Development discourse and practice, has confronted the challenges of negotiating the formal and informal; the legal and para-legal, the traditional and the scientific, in a myriad different ways, which have altered received notions of governance, rights and community. Broadly, attention to the ‘informal’ can be delineated along two competing approaches: 1. Conservative view which deems the shadow state of syndicates, brokers and middle men that surround everyday transactions between citizens and state as a criminal nexus (Harris-White and Singh, 2019). 2. Critical view, which recognises that in the remote reaches of development marked by marginalization and poverty, “people are infrastructures” (Simeone, 2014), that is a connected ensemble of communities, resources and territories that collectively create survival infrastructures. While formalization of informal approaches at the community level is increasingly being advocated as a step towards more sustainable, community led approaches to just development, more attention needs to be paid epistemologically to the intra community power differentials, to accountability and sustainability stakes among competing actors. This paper, focuses on how top down changes to Jharkhand mining sectors, brought as part of environmental and economic policy priorities, intersect with local syndicates, which ultimately affect the choices and strategies available to marginalized communities affected by these changes. Looking into the deep social structures of mining and migration economies the paper argues for considering the ‘everyday’, ‘the informal’, ‘the liminal’ as part of strategies for more sustainable and rights based approaches to just transitions.
