The primacy of the parallel: informal governance in the Romanian projectocracy

Scholars of the state are confronted by a paradox: the more totalizing the formal systems of control, the more they rely on the informal practices they seek to eliminate. While studies of informality have documented such practices as "workarounds" or "resistance," they often stop short of theorizing them as a coherent system of governance in their own right. This article intervenes by developing the framework of Parallel Governance: a robust, systematic, and morally legitimized mode of social ordering that functions as the primary site of social life. It argues that this system emerges in direct response to "projectocracy"- a mode of statecraft that governs through performative bureaucracy and the production of auditable fictions. Drawing on new ethnographic evidence of community-managed resources and cooperative labor in post-socialist Romania, the analysis provides a thick description of this system's infrastructures and its distinct moral economy. It further proposes a reflexive ethnographic methodology for studying a system that thrives on its own illegibility to the formal state. Ultimately, this framework repositions the study of community practice not as an afterthought to state failure, but as a central analytical task for understanding governance in the contemporary world.