Short Abstract

What becomes visible when we examine African fiscal systems from the ground up? This panel uses informal institutions and everyday experiences of taxation as prisms for rethinking how fiscal systems work, whose knowledge counts, and how states and citizens encounter one another.

Long Abstract

Taxation offers a powerful prism for understanding African states, economies, and political orders. Yet dominant ways of seeing fiscal systems often privilege what is most readily legible to states, researchers, and international policy actors: formal institutions, statutory taxes, administrative data, and official policy frameworks. This can obscure the institutions, practices, and perspectives that shape how fiscal systems actually work and how citizens experience them.

This panel asks what becomes visible when we examine taxation from the ground up. It brings together research on informal fiscal institutions, non-state and informal taxation, intermediaries, and the everyday experiences of taxpayers to illuminate dimensions of fiscal systems that conventional frameworks often overlook. In doing so, it treats fiscality not simply as an object of study but as a prism through which broader questions of power, governance, statehood, and development can be reconsidered.

The panel particularly interrogates the politics of knowledge underpinning how taxation is studied and governed. Whose practices are recognised as fiscal institutions? Whose experiences inform understandings of how tax systems and related development policy operate? And what are the consequences when the knowledge and perspectives of citizens and marginalised groups are systematically less visible in research and policymaking?

Drawing on grounded, multidisciplinary empirical research across African contexts, the panel demonstrates how changing our vantage point can challenge disciplinary and policy orthodoxies and reveal new possibilities for understanding African states and societies.

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