Constructing responsibility: Infrastructural harm, citizen oversight and the politics of publics

While concepts such as infrastructure and assemblage can make it difficult for scholars to locate responsibility for social injustices, given the diffused nature of action and harm, this article starts from the continuous, competing and negotiated constructions of responsibility that can be explored ethnographically. The argument is based on fieldwork in Cuenca, Ecuador, where the flawed construction of a tram threatened local businesses and led to citizens’ organized attempt to attribute responsibility and be compensated. In the face of an apparently irresponsible state, these citizens thus tried to reconstruct responsibility through what I describe as the weaving of causal chains and the search for alliances of (self)responsibilization. In this analytic, the construction of responsibility proves a key component of how worlds are inhabited and made and, more specifically, how the state, the public good and citizens are configured.