Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding the Rule of Law in the Context of Informal Economies, Urban Governance, and Corruption

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Around the world, a global anti-corruption consensus has taken root, supported by the World Bank, industrialized countries, NGOs, and theorists, with transparency and rule-of-law as the primary justifications and goals of new legislation and policy at multiple scales of governance. At the same time, increasingly numbers of people enter the informal economy, especially in urban centers. The research seeks to understand the relationship between these processes, critically engaging with literature from anthropology, urban theory, and sociolegal studies. In order to shed light on the role that discourses and perceptions of law, illegality and corruption serve in shaping informal economic practices and social relations in the contemporary city, the study asks 1) what corruption means in the contexts of informal economies and 2) what is means for different actors when their everyday practices become reinterpreted as corrupt. The results of this investigation will be a dissertation thesis, academic articles, and conference presentations, which will be important to scholars from a variety of disciplines, as well as policy-makers working on issues of urban governance, planning, and economic development. Focusing on the daily lives and interactions between vendors, municipal authorities, and Mexico City residents, this study employs ethnographic methods including participant-observation, interviews, conversation analysis, and textual analysis to examine how participants in the informal economy make sense of the law. It hypothesizes that legal strategies that target the informal sector lead to a fragmentation of existing social arrangements, increased perceptions of corruption, more frequent conflicts over the use of public space, and greater legal precarity for informalized workers.