Abstract
This paper analyzes the modalities and relations of power in and through which mid-level practitioners operate in their working lives. I situate these theoretical concerns in a context of urban policy solutions to the climate crisis that have emerged in the wake of the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Specifically, I focus on global climate and development initiatives that seek to reform urban bureaucracies in order to facilitate investment in ‘sustainable’ infrastructures. In explaining the implementation of these reform initiatives, some of the literature tends to assume a power play in which all-mighty foreign actors seduce or overpower municipal actors imagined to incorporate global policy projects into their agenda, thinking and working lives. Based on interviews with mid-level practitioners in Mexican municipalities, I foreground the possibilities of agency within and alongside relations of domination and seduction and discuss these in the context of Amy Allen’s theory of power, literature on everyday bureaucracy and what Rachael Dobson calls a policy ontologies approach. Pluralizing the modalities of power through which to understand how these initiatives work not only pinpoints the practitioners’ spaces of agency, but also indicates how mid-level bureaucrats manage contradictions and ambiguities and how these moments shape the workings of policy worlds.
Hilbrandt, Hanna