hustling that pushes frontline staff to make up for shortcomings in resources by inventing new and more efficient ways to implement their work. Hustling goes beyond individual coping mechanisms; often embedded in collective routines and practices that are, however, not codified. Second, given the high amount of information, policies and laws frontline workers need to be familiar with, they shuffle around with knowledge and devise productive ways to communicate with each other while remaining able to process cases. As such, informality is neither the opposite to formality nor simply uncodified but can range from spontaneous solutions to established sets of practice that blur the boundary between formal and informal.

In this chapter, I ask what catching up means in the practice of collaborative policymaking. During ethnographic fieldwork among municipal policymakers and semi-public managers in child and family services in the Netherlands, I found the central actors constantly catching up. These are not interactions that we generally see in accounts of public policymaking, nor has this ‘mundane’ activity been systematically analysed. Based on many hours of participant observation, and illustrated through a composite narrative, I demonstrate how catching serves to construct the participants’ identity (who am I in this meeting), and relationship (what is our relation in this meeting), and to make sense of the specific situation of the meeting (what is it we are doing here) and of the larger ‘world’ beyond (what has happened and might structure what we will be doing here). I argue that catching up is a connective practice, connecting temporalities, spaces, knowledge and people. Within its actions, the informal and the formal are entangled.

In this chapter, I illustrate the use of visual ethnography to uncover the nuanced role of informal processes and structures, henceforth referred to as informality, in navigating the complex challenges of water governance in India through enabling repair. By repair, I refer to the ability of informality to act as a transformative approach, adept at navigating and addressing the multifaceted governance challenges faced by Indian cities. The mapping of informality in repair within urban water governance uncovered three dilemmas: 1) the difficulty of documenting transient oral narratives, 2) the discrepancies between verbal accounts and observed practices and 3) ethical concerns associated with documenting illicit activities. To address these dilemmas, I coupled ethnographic approaches with photographic methods. Ethnography provided reflection, clarity and a documented record, although it introduced a delay in capturing observations. Photographic methods compensated for this by offering an immediate visual record and facilitating live analysis alongside textual notes. I outline five routines of conducting visual ethnography, applied in the cities of Bhopal and Bhuj, to shed light on how various actors enact informality in addressing the gaps within urban water governance. These routines served as a photographic praxis to critically engage with both human and non-human actors in these locales. Through these routines, I illustrate how informality results in two types of repairs: reactive and reparative. Reactive repair serves as a temporary measure to restore the status quo. In contrast, reparative repair aims at fostering long-term change, illustrating the dynamic ways in which informality contributes to repairing the intricacies of water governance in India.

This chapter zooms in on how bodily gestures allow negotiations on upcoming works in an underground construction project, to transition into subsequent stages without leaving a trace. The gestures were observed during joint meetings of contractors/project managers in their work at an infrastructure mega project located in an international airport. These gestures conveyed meaning through acts of pointing, circling, shielding and bracketing in front of a digitally screened technical drawing. While these gestures entail no significant engineering skills or training, upon closer analysis, they reveal a refined craftsmanship. The gestures clarify, augment and suggest – but leave no visible, formal trace. The gestures convey meaning ambiguously compared to drawing or sketching – and leave no mark. As such, the meaning revealed through gesture remains tacit craftsman’s knowledge. Enveloped within past events, it turns those present in the meeting into gatekeepers: only they have accessed local, tacit knowledge required to interpret the technical drawings correctly and make decisions on upcoming works that can progress infrastructure projects underground on time and within budget. Following the role of gestures therefore gives an account of the informal ways in which engineers negotiate progress in construction work.

The materiality of policy worlds – buildings, mobile phones and carparks – has been an under-examined aspect of policy relations. Everyday materialities are routinised in such a way they are enacted as trivial, contributing to an indifference towards the roles they play. In particular, the role of the car and quite what happens aside from driving is largely overlooked. How relations are re-assembled through the small threshold spaces of car interiors, where actors are suspended between two states – neither here nor there – affects everyday work. Latterly, the car has become a complex communicative assemblage for multi-tasking, a coordination centre for telephone, global positioning system (GPS), internet, etc., a place of work, but cars are also places of refuge, comfort zones for affective regulation via the sound system. This chapter explores from a multi-sited, inter-organisational ethnography in rural Scotland how cars are vital in mobilising relations for the implementation of legislation requiring certain National Health Services (NHSs) to integrate with local government social care services. Given rurality, actors’ cars were used to travel around the area. I suggest a focus on taken-for-granted materials, like cars, can unsettle policy understandings, engendering thinking beyond ‘formal’ policy practices, to illuminate acts of implementing ‘through things’ (de La Bellacasa, 2011). Materialities provide a novel way of interrogating policy practices unfolding in assorted in|formal settings, in this case, conveyed via vehicles. The car is a site whereby often unnoticed doings are produced through relations between bodies, objects and places. These relations are spatially and temporally enfolded and constitute policy work, particularly in rural areas.

This chapter focuses on the actors who engage in policymaking to offer alternative understandings of informality and the context in which this occurs. Using ethnographic vignettes from Canada and Australia as illustrations, theoretical and methodological goals are pursued through adopting the anthropological concept of ‘traces’ to show how informality both mediates and transcends across non-fixed physical, temporal and conceptual boundaries. With an underlying premise that normative understandings of informality are shaped by the policymaking ‘black box’ metaphor and a lack of access to policymaking spaces and actors, this chapter argues against the association of informality with illegitimate and invisible policy processes. Instead, experience of the policy process gained through professional and ethnographic engagement, or an ‘insider’ perspective, shifts the researcher’s gaze beyond physical barriers or separations to show that ‘traces’ formed through in|formal encounters create opportunities for relationality through which policy is conceived, deliberated and, in part, created.

As a backend to this book, we outline the crafting of our collaborative book assembling journey on in|formality in policymaking. Anchored in practitioner experiences, we explore how we encountered the often-discounted dimensions of informal policy processes and the challenges entailed in transversing traditional academic boundaries. We describe the chronological evolution of the project, highlighting the inclusive editorial process and thematic workshops that shaped this book’s content. With creativity and thoughtful reflection, we describe how we navigated the complexities of interrogating informality in policymaking without falling into binary distinctions. Ultimately, we show how our efforts underscore the transformative potential of collaborative academia and our ongoing inquiry into in|formality.