Abstract
When the Comoro Islands gained independence in the 1970s, only Mayotte, out of the islands of the archipelago, remained under French sovereignty. It became the 101st French departement in 2011. Along with these institutional changes, public housing policies have dramatically changed since 2005. The access to social housing is bureaucratized and policymakers intend to redefine the different types of public housing that are being built as well as the way to categorize their target publics. This paper does not mainly focus on the front office interactions between the decreasing number of potential beneficiaries of public housing policies and the street level bureaucrats. It rather aims at depicting trajectories of these intermediate actors. Along with their social, scholastic and professional backgrounds, it analyzes how street-level bureaucrats deal with their duties in everyday work. These agents hold an intermediary position which requires them to play a specific role in the way applicants’ files are set up and how they are followed up. Even if they deplore the decreasing number of constructions which leads a diminishing number of beneficiaries, they also contribute to legitimate this change as they promote more comfortable types of housing that are being offered. Our hypothesis is that despite little room for manœuvre given by the administrative categories that prescribe eligibility conditions, these administrative agents take part in redefining and differentiating the different targets of social housing. In particular, they are able to gain extensive knowledge of local families, and thus give extra value to their counselling activities towards households.
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Notes
- 1.
The authors thank Lorenzo Barrault-Stella and Pierre-Edouard Weill for their attentive and thought-provoking reading of this chapter, and Juliette Rogers for translating it from French to English.
- 2.
This only concerns social home ownership assistance, due to the fact that there is very little public rental housing, although public authorities have been investing in it since the late 2000s.
- 3.
Order number 175/DE 2009.
- 4.
Funded by the ANR (French National Research Agency) through the program INEMA (2012–2015), “The departmentalization of Mayotte: Construction and handling of social and linguistic inequalities,” of which E. Palomares coordinated the third theme, entitled “Circulation, migration policy, and figures of the foreigner.”
- 5.
Unless they are able to obtain an exception from the Prefect on the grounds that their old SIM cabin has been assessed as dilapidated.
- 6.
Thus going beyond “racial” boundaries. He also notes that “in the identity dimension carried by creoleness, we thus primarily observe an attachment to the place, the affirmation of a principle of autochthony” (Bonniol 2013: 245).
- 7.
French civil service grades are as follows: Grade A consists of “senior officials that are responsible for executive management and administrative decision making”; grade B officials are “responsible for basic implementation of policy”; grade C employees “provide basic clerical work, secretarial support and carry out routine administration” (Elgie and Griggs 2000: 50).
- 8.
DE Note, “Reform of social housing policy in Mayotte,” 2007.
- 9.
Order number 175/DE 2009.
- 10.
Exceptions can be made after a social service investigation, but they are few.
- 11.
Mayotte has a particularly low employment rate: only a third of the working-age population is employed, another third is unemployed or on the edge (i.e. people classified as inactive by International Labor Office criteria, but who would like to be working), and a third is inactive (Fabre and Rivière 2015). While half of the employed work in the public sector, informal income predominates for those without access to formal employment: “In an economy where the employment market continues to lack dynamism (…), part of the population can (…) content itself with one or more poorly compensating activities that is not declared as a job” (Daudin 2010).
- 12.
According to 2012 census data, one third of couples are composed of one person born in Mayotte or elsewhere in France and one person born in a foreign country; of these couples, most consist of a French citizen born in Mayotte and a person born elsewhere in the Comoros archipelago (Baktavatsalou and Clain 2016). Women start to cohabitate earlier here than in mainland France (7% of women 14–19 already live with a partner), but over the age of 30 they are less likely to be living with a partner (68% of women 30–34, as compared to 72% in the mainland). This difference becomes distinctly stronger after the age of 45.
- 13.
Form entitled “Request for State subsidy for the construction of a house in social or very social acquisition.”
- 14.
Prior to the recent transformation of this institution, the qadi was “a Muslim judge assuming civil, judicial, and religious functions. It is a justice of the peace and a notary resolving everyday problems: marriages, divorces, repudiations, successions, inheritance, etc.” (Blanchy and Moatty 2012: 118).
- 15.
Clémence Léobal (2016) has found similar processes in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in French Guiana, another overseas department: when women from the Bushinenge minority request public housing, they try to conform to a number of administrative requirements, often leading them to strategies not declaring polygamy.
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Condro, M., Girard, V., Palomares, É. (2018). How to Identify and Select Citizens Entitled to Social Housing in a Postcolonial Situation? Administrative Agents Dealing with Changing Bureaucratic Norms in a French Overseas Administrative Department. In: Barrault-Stella, L., Weill, PE. (eds) Creating Target Publics for Welfare Policies. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89596-3_9
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