The secret lives of urban kampong chiefs : a political ethnography of grassroots leaders in Singapore's neighbourhood governance and regime politics

Abstract

Who are grassroots leaders, how are they organized, and how do their roles and practices as community leaders in grassroots politics shape Singapore"s contemporary urban governance and party-politics? With over 52,000 members spread across hundreds of state-sponsored local organizations such as Citizen Consultative Committees and Resident Committees, and a local presence in every neighbourhood in Singapore today, grassroots leaders are a ubiquitous sight in Singapore"s neighbourhood politics. Despite its empirical significance, previous studies have analysed grassroots leaders through top-down, macro-based, and formal-rational approaches. These studies regard grassroots leaders as passive subjects with the minimal agency to influence local grassroots politics beyond what has been structured through the political institutions they serve. Recently, an emerging scholarship that focuses on the middling roles and emic experiences of community actors in mediating grassroots politics has gained currency. These studies depict the vital roles community leaders play in shaping the styles of urban governance and authoritarian regime resilience. They also call for renewed inquiries into existing political actors" lived experiences and their relationship with political legitimacy and regime durability.This study responds to the above call by examining the political formations, roles, and significance of grassroots leaders in Singapore through a political ethnography of Singapore"s grassroots sector in four neighbourhoods within a local political ward in Singapore. Here, I focus on grassroots leaders and their governing practices as they mediate state-society relations as state-sponsored volunteers. I trace the different ways grassroots leaders reproduce different forms of political and state relations through their daily encounters with other actors such as residents and street bureaucrats at the neighbourhood level that make up a significant