Social Equity Policies and Urban Poor Migrants’ Lived Experiences in Public Services

Abstract

Social equity policy has become a central topic in public administration and urban governance, yet its practical impact on marginalized populations remains poorly understood. Specifically, little is known about how urban poor migrants interpret and emotionally respond to their experiences with public service systems under such policies. What remains unclear is how these individuals perceive justice in state-led equity initiatives and what meanings they assign to their encounters with bureaucracy. This study adopts an interpretative phenomenological approach to examine how urban poor migrants construct meaning from their lived experiences with social equity programs in metropolitan environments. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with twelve participants and analyzed thematically using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The findings reveal four major themes: formal invisibility, bureaucratic alienation, micro-resistance, and reframed hope. These themes reflect how participants navigate institutional structures that recognize them in form but often exclude them in practice. The results suggest that justice, for these individuals, is experienced less as procedural inclusion and more as personal affirmation and relational recognition. This study enhances our understanding of equity by uncovering emotional and existential dimensions often absent in traditional evaluations and offers new insights for policy reform grounded in lived realities. However, the study is limited by its small sample size and focus on a single metropolitan context, which may constrain the generalizability of its findings. Despite this limitation, the study makes a distinct contribution by foregrounding the lived, emotional, and relational dimensions of social equity, offering both theoretical enrichment for equity scholarship and practical guidance for policymakers seeking more human-centered reforms.