Paper short abstract:

This presentation interrogates how informal livelihoods are governed in the context of worsening climate change. I seek to identify gaps in discourses on climate change policy and governance of informal economic actors with a focus on street vendors and market traders in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Paper long abstract:

Dar’s prevalent informal economy is comprised of diverse communities pursuing vulnerable and precarious informal livelihoods, including informal street vending and market trading. These livelihoods are undertaken in a rapidly urbanising context where the population is expected to exceed 10 million by 2030. Alongside rapid growth, climate-related shocks such as flooding and heatwaves are becoming increasingly severe in Dar. While there is an extensive body of literature on street vending/trading in Dar – see Msoka (2007), Lyons (2013), Malefakis (2019), Munishi (2020), Hamidu & Munishi (2021) inter alia – there is no work to date on vendors’ response to such shocks, despite emergent evidence that livelihoods of informal street vendors/traders are increasingly threatened by climate-related events. Although recent scholarship has demonstrated vendors’ tactics to assert their right to the city in the face of evictions by Dar’s authorities, an examination of urban governance of informal actors in this context of worsening climate change remains unexplored. Following recent calls for interdisciplinary linkages between human and environmental aspects of urban equity (Wagle, P., & Philip, K. 2022) this working paper sits at the intersection of scholarship on informal street vending/market trading, climate justice, and urban governance. Although primarily theoretical, this paper will draw on my past empirical work studying informal vendors in 2016 and my subsequent work with a Dar-based NGO that works to advocate for the rights of market traders to increase the organisation’s work on climate change awareness, responsiveness, and resilience in their strategic programming.