Capillary Knowledge: The Role of Local Expertise in Informal Housing Policies

Sociologists have uncovered the key role of bureaucracies in producing abstract measurements to make populations more legible. This body of work identifies the state as the main actor centralizing and controlling the data produced, assuming that bureaucracies are embedded in civil society and therefore well positioned to generate more precise knowledge about societies. But bureaucracies face challenges to access and identify certain territories, such as informal settlements. How can states produce knowledge about populations that are hard to count? And what impact does the state’s knowledge-production process have on related policies?

I argue that, in these cases, state bureaucracies embed the process of data collection in civil society organizations. Nonstate actors provide the state with “capillary knowledge,” a concept that refers to locally embedded information that bureaucracies can rarely access. In the process of collaborating in a legibility project, nonstate actors form an expertise network that controls how and what type of data is collected. Consequently, the expertise network gains leverage to negotiate public policies and their implementation. I illustrate this process through a case study of the National Registry of Informal Settlements in Argentina, where I trace the collaboration of a right-wing government and a social movement to make informal settlements more legible. The analysis demonstrates that states not only rely on “standardized data,” but also on “capillary knowledge” to make populations more legible for policy implementation. Ultimately, the co-production of legibility becomes an opportunity to strengthen civil society organizations.

Drawing from 145 interviews, 14 months of participant observation, and archival work, I demonstrate that when the state attempts to count populations, economic activities, houses, or territories that are not easily accessible nor legible, bureaucracies rely on “capillary knowledge,” understood as non-standardized, local information that involves an embedded network to collect it.