“Governmentalist projects… are prepared to concede – or sacrifice – a level of autonomy to individuals, groups and populations to reduce costs and increase personal freedoms. To govern becomes the pursuit of minimising discipline and surveillance, an acceptance of probabilistic risk in order to maximise individual freedom and responsibility” (McKinlay and Pezet 2018)1.

Above-mentioned quote suggests that there is a conscious and explicit strategy across Peruvian politicians, to recognize and value informal urbanization. This is a learning practice of state officials that requires interpretation. The credited strategy has been promoting the enactment of laws that are favouring marginal urban development, which in turn requires to concede that level of autonomy to the involved local actors. However, as far as the construction of governmentality of informal are identified by the emergent norms and institutions of the state, this also fits to the changing needs of those informal dwellers.

At this point it is important to remark that the autonomy granted by the state refers to the recognition of individuality rather than that of agency. Therefore, following Foucault (1979)2, the choice or decision of an individual subject, “does not direct the entire network of power that functions in a society and makes it function”. Thus, to interpret the emergent project of informal governmentality, the causal network of power in Lima should be delineated under these considerations of relative autonomy and diffussed power.

Later sentences have set a different logic from the initial stance on politicians will and agency creating a governmentalist project. If the power is so distributed and the agents are influenced by this causal network, the project emerge and the strategy is already defined by prior institutions and techniques of governing populations. Thus, informal urbanization is a mode of inmanence transforming material elements within a spatial regime of commodification that is neoliberal urbanization.

Finally, it should be said, again, that the govermentalist project developing under this regime, allows the interaction of the assemblage of strategies, technologies and resistances, and therefore, is inmanent in its ideological critique, institutional contestation and spatial transformation. Then, in the context of informal urbanization in Lima, we can agree with McKinlay and Pezet (2018)1 when they call strategy as “an element in the process of knowledge creation, when grassroots practices – or problems established from above – become systematised”. Therefore, we call inmanence when these practices becomes ‘an object of knowledge and analysis’ or what others similarly call institutional learning.

References

  1. McKinlay and Pezet 2018. Foucault, governmentality, strategy: From the ear of the sovereign to the multitude. Critical Perspectives on Accounting 53: 57-68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2017.03.005. ↩ ↩2

  2. M. Foucault. 1979. The history of sexuality I: An introduction. Allen Lane, London. ↩