Shattering the illusion: state-imposed informality and ambivalent accountability in postcolonial governance

Purpose: This study examines how, during the COVID-19 crisis, the Sri Lankan state embedded informality within formal welfare structures to govern accountability through ambiguity. It theorizes state-imposed informality as a postcolonial governance strategy that shifts responsibility downward while retaining top-down control under procedural legitimacy.

Design/methodology/approach: Using a subaltern perspective and reflexive interpretive methodology, the study investigates Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 cash transfer program through 29 interviews with beneficiaries and state actors across local to national levels. It draws on theories of postcolonial accountability, strategic informality, and subaltern agency.

Findings: The study reveals how austerity, political interests, and institutional constraints produced an ambiguous governance regime. Formal mechanisms were selectively mobilized while informality was embedded to manage crisis demands. Public officers and beneficiaries, though marginalized, negotiated, adapted to, and resisted this regime through moral judgment and relational accountability.

Originality/value: The paper conceptualizes state-imposed informality as an ethically charged mode of postcolonial crisis governance and reframes public accountability as relational, contested, and shaped from below. It contributes to critical accounting and postcolonial governance by highlighting how accountability is not only displaced but also reconstituted through subaltern practice.