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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Colombia, the paper explores how data infrastructures reconfigure discretion, responsibility, and authority in welfare administration. These shifts are negotiated through data bureaucrats’ different imaginaries of welfare administration, poverty, and fairness.

Paper long abstract

Colombia’s welfare system relies on algorithmic targeting and scoring of vulnerability. This paper investigates how data infrastructures reconfigure welfare administration by examining the practices and notions of data bureaucrats working with Colombia’s digital welfare infrastructure, SISBÉN.

Insights from ethnographic fieldwork suggest that national officials, who design and manage SISBÉN, prioritize minimizing “manipulation” of the system by local civil servants and citizens. They envision algorithmic classification and interoperable data systems as routes to reliable, neutral information about poverty for fairer social assistance. In contrast, local civil servants, who collect data through home visits and interviews with potential welfare recipients, do not necessarily find the system capable of accurately capturing needs and argue for the relevance of their on-the-ground experiences. Some street-level bureaucrats use their discretion – constrained by opaque and monitoring data systems – to strategically adapt the information they enter and partially circumvent rules in attempts to help people obtain more favorable classifications. In interactions with applicants, they navigate conflicting interests and demands, including maintaining local relationships and meeting job requirements.

The paper argues that national data bureaucrats enact imaginaries of centralized welfare administration, standardized poverty knowledge, and fairness through control. Simultaneously, local data bureaucrats enact imaginaries of local welfare administration, situated, on-the-ground judgments of need, and fairness as relational accountability. I demonstrate how bureaucratic discretion, responsibility for welfare, and authority over welfare are negotiated between data bureaucrats and data infrastructures in reconfigurations of how poverty is and should be known and of who can and should make welfare decisions.