Development in translation: everyday statecraft, housing as social infrastructure, and the production of racialised deservingness

Development interventions that promise inclusion often result in displacement, reinforcing stigma and producing new forms of exclusion. Yet less attention has been paid to how these contradictory outcomes emerge by reshaping local processes of negotiation, interpretation and categorisation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research into an EU-funded housing programme in a resource-poor Hungarian town with a significant Roma population, this article develops the concept of everyday statecraft to explain how governmental rationalities are translated across institutional scales. Everyday statecraft refers to the routine practices of a dispersed assemblage of local actors, municipal officials, intermediary organisations, street-level professionals and residents, who interpret, negotiate and materially enact development, continually translating governmental objectives into locally legitimate forms of rule. Thus, development is governed through this translation process. The analysis demonstrates that EU-funded housing development becomes entangled with two mutually reinforcing local projects: sustaining middle-class reproduction in a demographically shrinking town while governing racialised poverty through administrative constructions of deservingness. By conceptualising housing as social infrastructure through which development operates as a political technology of governance, the article shows that brokerage mediates access to housing and institutionalises racialised categories of deservingness, exemplified by the figure of the “good Roma”. Ultimately, it argues that EU-funded development produces a form of conditional citizenship in which belonging and access to welfare become contingent upon behavioural conformity, bureaucratic legibility and ongoing surveillance. This dynamic explains how development contributes to the everyday production of the local state and perpetuates social hierarchies.