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Paper short abstract

Drawing from a comparative analysis of two ethnographic cases of prefigurative policy in the Basque Country, I examine how contesting state-centred political processes that could be seen as anti-policy may also represent the production of alternative democratic orders rather than its refusal.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I’d like to contribute to the anthropological debates on policy and democracy by examining how sovereignty and democracy are conceptually prefigurative enacted through everyday practices. Based on a comparative ethnographic analysis of two contemporary experiences in the Basque Country — the citizens’ movement Gure Esku (2013–present), which advocates for a referendum on political self-determination, and a local participatory public policy of autonomous resource allocation implemented in the city of Hernani (2021–present) — I examine how forms of public policy that contest state centrality, or even operate against the state, emerge both as political values and as material outcomes of collective action. The comparison foregrounds the temporal and spatial dimensions of political category-making, showing how actors reimagine participation, collective futures, and territorial belonging beyond dominant frameworks of statehood. I argue that shifting the analytical focus from discursive claims or narratives to prefigurative practices allows us to grasp how projected political concepts operate performatively, generating material effects in the present. From this perspective, the cases could be examined as forms of anti-policy that deliberately stand against and refuse the State: not through arbitrariness, incoherence, or governing through chaos, but through the prefigurative construction of alternative democratic orders. By conceptualising anti-policy as a constitutive political practice rather than as negation or refusal, the paper reflects on how ethnographic based anthropology may bring opportunities for rethinking the diversity of power dynamics in what seems to be a polarised political landscape.