The hybridisation of city management : Intercultural brokers in Managua

• Sustainability and the organizing of cities are intimately related. Issues as mobility, energy efficiency, urban poverty, waste management, water, social and spatial segregation, urban sprawl, or climate change, to mention a few, all concerns both sustainability and cities. The organizing, or disorganising, of city-sustainability often entails the engagement of a multitude of actors coming from different organisational levels and fields. As a result, the boundaries between dichotomies as the public and the private (Brunsson, 1994), the global and the local, are blurred. This has led to the elaboration – from public administration, policy making, or organization studies – of epistemological constructs that facilitate our understanding of these practices, such as: network governance (Rhodes, 1997; Stoker, 2006), multi-level governance (Peters and Pierre 2004), new public management (Hood 1991), action net (Czarniawska, 2002) or hybrid organisations (Kickert, 2001; Koppell, 2001, 2003; Kurunmäki and Miller, 2006; Thomasson, 2009). The hybridisation (e.g. Pieterse, 1995) of city management seems to be a standardised organisational response both to address meta-problems as issues of sustainability that demand holistic and multi-level approaches (Roome, 2001); and to face the complexity of institutional contexts in a globalizing society with an increasing interdependence on external resources, regulations and actors (Castells, 1996). The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the process of hybridisation of the organising of city-sustainability by elaborating the metaphor of a biological and a cultural hybrid and bringing it into organisational and public administration studies. In order to do that, the paper concentrates on the exploratory case-study of the garbage dump and slum of La Chureca, in Managua, Nicaragua, and its regeneration project. At La Chureca 2000 people work informally by selecting recyclables from the garbage, 300 families live in the garbage slum and almost 600 children work. The garbage dump is being the object of an urban and environmental regeneration project, the Acahualinca Integral Development Project, funded by the Spanish Aid Development Agency in collaboration with the Managua local government, which includes actions related to social, ecological and environmental sustainability. Most of the field material used in this paper is textual (interviews, interview notes, observations and field notes) has been collected during two field visits to Managua: from December 2009 to March 2010 and from January to February 2011. The data is firstly coded and categorized. Then, we relate the categories derived from the field to concepts stemming from theoretical underpinnings as the biological or the cultural hybrid metaphor. The Acahualinca project can be conceptualized as an action net where a multitude of organizations are involved in its formulation and implementation: the Managua local government, different national ministries, international aid organizations and NGOs, multi-lateral international agencies as UN-Habitat, engineering corporations, local NGOs, the local community, and a number of intermediary organisations (such as the technical unit created to implement the project or an special body within the municipal government to translate international development projects into the municipal policies) among others. In a previous paper we conclude that the result is the hybridisation of city organising (Zapata Campos and Zapata, 2010). A hybrid is a metaphor, even though we might not think of it as such. In organisational studies hybridity implies the encounter of different cultures, institutional fields or logics. In the first part of the paper we explore the applicability of the hybrid metaphor brought from biology to culture by Stross (1999) to our case study. In the second section, we use analytical frameworks and concepts coming from both the new institutional theories and from the studies of hybridity and transculturalisation in cultural anthropology (e.g. Pieterse, 1995) to analyse and discuss our findings. More specifically in this section we explore the role of interorganisational translators between the different organisational cultures involved in the Acahualinca project. These interorganisational translators have been addressed previously in the organisational and cultural studies through concepts such as: intermediary organisations (Brown, 1993), boundary organisations (e.g. Guston, 2001), boundary-spanning organisational structures (Scott, 1992), micro-actors (Hernes, 2005), boundary-spanners (Aldrich and Herker, 1977; Bozeman, 1987), intercultural brokers (Bhabha, 1990) or marginal (Park, 1928). In the final section of the paper we explore the implications of the process of hybridisation (e.g. questions of identity, democracy, transparency, flexibility, autonomy, anxiety, stress, or ambiguity), the role of the interorganisational translators, and the emergence of power in the organising of sustainability in the glocalised city.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Företagsekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Business Administration (hsv//eng)

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