“Activism Is a Good Means to Connect Things”: Brokering as World-Making Against Competitive Tendering in Newcomer Support

Neoliberal reform of welfare and integration regimes affects service provisioning for migrants and refugees across Europe. This article studies the effects of competitive tenders ( aanbestedingen ) as a modality of such reform on the political possibilities of small-scale grassroots initiatives that support recent newcomers in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. This article studies these dynamics from the perspective of activists who self-identify as brokers and who assist the organisers of these small-scale initiatives. So far, existing research has rarely looked at the interstices of literature on brokerage and literature of neoliberal reform nor applied literature on neoliberal reform of the nexus of integration/welfare governance in cities—despite evidence that brokers have appeared as critical figures in the context of neoliberalisation and (re)politicisation. Brokerage and neoliberal reform are part and parcel of urban theorising and so are collaborative dimensions to urban governance, urban approaches to asylum and integration, and urban inequalities. Combining studies on brokerage with studies of neoliberal reform, this article shows that brokers make use of their positioning in-between the city administration and small-scale grassroots organisations to engage in a form of world-making that re-connects resistance to depoliticised elements of arrival infrastructure—while trying to help small-scale support initiatives to formalise. The main argument is that the interplay between informal and formal infrastructure gives unique insight into the political-economic dimensions of infrastructuring and to constitutive contradictions that underpin neoliberalisation. It is based on long-term ethnographic research, including a year of full-time fieldwork in Delfshaven, a classic arrival quarter.