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

在世界各地，一个全球反腐败共识已经扎根，得到了世界银行、工业化国家、非政府组织和理论家的支持，透明度和法治是多层面治理的新立法和政策的主要理由和目标。 与此同时，越来越多的人进入非正规经济，特别是在城市中心。 该研究旨在了解这些过程之间的关系，批判性地参与人类学，城市理论和社会法律研究的文献。 为了阐明对法律、非法行为和腐败的论述和看法在塑造当代城市的非正规经济做法和社会关系方面所起的作用，本研究提出了以下问题：（1）腐败在非正规经济中意味着什么;（2）当不同行为者的日常做法被重新解释为腐败时，他们意味着什么。本次调查的结果将是一个博士论文，学术文章和会议报告，这将是重要的学者从不同的学科，以及政策制定者对城市治理，规划和经济发展的问题工作。 本研究以墨西哥城的商贩、市政当局和居民的日常生活和互动为切入点，采用民族志研究方法，包括参与者观察、访谈、会话分析和文本分析，考察非正规经济的参与者如何理解法律。 它假设，针对非正规部门的法律的战略导致现有社会安排的碎片化，腐败的看法增加，使用公共空间的冲突更加频繁，以及非正规工人的法律的不稳定性更大。

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.