“We make do and keep going!” Inventive Practices and Ordered Informality in the Functioning of the District Courts in Niamey and Zinder (Niger)

Hamani, Oumarou

doi:10.1163/9789004264960_007

Cited by 14 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Their behaviour is thus similar to what Mathews (2011) and Blundo (2014) found among forest officers and game rangers in Mexico and Senegal respectively, and what Hamani (2014) calls the "inventive practices" of gendarmes and policemen in the district courts of Niger.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Local bureaucrats as bricoleurs. The everyday implementation practices of county environment officers in rural Kenya

Funder

Marani

2015

Int J Commons

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Bricolage in natural resource governance takes place through the interplay of a variety of actors. This article explores the practices of a group whose agency as bricoleurs has received little attention, namely the government officers who represent the state in the everyday management of water, land, forests and other resources across rural Africa. Specifically we examine how local Environment Officers in Taita Taveta County in Kenya go about implementing the national environmental law on the ground, and how they interact with communities in this process. As representatives of "the local state", the Environment Officers occupy an ambiguous position in which they are expected to implement lofty laws and policies with limited means and in a complex local reality. In response, they employ three key practices, namely (i) working through personal networks, (ii) tailoring informal agreements, and (iii) delegating public functions and authority to civil society. As a result, the environmental law is to a large extent implemented through a blend of formal and informal rules and governance arrangements, produced through an interplay of the Environment Officers, communities and other local actors.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Local bureaucrats as bricoleurs. The everyday implementation practices of county environment officers in rural Kenya

Funder

Marani

2015

Int J Commons

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“…Examples closer to the topic of official law are Bierschenk's treatment of informalization and privatization strategies in the everyday functioning of the Beninese judiciary in an earlier volume of this journal (Bierschenk 2008), Hamani's use of the notion of ordered informality to describe inventive practices of district court personnel in Niger (Hamani 2014) and-with an explicit reference to legal pluralism-de Herdt and Olivier de Sardan's concept of practical norms to grasp those unwritten rules that direct civil servants' practice but do not comply with official norms (de Herdt and Olivier de Sardan 2015, 3, 7). While these latter works are situated in a strand of the anthropology of the state which calls for drawing on insights from organizational sociology and the sociology of law to counter an unwarranted exoticization of states in the Global South, a third strand of such recent ethnographic work has its origin in legal anthropology's concern with the notion of customary law.…”

Section: The Practice Of Official Legal Institutions: Informal Formalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethnographic legal studies: reconnecting anthropological and sociological traditions

Bens

Vetters

2018

The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law

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Legal anthropology and legal sociology have much in common. Traditionally, however, these approaches have tried to maintain disciplinary boundaries toward each other. Latest since the 1990s, these boundaries have become more and more porous and the academic practices of boundary-making do seem to convince practitioners of these fields less and less. The recent emergence of a subfield of the anthropology of the state situated at the interface of legal anthropology, legal sociology, ethnographic studies of bureaucracies and organizational sociology attests to this development. In this introduction, we propose to consciously transgress the traditional boundaries between legal anthropology, legal sociology and the anthropology of the state when it comes to the ethnographic investigation of official law. Based on the contributions to this special issue-consisting of empirical articles and commentaries-we map several avenues for boundary transgressions and the theoretical reconceptualizations these may engender. Among them are: looking at legal institutions of the state as practicing both informal formality and formal informality; moving from socio-spatial metaphors to investigating official lawplaces and-spaces as ethnographic objects; and studying normmaking within official law as a wider field of practice.

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“…There, the professional demands of bureaucrats can come into conflict with the stated goals of their institution (see also Nyqvist 2013Nyqvist , 2015, and bureaucrats go to great pains to weigh the benefit of access and transparency with the benefits of the state. Blundo (2014) and Hamani (2014) also demonstrate how informal and improvisational practices of bureaucrats in Senegal and Niger, 7 The notion is complicated, however, by those who point out the importance of repetitive rule-following (or, "proceduralism," as Sharma and Gupta (2006) phrase it) is central to the performance of institutional power. respectively, enable them and their institutions to navigate competing demands from factions of the state or society.…”

Section: From Policy To Practice: the Significance Of Discretion And mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Review of the Anthropological Literature on the Civil Service

Hoag¹,

Hull²

2017

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The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

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“We make do and keep going!” Inventive Practices and Ordered Informality in the Functioning of the District Courts in Niamey and Zinder (Niger)

Cited by 14 publications

References 0 publications

Local bureaucrats as bricoleurs. The everyday implementation practices of county environment officers in rural Kenya

Local bureaucrats as bricoleurs. The everyday implementation practices of county environment officers in rural Kenya

Ethnographic legal studies: reconnecting anthropological and sociological traditions

A Review of the Anthropological Literature on the Civil Service

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