Decision-making in Liminal Spaces

In 2023, the Indian government mandated additional testing at government-recommended laboratories: but only for exporters. To present a conditional question: If, the law is the same for any cough syrup manufactured in India, then: why do such incidents happen? 

Let us see what happens at the cutting edge.

There exists a liminal space on the frontline. Here, the formal and informal systems co-exist. The formal system relies on what is legal, authorized, and legitimate. In contrast, the law itself is rendered open-ended and becomes subject to multiple interpretations and interests in the informal system, as Professor Ananya Roy found in her research in India.

The result is arbitrary and fickle decision-making, and its evidence is available in the constant Whataboutery that tries to avoid accountability and shift blame.

This does not mean that decision-making in the liminal space is completely illegal, illegitimate and unauthorized, even though it deviates from the formal. In fact, in the liminal space, decision-making constantly oscillates between the formal and informal, depending on the local context and custom. The differentiation between what is legal or illegal, legitimate or illegitimate, and authorized or unauthorized depends on the interpretations emerging from the local context and interplay of diverse interests.

Deciding among alternatives no longer depends on whether it is legal or paralegal, as it should be, but between informal and informal with its own unique logic of resource allocation, accumulation and authority. Naturally, this involves prior planning, but the with its own logic.

In other words, there are two spaces operating at the grass roots: One is formal where the legal, legitimate and authorized works. Another is the liminal where local context and custom prevail. In this distinct liminal space, deviations from the formal are accepted. Some may call the liminal space unregulated, but a more accurate description would be deregulation: having a purpose and a plan.

More laws or rules are not a solution, as they are implicated in the production of the liminal space. One way of reducing the operations in the liminal space is to have complete disintermediation. One example of this is the faceless procedure introduced in the income tax department: work is done without any human interface, and the taxpayer even does not know the assessing officer. 

Similarly, all points of interaction of frontline functions with the public should be mapped and replaced with, (a) machine learning, speech recognition, (b) ChatGPT and other models, or (c) Agentic or physical AI with robots. Functionaries should operate only at the back end, faceless, and with no power to manipulate the digital parts of the system.