Sweet talking the state: brokers’ strategies in a context of digital transformation in Nairobi, Mumbai, and Guadalajara

Paper presented during the ‘Urban Futures at Risk’ symposium, Humbolt University Berlin, Dec 2023 

Fenna Hoefsloot (presenter), Dennis Mbugua Muthama, Neha Gupta, and Jesus Flores  

In this paper, we aim at a comparative analysis of the development of the digitalising state in the metropolitan regions of Mumbai, Nairobi, and Guadalajara to demonstrate how, in all three cases, middlemen play crucial roles in the implementation and functioning of the state in the transition towards digital governance. The digitalising state (Datta, 2023)  - as a restructuring of networks, information flows, and territories - implies the transition towards the digitalised interaction between the state and its residents, signalling a potential shift in the position of intermediaries in this process. As people-to-land relationships are increasingly registered digitally, the highly institutionalised yet not necessarily formal rules of the administration systems in which they operate change and roles are re-written. In the process, the digitalising state creates exemptions for various actors, particularly private consultants, and leaves the extraction and use of personal data open to an unspecified and increasing number of actors.   

However, while informal brokers are key in many paper-based bureaucracies, processes of land administration in a digital form aim to circumvent their role. Drawing on interviews with brokers and key informants in land administration and ethnographic observations in the three cities, we explore how brokers – the middlemen between the citizens and the state – adapt and cement their position within the digitalising state, despite its efforts to automatise their work and remove them from the network of state and non-state actors that constitute the imaginary of the digital urban future. We conclude that digital technologies do not directly expand the state’s ability for governance and service provision but rather increase its dependence on contractors and middlemen with the technological expertise that bureaucrats and citizens lack. It creates a stripped-down government and exempts the state from full transparency or accountability towards the public, specifically with regard to data ownership, processing, and protection.