Practice, Knowledge and Production of Statehood in Asylum and Environmental Policy

The purpose of this paper is to advance the theory of (relational) policy analysis by expanding the lens of social practice into the territory of state theory (production of statehood), while also keeping links to knowledge and knowing. We discuss linkages between the ‘micro level’ of doings in sociomaterial practices and the strategic effects of a ‘state apparatus’ through foregrounding epistemic construction and contestation. For understanding the state and statehood, we draw on literature of anthropology of the state (Scott 1985, 1998; Corrigan & Sayer 1985; Joseph & Nugent 1994; Shore 2012), particularly on the Foucauldian notion of ‘statehood’ as an effect of an assemblage of discursive and material practices, institutions, spaces, regulations and other components. We also try to bring in theories of social practice that attempt to describe structures and associations on a level of analysis ‘above’ or ‘outside of’ single routinized established practices (e.g. Schatzki 2011, Shove et al. 2012, Nicolini 2013). Numerous different ‘materials’ could be used for constructing such a linkage, including state idea (e.g. Abrams 1988), disciplined bodies, spaces, kin (Thelen et al. 2014), or affects (e.g. Newman and Clarke 2014). Building on the “knowledge: embodied, inscribed, enacted” framework (Freeman and Sturdy 2014), we focus on the practical doings and interactions between public officials and other subjects of the state in specific administrative procedures. We examine the various forms and functions through which knowledge manifests in administrative doings, foregrounding the processes of construction and contestation of knowledge in practice, as well as the production of statehood as a strategic effect of these processes. We draw on two qualitative case studies from asylum policy and environmental policy. In both of these case studies mobilisation of knowledge in routine administrative practice helps produce statehood as officialdom (Bourdieu (2012 [2014]) as well as ‘seeing like a State’ (Scott 1985). In relation to action, however, knowledge fulfils various different functions. It does not necessarily steer the action, but may also be mobilised for symbolical/ritual reasons, because it is appropriate for it to be there (Feldman and March 1981, cf. Dery 1998) – such as (independent) expert knowledge being used to justify decisions ex post. This seems to be at play in our environmental policy case, where the appropriate official practice is well known and standard schemes relatively established. In contrast, in the case of decisions upon asylum claims, official having to assess the credibility of a claim usually without much evidence in the form of documents. To establish the entitlement to refugee status and determine the state’s response to the ‘problem’, they rely on collectively validated rules of practice for constructing the credibility of applicants’ stories. In both of these cases, contestation around inscribed and embodied knowledge takes on different forms, while the practical, even mundane and subpolitical management of the procedure produces reified realities far surpassing occurrences of individual doings.