The everyday local state? Opening up and closing down informality in local governance

Seeking to understand local governance under austerity localism raises questions about changing state-civil society relations. Polarised debates have resulted in different disciplines that can be bridged by considering the practice. We use the case of Cardiff, Wales, to consider how the practice is reshaping local governance, focusing on community service delivery and the role of the Council and of third sector organisations in creating new ways of coping, doing and working together and apart. Drawing from understandings of informality as a top-down as well as bottom-up process, we argue that both sides of (local) state-society relations got better at opening up informality and navigating its contradictions as austerity localism rolled out, underlining the mutually constitutive nature of the ‘everyday local state’. But over time we find that the ongoing strictures of funding cuts have closed down informality, constraining the creativity engendered, as the local state centralises in response.