This ethnographic research project analyses the role of brokerage – the social mechanism of mediation between different groups or levels in society – in urban governance arrangements, citizen participation, and citizen initiatives, and its impact on the state-citizen relationship. It does so at a moment in which brokers, identified as citizens who officially ‘speak for’ and ‘act on behalf of’ their fellow citizens vis-à-vis the state, have become a persistent presence in democratic urban governance across the globe. Through their political representation and negotiations, brokers impact state-citizen relations and decision-making processes regarding the allocation of resources such as housing, welfare, infrastructure, security, and social care. As brokerage in governance always consists of both formal/official and informal/personal actions and transactions, this study investigates how brokers intertwine practices, discourses, and networks both inside and outside officially sanctioned channels and institutions.
BROKERS focuses on urban governance arrangements, forms of citizen participation, and citizen (grassroots) initiatives that seek to address the needs of residents of underprivileged neighbourhoods. These neighbourhoods are particularly relevant to this research as their low-income residents most directly experience changes in governance and its resource flows, be they direct or via brokers.
This project compares brokerage in four different cities, two in the Global North and two in the Global South. These cities are Rotterdam (the Netherlands), Manchester (UK), Medellin (Colombia) and Recife (Brazil). In these cities, we focus on specific types of brokers: community leaders, street-level bureaucrats, welfare advisers, activists, and active citizens; some develop their own grassroots initiatives, while others are invited by the authorities to act as representatives of other citizens.
Combining research from these divergent schools of thought, this project approaches brokers as ‘assemblers’, connective agents who actively bring together different government and citizen actors, institutions and resources, and who combine formal and informal politics. In so doing, this approach combines recent theories on assemblages – which view urban governance, citizen participation, and grassroots initiatives as an amalgam of different actors, institutions and resources that function together – with an anthropological actor orientation. The research is carried out by a project team consisting of four PhD researchers (Adam Moore, Janne Heederik, Lieke van der Veer and Sven da Silva), two Postdoctoral researchers (Flávio Eiró and Carolina Frossard), and the PI (Martijn Koster).
BROKERS has been very successful in achieving its goals. By using an anthropological, actor-oriented approach to the study of brokerage, the project has contributed to a better understanding of the roles of brokers in urban governance, citizen participation, and different forms of grassroots initiatives. It has analysed how different types of brokers (community leaders, local activists, active citizens, and frontline workers such as street level bureaucrats and welfare advisers) bridge gaps between the state and the population through both formal and informal ways. These brokers play crucial roles in the functioning of urban governance, citizen participation, and grassroots initiatives. The project also demonstrated how, in the acts of brokerage, electoral politics often becomes part of governance arrangements, giving rise to debates about how democratic governance interacts with clientelism. The project's innovative approach which sees brokers as assemblers – as connective agents – in wider assemblages advanced our theories on the interplay between individual actors and wider structures of rule, authority and belonging, such as the state.
The project has also contributed to advancing the North-South dialogue in anthropology, urban studies, and geography. In this debate, BROKERS has contributed to making concepts, theories and bodies of literature that were limited to studies of either the Global North or the Global South available across this divide. The project applied concepts such as clientelism, and informal politics, and theories on the imagination of the state, that were mainly used in studies of the Global South, to its studies in Manchester and Rotterdam. At the same time, notions of active citizenship and self-responsibilisation, mainly used in the Global North, proved to be a useful starting point for critically analysing urban governance, citizen participation, and grassroots initiatives in Recife and Medellin.
