‘Don’t cause trouble’: speculative governance, ward administration and fragmented sovereignty in urban Myanmar

Speculative urbanism in the Global South has often been analysed through lenses of global capital and top-down state planning, with limited attention paid to how bureaucrats shape these dynamics from below. This article examines how ward administrators and 100-household leaders in urban Myanmar govern through land speculation within the legal lacunae produced by overlapping state authority. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Mandalay, this article shows how ward-level actors manipulate land value perceptions, discourage formalisation and administrating trades, despite lacking jurisdiction over land governance. The article situates these practices within Myanmar’s history of forced resettlement and discretionary land allocation, highlighting how decades of state-produced legal ambiguity have created fertile ground for the proliferation of informal land governance. Ward-level actors’ power instead hinges on navigating bureaucratic fractures and maintaining informal legitimacy while avoiding scrutiny from the municipality. Far from passive intermediaries or enforcers of higher-level agendas, these actors strategically mobilise speculation as a lever of local governance while also being subjected to such speculative pressure in their exercise of power.This article contributes to the discussion on Global South urbanism by foregrounding the everyday labour of street-level state actors whose authority is simultaneously consolidated and restricted within fragmented and legally ambiguous urban landscapes.

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