To Punish, Parent, or Palliate: Governing Urban Poverty through Institutional Failure
通过洛杉矶无家可归吸毒者的针具交换项目案例，提出“安抚式治理”概念，描述既不惩罚也不管教、仅通过临时措施维持贫困者生存的治理方式，并分析机构间的补充、竞争与利用关系。
Studies of poverty governance typically emphasize the punitive subjugation or paternalistic disciplining of the poor. Much work combines elements of these approaches, and recent studies depict relations between institutions as premised on collaboration or burden shuffling. Despite the precarity of poor people’s existence, the role of life itself in governance is conspicuously absent in this literature. Using an ethnographic case study of a syringe exchange program serving unhoused people who inject drugs in Los Angeles, this article theorizes palliative governance to describe forms of regulation that neither punish nor parent, but simply try to keep very poor subjects alive through a series of stopgap measures. Rather than collaborate or burden shuffle, exchange workers supplement, contest, and co-opt other governing institutions. An analysis of palliative governance broadens our understanding of how institutions interact with subjects and each other, while revealing the paradoxical ways states both expose and protect bare life.