Governing With Technical Precision: Data, Politics, and Corruption in Mexico City's Secretary of Mobility

Abstract

This article explores the production, effects, and limits of the distinction between technical and political work in contemporary urban governance. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City's Secretary of Mobility (SM), we analyze how a group of government officials who identify themselves as “technical experts” produce and mobilize data and evidence to modernize the city's public transportation system, which has been dominated by a form of urban clientelist politics they associate with corruption. Expert bureaucrats are thus called upon to continuously produce and perform objectivity and neutrality while navigating and disavowing forms of politics that permeate the fields in which they intervene. Drawing from literature on bureaucracy and expertise that conceptualizes expert work within and outside bureaucratic circles as “an art of approximation,” we approach expert bureaucrats as reflexive subjects embedded in the particular social worlds they seek to transform, albeit from specific positions and sensibilities. Although mistrust in politics forms part of good governance agendas, we show that such mistrust always takes shape as part of specific histories, imaginaries, and anxieties about its meanings. In doing so, we argue that politics is always constitutive of and present within expert governance as a precondition, a possibility, and a threat. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association.