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- Convenors:
-
Alan Smart
(University of Calgary)
Martijn Koster (Wageningen University)
- Stream:
- Worlds in motion: Human rights, Laws and Trafficking/Mondes en mouvement: Droits humains, lois et traffics
- Location:
- SMD 425
- Start time:
- 5 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
In the last decade, there has been a resurgence in studies of informality. Moving beyond the commonly used formal/informal dichotomy, this panel aims at developing a novel analytical framework for understanding the intertwining of the formal and the informal in governance and politics.
Long Abstract:
In the last decade, in anthropology and other disciplines, there has been a resurgence in studies of informality. Scholarship has taken exciting new approaches to informality and its intersections with politics. The debates on informality are mainly structured along dichotomous formal/informal or legal/illegal lines, where government/law equates to formality, or along the Global North/Global South divide, in which the North stands for formality and the South equals informality. Recently a more nuanced understanding has emerged. In this view, the formal and the informal are always and everywhere intertwined. The economy, human settlements or politics are never structured only along institutional lines, but are also enacted in personalized actions and transactions. Domains that seem very formal also contain informal practices. Likewise, domains that seem very informal are also shaped by formal procedures and arrangements. In this panel, we will move beyond the formal/informal dichotomy and aim to develop a novel analytical framework for understanding how formal and informal practices are interconnected. Papers will address questions such as: How does movement from informality to formality, or vice versa, affect the dynamics of a field of practice and its consequences for different groups of people? Does formalization increase the potential for social mobility, or close off paths that are only available because of uncertain legal status? We are particularly interested in the implications of these changing views and dynamics for governance and politics at all scales.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Brian Campbell (Dalhousie University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how informal, used-goods markets can serve as platforms for fledgling formal businesses and as refuges for failed ones.
Paper long abstract:
From September, 2013 to August, 2014, I conducted field research at a merchant's cooperative and a flea market in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At both venues, used-goods sellers were the predominant type of vendor. Such venues have long been considered informal marketplaces by academics and politicians who see used-goods economies as rife with underground or illegal economic activity. This is compounded by the stigmatization that such vendors face from governments in cities such as Halifax. And yet, the goals of some vendors run counter to these expectations and stigmatizations. While at these two venues, I examined the many reasons why people enter the used-goods trade. Many vendors were moonlighting or participating to take advantage of the social atmosphere of said venues. But, for a small number of collectibles vendors, two justifications stood out: (a) using such venues in order to "platform" into opening brick and mortar stores, or (b) using such venues as a refuge after a brick and mortar store had failed. In platforming or seeking refuge, vendors had to navigate the informal expectations of the venue, while engaging the formal regulations around taxation and business registration (or de-registration), as well as city bylaws targeting used-goods. As a result, for this subset of vendors, informality and formality became blurred in the pursuit of building a business or saving it from utter failure. This paper will examine how such informal venues can act as springboards for fledgling formal businesses and salvation for failed ones.
Stephen Campbell (Trent University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses formality-informality articulations through an examination of construction work in and around Yangon, Myanmar. I argue that formality-informality articulations are fruitful points of entry for investigating everyday state formation, and the contested nature of state power.
Paper long abstract:
At first glance, Myanmar appears anomalous to global narratives of labor market flexibilization.
Since the reintroduction of electoral democracy in 2010, the Myanmar government has legalized trade unions and tripartite collective bargaining as means for workers' to realize the recently-introduced minimum wage, and existing occupational health and safety laws. In the context of Myanmar's ongoing political and economic transformations, these shifts in labour policy suggest a move of formalization—an effort, that is, to expand state regulation over the largely informal employment relations that dominate Myanmar's economy. Yet the persistence of sub-contracting, sub-sub-contracting, and labour brokerage—all of which emerged following the collapse of socialist rule in 1988—have ensured that formalization here remains a rather shallow project. In other words, informality persists behind the mask of formalization. This is a regulatory disjuncture made most stark in large-scale "formal" enterprises and in formal government infrastructure projects that remain dependent on informal labour. In the present paper, I consider this articulation of formality and informality through an examination of employment relations in the construction sector in and around Yangon. I suggest that those sites where we find such articulations of formality and informality offer particularly fruitful points of entry for pursuing a contemporary anthropology of the state. For it is precisely in the quotidian claims for, or avoidances of, formalization that we can observe everyday processes of state formation, and the contested nature of state power.
Frank Müller (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
Informality is a methodological place to rethink power relations related to dwelling and confined housing. This paper develops a practice approach towards urban informality and demonstrates that informalization is deepening precarity across classes in Urban Latin America.
Paper long abstract:
The relation of informality and formality receives ongoing attention in the social sciences, often related to urban space (Boudreau and Davis, 2016; Pasquetti and Picker, 2017). Avoiding reiterations of the dichotomy of both spheres in practice fields such as housing or street vending, informality now should be conceived as a power relation. As such, it is a methodological place from where to rethink building blocks of social sciences. Contributing to this development, this paper discusses four approaches to informality, first, as an objective fact coterminous with state failure; second, as related to the access to goods, implying a differentiated citizenship; third, as a discursive process, as when informality is constructed as threat; forth, as practice. Drawing from fieldwork in socially polarized and fragmented peripheries of Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro this paper takes this practice-approach further. It develops informality as a procedural category to address practices and power relations in urban land use and housing-related conflicts. In particular, it looks at four facets of performing informality: in mundane ways of "dwelling"; as being embodied through encounters; as conscious, yet situated acting out of norms, and as shaping the confinement of housing which conversely impacts on social positions, relations and actions. I show that informalization is deepening "precarity" which, although "lived differentially" (Butler 2015: 21), normalizes the life experiences of insecurity across classes. Methodologically, this implies to look at emerging alliances related to the built environment that form dwelling, and more broadly, the urban as an assemblage.
Josephine Smart (University of Calgary)
Paper short abstract:
The dichotomy drawn between in/formal economies was not a dominant government discourse in colonial Hong Kong, and policy formulation regarding in/formality is influenced by context specific political, social, and economic logics within a given temporal frame.
Paper long abstract:
The conception of the formal/informal sectors as discrete and separate entities in a local economy has since been replaced by a more nuanced discourse that emphasizes the fluid transformation and intersectionality between in/formality as a process, practice and function. This paper utilizes archival evidence and contemporary ethnographic observations collected in Hong Kong since 1983 to achieve three main objectives: (1) to show that the rigid dichotomy drawn between formal and informal economies was not a dominant discourse in policy formulation in colonial Hong Kong, (2) to critique a common tendency among researchers and students to view government agents in policy formulation and enforcement as being un/under-informed about the economic reality of intersectionality, and (3) to encourage a more insightful and open examination of the complex rationale behind policy formulation regarding in/formality in urban economies as influenced by context specific political, social, and economic logics within a given temporal frame.
Martijn Koster (Wageningen University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses urban governance as a formal-informal assemblage. It zooms in on community leaders in the city of Recife, Brazil, who operate as political brokers between the state and the favela population. It shows how their 'assembling work' connects and entwines the formal with the informal.
Paper long abstract:
The field of urban governance contains both formal and informal actions and transactions. It comprises of official procedures and personal favors, of legal frameworks and private arrangements between bureaucrats and residents. This paper sets out to understand urban governance as a formal/informal assemblage. It ethnographically zooms in on community leaders in the Brazilian city of Recife. These leaders operate as political brokers between the state and the favela population. They claim to 'speak for' and 'act on behalf of' their fellow favelados vis-à-vis the state. Within the field of urban governance, they are active in the distinct, yet overlapping domains of participatory programs, clientelist exchanges and contentious politics. They work on a wide variety of issues, ranging from slum upgrading, tenure security and poverty alleviation to cultural expression, gender equality and crime prevention.
They bring residents' ideas into policy design and translate local meanings to bureaucratic categories, and vice versa. They connect the institutional with the personal and the official with the unofficial. I present these community leaders as connective agents in wider governance assemblages. These assemblages - amalgams of different government, citizen and corporate actors, institutions and resources - constitute temporary power structures, which are inherently unstable, incoherent and inconsistent. The community leaders are key actors in bringing together and forging alignments between the different elements of the assemblage by both formal and informal means. As special 'assemblers', they are a valuable starting point for analyzing urban governance as a formal-informal assemblage.
Tathabrata Bhattacharya (Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU))
Paper short abstract:
Kalyani Municipality implemented a sanitation project changing its dynamics of managing land and perception of land tenure in the slums. By examining the means used to do so, the paper aims to understand the implication of adopting informal means to challenge formal systems and access formal rights.
Paper long abstract:
The paper explores the informal 'means' or approaches adopted by the Kalyani municipality in the state of West Bengal (India) to challenge the unconstitutional limiting of its powers by the state government using a voluntary sanitation project and the resultant dilemma regarding legitimacy of land tenure in two of its slums. By understanding the kind of sanctions imposed upon the municipality, the nature and the policy-level requirements of the sanitation project and the informal 'links' or networks among people, groups and organisations; that were developed to support the programme, an effort has been made to understand the degree to which an urban local body can impact the established land administration system in Kalyani and its resultant effect on the understanding of land tenure system in the two slums. It is found that not only did informal means of the municipality help instill faith in the slum communities; it also triggered voluntary slum development initiatives and a strengthened perception of legitimacy of their land tenure. This has further led to implementation of other state-funded projects in the slums, that in the past, required legal land ownership. From a planner's perspective, this has introduced another dimension in the land administration of the city and the way land tenure functions in the informal settlements of Kalyani. With sanitation being one of the national priorities and a recently declared human right, the study provides an insight into how informal means are adopted by formal agencies to access formal rights and further challenge formal regulations.
B Lynne Milgram (OCAD University)
Paper short abstract:
Overseas Filipinos send family members cash and gifts that support the national economy. To meet subsistence needs, I argue Philippine recipients, entrepreneurs and officials activate the transnational flow of gifts especially trading them in informal/formal, gift/commodity and extralegal spheres.
Paper long abstract:
Filipinos working abroad (Overseas Filipino Workers or OFWs) regularly send cash remittances and in-kind gifts (cosmetics, vitamins, used clothing) to Philippine family members. OFW's gifts are not subject to customs duties because, like cash, they contribute to the Philippine economy. However, because the state's political-economic infrastructure fails to meet citizens' subsistence needs, both Philippine gift recipients and entrepreneurs working in Baguio, for example, operationalize this transnational flow by diverting the gifted products into public market trade - transactions that straddle informal/formal, gift/commodity and sometimes extralegal practice.
This paper argues that both Baguio entrepreneurs and resident gift recipients activate interdependent commodity (formal) and gifting (informal) conversations to innovatively enmesh sectors of societies across global locations. Baguio residents, for example, who do not want the OFW informally-gifted goods they receive, sell or exchange these products, in commodity transactions, at applicable public market stores. Entrepreneurs, in turn, foster customer relations by gifting capital income from these sales and goods to community welfare initiatives. Baguio marketers thus emerge as international entrepreneurs while remaining seated in their local stores. Simultaneously, depending upon the government's agenda, officials variably permit the tax-free import and sale of gifted goods, tax or confiscate these imports, or raise these goods' tax-exempt status (Aquino 2015). Given that the Philippine economy continues to be propped up by OFW remittances and gifted goods, I argue that both Baguio residents and entrepreneurs will use informality as an urban organizing logic when it is to their respective advantages (Roy 2005; Smart & Zerilli 2014).
Alan Smart (University of Calgary)
Paper short abstract:
Smart city strategies tend to avoid or displace informality. Yet informal practices have often been more responsive to the needs of citizens than formal institutions. An inclusive perspective on smarter cities could work with, rather than against, informality.
Paper long abstract:
This paper brings together two bodies of research that are rarely considered together: formalization as a development strategy, and the impact of smart city strategies (SCS). Both have become standard practices for cities that want to be, or be seen to be, at the cutting edge of urban development fashion. However, the emphasis in SCS on embedding sensors connected to cutting edge data analytics begs the question of what makes a city smart. For example, making traffic flow more smoothly in a sprawling, auto-dependent urban region is a very limited conceptualization of smartness. Cities can be "smarter" in a variety of ways, including (1) citizen engagement, (2) low-tech but effective architectural and urban design, and (3) high-tech. After discussing the nature of urban intelligence, I address a key question, particularly for cities of the global South: does converting informality into formal institutions make such cities smarter? In many SCS in the global South, for example in India's ambitious program, urban informality is seen as an immense obstacle to modernizing cities, so that either SCS requires extensive clearance and displacement of informal settlements and practices, or the establishment of greenfield new cities. Yet, many studies show that informal practices are better than formal institutions at meeting the real needs of citizens. Could we make a city smarter by working with, rather than against, informal practices? What kind of SCS could incorporate a more inclusive approach?