THINKING REFORM OTHERWISE IN THE SEMI-PERIPHERY: AGENCY, FLEXIBILITY AND TRANSLATION

Paul Stubbs, The Institute of Economics, Zagreb (pstubbs@eizg.hr) IPA Panel: Thinking and Performing Policies Otherwise: towards an ethics and politics of policy translation Friday 4 July 2014

STRUCTURE

1. Policies Otherwise: towards an ethics and politics of policy translation

2. Performing Reform in the Semi-Periphery: revisiting social welfare in Bosnia-Herzegovina

3. From Recalcitrance to Resistance: protests, Plenums and a glimpse of policies otherwise

John Clarke, David Bainton,

Nomi Lendvai and Paul Stubbs

Making Policy Move: towards a politics

of translation and assemblage.

Policy Press, 2015.

POLICIES OTHERWISE Translation as a site of struggle multiplication of policy

assemblages and search for the beyond, the not yet (Rojas, de Sousa Santos)

The multiple, the contradictory and the awkward in the policy process

From pluralism to pluriverse lying outside the prevailing web of interlocutions

Relational attentiveness changing the subject (Gibson-Graham) and the possibility of collective disidentification (Butler)

New loci or enunciation (Rojas) alternative rationalities, knowledges and practices

Exploring limitations, refusals, counter-tendencies and instabilities that constitute the conditions for other possibilities (Clarke)

PERFORMING REFORM IN THE SEMI-PERIPHERY Bosnia-Herzegovina (B-H) tropes of transition: failed

state, endemic inter-ethnic tensions, post-conflict, post-socialist, ...

Semi-periphery (Blagojevi) contradictory modernisation, semi Other to an imagined West

Crowded playground of flexible, intermestic reform actors projectisation

Consultancy mode translation pathways open space B-H realities and specificities and buy in - DFID IBHI BSAL performative enactments and emotional disagreements

Improvised nature of governance and rule with a variety of actors operating across a range of spatial scales (Jeffrey)

Multiple claims in a fractured public sphere variable geometry of practices and imaginaries

FROM RECALCITRANCE TO RESISTANCE I

Exploring and expanding sceptical capacity (Clarke)

The newcomers were never at peace; they allowed no one else to live in peace. It seemed that they were resolved with their impalpable but ever more noticeable web of laws, regulations and orders to embrace all forms of life, men, beasts and things, and to change and alter everything, both the outward appearance of the town and the customs and habits of men from the cradle to the grave. ... Naturally, here as always and everywhere in similar circumstances, the new life meant in actual fact a mingling of the old and the new. Old ideas and old values clashed with the new ones, merged with them or existed side by side, as if waiting to see which would outlive which. ... By a natural law the people resisted every innovation but did not go to extremes, for to most of them life was always more important and more urgent than the forms by which they lived (Andri)

FROM RECALCITRANCE TO RESISTANCE II

Consultants as insultants speaking ubleha

Raja (aviha-Valha) irony, humour and zafrkancija as a negotaation of the paradox of co-operation and antagonism

Humanitarne akcije (Brkovi) citizens actions locally embedded enactments dependent on networks and the ability to keep moving

Bebolucija protests (June 2013)

FROM RECALCITRANCE TO RESISTANCE III

February 2014 street protests Plenums translation of direct democracy

changing the nature of political discourse (Sarajli)

Practice of listening to speak for others is to first silence those in whose name we speak (Callon)

Interruptions, creative expressions of the new, the unthought and the unexpected (Gibson-Graham)

From recognition to transformative redistribution (Fraser)?

http://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/