Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
The panel will bring a series of papers to interrogate the ways in which urban informality is constituted beyond the economic sphere. Focusing on the social and institutional dimensions, a more comprehensive discussion will be developed to overcome the myth that informality is decreasing.
Long Abstract:
The panel invites papers that interrogate the ways in which urban informality is constituted beyond the economic sphere. Focusing on the social and institutional dimensions, a more comprehensive discussion will be developed to overcome the belief that informality is decreasing (i.e. Delechat & Medina, 2021).
The panel is open to contributors who are interested in addressing the following questions:
• How does the informal economy intersect with other dimensions of informality such as the institutional (i.e. regulation), material (i.e housing) and social (i.e. migration) and which provide opportunities to overcome periods of crisis regarding health, employment, care, etc.
• To what extent the presence/absence of the state is a factor defining how informality is interpreted and included in policy making?
• How do state institutions of policy-making contribute to informality beyond the economy?
• What forms of collective organization and knowledge are being developed around informality? For example, is collective organizing impacted by the work of NGOs or by legacies of trade unionism
• How are forms of collective organizing helping to shape and define urban space and urban policy around care, health, employment, mobility or planning?
• How are issues on intersectionality (i.e. gender, ethnicity) helping to explain reproduction and exploitation within and across the different dimensions of informality?
Panelists shall upload in advance their contributions following the conference's rules. During the session, each contributor will have 2 minutes to pitch their interventions or provocations. Contributors are expected to consult in advance to the session the other panelists' materials to develop an informed discussion.
This paper presents a three-part analytical framework to understand whether and how precarious urban workers, specifically street vendors, can pursue collective action to mitigate power imbalances within the informal economy. It applies this analysis to a study of street traders in Dar es Salaam.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aligns with a literature interested in whether and how worker collective action can mitigate power imbalances within the informal economy, power imbalances that then perpetuate unequal patterns of accumulation and dispossession. The paper sets out an analytical framework comprising three parts. First, it presents an analysis of class within the informal economy, specifically as it relates to precarious street vendors. This involves identifying a focus of contestation—for instance, access to the street—and the social relations that define a related class antagonism—for instance, between vendors who depend on access to the street and larger retailers plus allied state officials with an interest in evicting them. Second, the paper engages with the conditions whereby this class antagonism can inform street vendors' collective identity formation and organising. It focuses on co-operative organising, one, as a basis for addressing shared welfare concerns but also, two, as a platform for more overtly politicised and disruptive interventions. Finally, the paper stresses the importance of integrating a study of bottom-up collective action with an analysis of urban elite power structures. This political analysis helps explain whether street vendors can gain leverage and achieve a degree of success through their collective action. After this theoretical discussion, the paper applies its three-part analytical framework to a study of street vendors in Tanzania's commercial capital, Dar es Salaam. It examines the recent shift from a regime of (relative) protection under President John Magufuli to an unprecedented mass eviction under his successor, President Samia Suluhu Hassan.
This paper addresses the impact of the covid-19 restrictions on informal cross-border trade between the DRC and Rwanda. The data show that newly adopted policies aiming at the formalization of these economic activities appear to lead to further exclusion and informality among traders.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this study is to understand the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the activities of informal cross-border traders. Using quantitative and qualitative mixed methods, the study highlights some challenges faced by informal cross-border traders, particularly during the period of the Covid-19 pandemic. The result suggests that while most informal cross-border traders were already living a precarious life and prone to poverty, the Coronavirus pandemic has significantly exacerbated their livelihood status. In this context, the lockdown measures and the travel restriction between DRC and Rwanda to contain the spread of the pandemic have had a toll on informal, small-scale cross-border activities. Moreover, newly adopted border policies that aim at formalizing these cross-border trade activities by encouraging group purchase of merchandise appear to have further negative consequences for small-scale cross-border traders. On the contrary, they lead to further exclusion of traders with meager capital and to the perenniality of informality.
The paper invites a critical engagement with techno-fixes for poverty by looking at challenges to 'see' informal employment: while some marginalised populations are missing from data infrastructures and excluded from social protection, others are oversampled and kept under excessive surveillance.
Paper long abstract:
Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, data have been at the centre of the social policy response and programmes delivery. Automated systems are increasingly making decisions on social and economic rights in a raft of data-driven policymaking. While data-driven solutions are valuable and have led to a partial inclusion of marginalised populations or as means to do away with what is considered a corrupt bureaucracy, they have shifted the focus away from power imbalances in the design of social interventions and the challenges of 'seeing' informality. This paper problematises how populations in informal employment are included in narrowly targeted social assistance interventions, which are heavily reliant on data infrastructures that fail to make informality legible to programme administrators, and, thus, the state. The focus lies in the politics of exclusion and inclusion that permeate data infrastructures, particularly social registries, the most popular statistical tool used to identify poor 'deserving' populations in the Global South. The study zooms into Ecuador's most prominent social assistance programme, Bono de Desarrollo Humano, and the COVID related programme Bono de Proteccion Familiar. Based on ethnographic work, interviews, and narrative analysis, it finds that social registries weaken the link between eligibility and informal employment, making it illegible to the state. More recent data innovations, such as machine learning, are insufficient to locate informal workers. They tend to replicate data ommissions and biases, e.g., assuming the poor are geographically concentrated in peripheral areas, unable to 'see' care circuits or keep track of demographic and occupational changes.
Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality, and to see the links to virtual rooms. Log in
Short Abstract:
The panel will bring a series of papers to interrogate the ways in which urban informality is constituted beyond the economic sphere. Focusing on the social and institutional dimensions, a more comprehensive discussion will be developed to overcome the myth that informality is decreasing.
Long Abstract:
The panel invites papers that interrogate the ways in which urban informality is constituted beyond the economic sphere. Focusing on the social and institutional dimensions, a more comprehensive discussion will be developed to overcome the belief that informality is decreasing (i.e. Delechat & Medina, 2021).
The panel is open to contributors who are interested in addressing the following questions:
• How does the informal economy intersect with other dimensions of informality such as the institutional (i.e. regulation), material (i.e housing) and social (i.e. migration) and which provide opportunities to overcome periods of crisis regarding health, employment, care, etc.
• To what extent the presence/absence of the state is a factor defining how informality is interpreted and included in policy making?
• How do state institutions of policy-making contribute to informality beyond the economy?
• What forms of collective organization and knowledge are being developed around informality? For example, is collective organizing impacted by the work of NGOs or by legacies of trade unionism
• How are forms of collective organizing helping to shape and define urban space and urban policy around care, health, employment, mobility or planning?
• How are issues on intersectionality (i.e. gender, ethnicity) helping to explain reproduction and exploitation within and across the different dimensions of informality?
Panelists shall upload in advance their contributions following the conference's rules. During the session, each contributor will have 2 minutes to pitch their interventions or provocations. Contributors are expected to consult in advance to the session the other panelists' materials to develop an informed discussion.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 7 July, 2022, -Michaela Collord (University of Nottingham)
Isidore Murhi (University of Mons and Université Catholique de Bukavu) Héritier Mesa (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
María Gabriela Palacio Ludena (Leiden University)