Cat and Mouse Game: Patching Bureaucratic Work Relations by Patching Technologies

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This article uses findings from a field study of the world’s largest guaranteed employment scheme (NREGA) in India to understand how digital technology mediates work relations and power dynamics within a bureaucracy. In this initiative, upper-level bureaucrats in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh built a digital network to remove local discretion at the “last mile” of an implementation of NREGA. I show how digital infrastructure affords actors at both the first and last mile opportunities to modify software to control as well as subvert certain practices. This article refers to this dialectic phenomenon as “governance by patching” and defines it as a socio-technical instantiation of a top-down process that focuses on small changes, iterative, and political process for positive change. Governance by patching is, therefore, neither a purely technical process nor an exclusively administrative one, but refers to the ability to fix unanticipated problems that arise in the implementation of governance programs by altering the socio-technical systems. The struggle for power continues, but on the new digital terrain.