Negotiating rights in the margins: Urban brokerage, citizenship and the politics of social assistance in Makassar, Indonesia

Abstract

This study explores how everyday brokerage mediates access to social assistance and reshapes citizenship practices among Indonesia’s urban poor. Drawing on a qualitative case study, it identifies three primary mediators: the state apparatus, politicians, and grassroots organizations. These actors operate through a framework of mediated practices conceptualized into three functional categories: navigational modes involving advocacy and representation, relational dynamics driven by familism and clientelism, and extractive behaviors characterized by corruption and rent-seeking. The findings reveal that this everyday brokerage is not merely a stopgap response to the absence of the state but a constitutive mode of urban governance. To capture this dynamic, this study introduces the concept of ambivalent citizenship, wherein mediated practices simultaneously empower and marginalize the urban poor. This article argues that the structure of relationships between mediators and citizens, whether fragmented and plural or singular and exclusive, dictates the capacity of the marginalized to claim their rights. When grassroots organizations are active, citizens leverage navigational modes to negotiate access and hold intermediaries to account. Conversely, when mediation is monopolized by political or familial networks through relational modes, exclusion and dependency deepen further. Furthermore, predatory practices that utilize extractive modes actively erode these formal rights. By unpacking the everyday politics of social assistance distribution, this study enriches the literature on urban governance, welfare politics, and citizenship in the Global South.