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Short abstract

Analyzing Swedish climate ODA in Eastern Africa, this paper traces how integration mandates are rendered technical and transformed through translation. We argue that integration work, although partial, produces relevant contextual adaptations that rigid standardization risks foreclosing.

Long abstract

Climate adaptation aid carries its own risk profile. When donor fragmentation, misaligned objectives, and insufficient localization converge, interventions meant to strengthen resilience may instead exacerbate vulnerabilities through maladaptation (Reckien et al. 2023; Schipper et al. 2020; Persson 2009). Justice considerations, diverse epistemologies, and cross-cutting issues like gender and conflict introduce complexity that can generate policy coherence or produce adverse unintended consequences. Integrated aproaches and mainstreaming are a response to this challenge. Since 2015, Swedish aid authorities have mandated such integration across all Sida-funded operations (Brodén Gyberg & Mobjörk 2021). This paper analyzes how these mandates function as a technology of government in Swedish climate aid to Eastern Africa. Drawing on Li's (2007) concept of rendering technical and Actor-Network Theory's understanding of translation (Callon 1984; Latour 1987), we trace how mandates circulate from overarching strategies to operational toolboxes and reporting, combining policy analysis with interviews with aid staff. We find that integration is rendered technical through procedural mechanisms that narrow the transformative ambitions they are designed to serve. As mandates travel across organizational levels, concepts drift, priorities shift, and the same mandate is differently constituted at each node. Together these dynamics produce a paradox: integration, designed to coordinate overlapping crises, generates its own coordination demands. We argue, however, that partial integration is not a failure, it keeps gender, conflict, and climate in view where siloed approaches risk losing them. Translation, however messy, produces relevant contextual adaptations that rigid standardization risks foreclosing.

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Short abstract

This paper examines how science-for-policy professionals construct and negotiate boundaries between technocracy, politics, democracy, and bureaucracy. Using a joke as empirical entry point, it explores the affective and imaginative dimensions of technocracy in everyday ministerial practice.

Long abstract

This study originates from an early fieldwork observation. During a discussion among science-for-policy professionals in Dutch ministries about declining trust in science and its risks for politics and administration, a participant jokingly suggested “restarting the cabinet formation and putting up a bunch of technocrats,” prompting laughter.

I am interested in what this joke and the laughter signify. Jokes can function as boundary markers, defining community borders and indicating what is considered ‘edgy’, that is, where ridicule ends and seriousness begins (Traweek, 2024). The joke may reveal how science-for-policy actors understand the power of expertise in bureaucratic settings. The joke briefly rendered technocracy imaginable while simultaneously clarifying its limits: as a joke, the idea becomes ridiculous and unserious.

In this paper, the joke serves as an empirical entry point to examine these imaginative dynamics of power and constraint in the everyday practices of science-for-policy professionals. In-depth interviews conducted in 2026 invite participants to interpret the joke and reflect more broadly on the role of science in government and democratic legitimacy.

The broader aim is to investigate how ministerial bureaucrats engaged in enhancing knowledge use view their role boundaries in a system where science, bureaucracy, and democracy are intertwined, contributing to qualitative research on technocracy. It specifically explores the ‘affective appeal’ of technocracy. Humor unsettles the opposition between ‘cold’ rationality and affect usually associated with technocracy. Opening up this affective dimension also allows attention to other underexamined dimensions of technocracy, such as imagination, gender, and religion.

Keywords: technocracy; affection; science-democracy-bureaucracy interface

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Short abstract

This paper follows consultancy as the everyday enactment of technocratic expertise in governing wicked societal issues. Drawing on ethnographic research, it shows how consultants perform epistemic work that translates uncertain care challenges into governable and actionable forms.

Long abstract

Contemporary states increasingly face “wicked” societal issues characterised by uncertain and contested knowledge and diffuse responsibility. Yet these issues are often addressed through technocratic governance arrangements that promise technical solutions and clear, actionable interventions. This paper examines how such technocratic expertise is enacted in governance of wicked healthcare issues, arguing that this cannot be understood without attending to the role of consultants as a key expert actor.

The analysis centres on a recurring tension. While actors involved in wicked care challenges frequently acknowledge that externally hired expertise cannot resolve the structural roots of these issues, consultants continue to be mobilised as indispensable intermediaries. Rather than treating this as governance failure, the paper asks how consultancy performs an epistemic function that sustains these technocratic responses to wicked problems. Drawing on an ethnography of Dutch regional healthcare networks addressing “misunderstood behaviour”, combining in-depth interviews, observations, and analysis of reports and grant applications, the paper traces the everyday practices through which consultants translate diffuse care issues into governable forms.

The analysis shows how consultants order uncertainty into actionable problem formats and translate political tensions into project-based interventions, stabilising temporary forms of coordination. In doing so, they render wicked care issues governable in the present by framing them as manageable problems, at the cost of other, more complex, dimensions of the issue. By foregrounding everyday practices, the paper positions consultancy as a central epistemic function within contemporary technocracy; one that both enables and reshapes how states act upon wicked societal issues.

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Short abstract

In 2022, India abolished 4863 river data collector positions through bureaucratic omission. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside the national expert bureaucracy of the water ministry, this paper examines how administered absence quietly dismantles India’s water data infrastructure.

Long abstract

India’s rivers are under exacerbating climate stress, and the hydrological data needed to manage them is increasingly critical, for both domestic water governance and transboundary negotiations across South Asia. In 2022, the Indian Ministry of Jal Shakti abolished the work-charge cadre of the Central Water Commission, eliminating nearly 5000 positions held by government-employed river data collectors stationed across 1600 remote gauging stations. This paper examines how that abolition was accomplished through the managed non-production of a prime minister-level cabinet note that had anuthorized its existence. Drawing on interviews with 55 senior hydrocrats conducted during 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside the CWC, I argue that this constitutes what I call administered absence, the deliberate management of what will not appear in a proceeding, as distinct from archival loss or the simple act of forgetting. Such administered absence, I argue, is bureaucratically productive: it generates plausible deniability while ensuring that a consequential decision continues to organize institutional life invisible publicly and without requisite accountability. The analysis attends to structural antagonism between the secretarial (procedural) and hydrocratic (technical) cadre, the silencing of expert voices in ministerial proceedings, and the cascading consequences for India’s river governance infrastructure at precisely the moment resilient futures demand it most. The paper further reflects on the ethnographic condition of researching administered absence: what it means to sit across from someone managing what they will and will not show you, and to treat that partial witnessing as methodologically constitutive rather than merely inconvenient.

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Short abstract

jxst reading invites people working within or in relation to state institutions to come together to consider larger realities of knowing through the frame of injustice. The aim is to open up a collective, iterative, political and poetic process of reading within institutions.

Long abstract

I would like to present the emerging technique of jxst reading as part of this panel in order to clarify the link between reading practices and technocracy, and, most importantly, what might come after.

jxst reading takes the concept of epistemic injustice as its starting point, which Miranda Fricker defines as “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower”.

Within the practice of jxst reading, reading becomes a multifaceted practice that is at once social, political, poetic and epistemological. It is a practice that raises basic questions about how reading happens within state institutions and whether it is necessary to pay closer attention to the links between reading, in a metaphorical sense, and our 'capacities as knowers'.

jxst reading is a technique-in-the-making, one that is intended to be practiced within state institutions as a form of 'inreach', a way of creating a habitat for critical listening, conversation and reflection. What does reading mean and why does it matter as a practice? Who or what gets to read today? In what ways might reading become a crucial tool for practicing expertise within the State after technocracy? Could jxst reading be such a tool?

This contribution will outline the technique of jxst reading and the insights and questions it has yielded so far. I will contextualise what motivates this technique, and share some initial findings. I would like to learn, through this panel, how jxst reading might be significant, after technocracy. https://jessicafoleywriting.com/2025/03/20/just-reading/