Chapter 9: Tracing Threads of In/Visibilities: The Knotty Mattering of Policymaking

This chapter focuses on the actors who engage in policymaking to offer alternative understandings of informality and the context in which this occurs. Using ethnographic vignettes from Canada and Australia as illustrations, theoretical and methodological goals are pursued through adopting the anthropological concept of ‘traces’ to show how informality both mediates and transcends across non-fixed physical, temporal and conceptual boundaries. With an underlying premise that normative understandings of informality are shaped by the policymaking ‘black box’ metaphor and a lack of access to policymaking spaces and actors, this chapter argues against the association of informality with illegitimate and invisible policy processes. Instead, experience of the policy process gained through professional and ethnographic engagement, or an ‘insider’ perspective, shifts the researcher’s gaze beyond physical barriers or separations to show that ‘traces’ formed through in|formal encounters create opportunities for relationality through which policy is conceived, deliberated and, in part, created.