Prefigurative legality: Transforming municipal jurisdiction

Abstract

This paper argues that prefigurative legality plays an important role in crafting municipalist strategy. We explore the experience of the City of Sydney in relation to new municipalism, focusing on its trajectory as a ‘boundary case’ that generates incrementally accrued transformative potential under conditions of muted political partisanship. The paper argues that at least in a boundary case such as this, legality can be a key and underappreciated component of transformative strategy, particularly if its prefigurative potential is appreciated. Prefigurative legality as a component of strategy is less about reconfiguring forms of state practice and more a means of institutionalising substantive policies and state practices in ways that extend the connection between community and state. As such, prefigurative legality has a deeply ambivalent relationship with the state and is both more incremental and more inclined to be ‘merely progressive’ than the prefigurative politics of radical municipalism. Nonetheless, we argue that legality still acts as an important and underappreciated pivot between power and resistance, especially where legal pluralism and multi-scalar indeterminacy are salient. The paper makes this argument while tracking the City of Sydney’s engagement with three dimensions of legality – delegated jurisdiction, legal pluralism and multi-scalar indeterminacy – and the ways in which these trajectories intersect with state and national government responses. While the Sydney case may fall just outside the boundaries of ‘classic’ instances, the role of legality in this setting generates valuable insights for the longer-term trajectories of more radical versions of new municipalism.

Bridging bureaucracy and activism: Challenges of activist state-work in the 1980s Greater London Council

“…The concept of activist state work introduced in this article reinscribes the important internal contradictions of the practical labour of working in governing institutions (whether as political representatives or officials) as an important category of analysis in radical approaches to the state. It therefore resonates with and might help inform contemporary radical municipal practice, especially in terms of the ‘prosaic’ practices that pit acts of resistance and transformation against the structural shell of institutional cultures, as well as the contested terrain of legality (Thorpe and Morgan, 2023). As the pathways for transformative politics make their way through the porous structures of existing legal-administrative apparatuses, revealing their reliance on engagement and creative political energies, they demand theoretical models attentive to the instability and internal crisis of the state-form.…”

Understanding the crisis of New Municipalism in Spain: The struggle for urban regime power in A Coruña and Santiago de Compostela

“…There was initially non-interventionism in appointing City Hall personnel, both because this was seen as a replication of clientelistic practices, and because the municipalists thought they could build alliances within the civil service. The municipalists also hoped to implement more inclusive and participatory working relations with and amongst administrators, partly in the hope that this would generate complicities amongst civil servants and open up opportunities for creative legality and administration needed in the face of hostile austerity legislation (Thorpe and Morgan, 2023). Beyond the urban level, a key goal of municipalism is to scale platforms upwards and outwards, both within and outside state institutions, while building an international movement through sister organisations, federal structures and networks (Russell, 2019).…”

Politicising proximity: Radical municipalism as a strategy in crisis

“…Across this plural terrain of transformation, there are debates and divergences over what, exactly, constitutes transformative or radical change of social and institutional forms. How far can the capitalist state and liberal-bourgeois law, for instance, be transformed from the inside or out – by developing creative, experimental and performative practices to ‘prefigure’ a new kind of state or law (Cooper, 2017; Thorpe and Morgan, 2023).…”

“…There are many ‘boundary cases’ documented in this special issue – examples of municipalist praxis that fall short, in one way or another, of their radical prefigurative or ruptural promise but which nonetheless cast light on the contours of the field, its boundaries with adjacent practices, or on the barriers it needs to surmount in order to be successful (Joubert, 2023; Thorpe and Morgan, 2023). Up against the definitions advanced here, most if not all of the cases in this special issue – even of the most paradigmatic new municipalisms of Barcelona, Zagreb and Naples – struggle to live up to this radicalism.…”