Mobilizing Expertise: The Role of Social Movements in State Knowledge Production

Alejandra Cueto, Brown University

States count populations as accurately as possible to design and enforce public policies. However, state bureaucracies struggle to identify and count territories that are hard to “see,” such as informal settlements. To measure these populations, scholars have shown that states rely on nonstate actors. In this paper, I focus on how the process of constructing knowledge with nonstate actors also forces states to adapt their classifications, public policies, and institutions. By doing so, I challenge the idea that state knowledge awards enormous power to states, understood as the primary agents monopolizing symbolic power in contemporary societies. Instead, I argue that when the state needs nonstate actors, such as social movements, to produce knowledge, the process of knowledge production can also empower these same movements, helping them shape state institutions. I investigate this process by examining the case of the National Registry of Informal Settlements in Argentina, where a social movement, NGOs, and the national government collaborated on a legibility project to identify and count informal settlements. The identification of informal settlements led to the creation of a law to prohibit the eviction of people living in these neighborhoods and a new state agency dedicated to 1) the production of information and 2) the development of access to formal water, electricity, and sewage, and its integration to the formal city. This paper adopts a historical approach to study the effects of knowledge production between the state and civil society on state bureaucracies. I combine interview data, participant observation, and archival data to study how this joint process of knowledge production between institutions and nonstate actors shape both public policies and institutions.

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 Presented in Session 67. Knowledge Production, Social Movements and Power in Cities from Asia to Argentina