El activismo burocrático y la vida mundana del estado. Las madres comunitarias como burócratas callejeras y el programa de cuidado de niños Hogares Comunitarios de Bienestar

Abstract

This article discusses the spaces of the outsourced social policy known as Welfare Homes as new scenarios in which the idea of what is public is produced and negotiated. Gathering up the main findings of the fieldwork developed with community mothers in different Colombian cities, the text suggests that there are public and non-state areas where street-level bureaucracies produce, at its discretion, the rule of law as a language of the state. In this sense, the production of the public in post-neoliberal scenarios has a life beyond the State, without stop depending on it, which takes place in everyday scenarios. That new existence of the public is far from the institutional, vertical and ritualized State idea that has been standardized by Weber's reading of the public administration.