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

在世界各地，在世界银行、工业化国家、非政府组织和理论家的支持下，一种全球反腐败共识已经扎根，透明度和法治是在多个治理尺度上制定新的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。该研究试图理解这些过程之间的关系，批判性地与人类学、城市理论和社会法律研究的文献相结合。为了阐明关于法律、非法和腐败的话语和观念在塑造当代城市非正式经济实践和社会关系中的作用，本研究提出了以下问题：1)在非正式经济背景下，腐败意味着什么；2)当不同行为者的日常行为被重新解释为腐败时，腐败对他们意味着什么。本次调查的结果将形成一篇论文、学术文章和会议报告，这对各个学科的学者以及从事城市治理、规划和经济发展问题的决策者都很重要。本研究聚焦于供应商、市政当局和墨西哥城居民之间的日常生活和互动，采用民族志方法，包括参与者观察、访谈、对话分析和文本分析，以研究非正规经济中的参与者如何理解法律。它假设，针对非正规部门的法律战略导致现有社会安排的分裂，对腐败的看法增加，公共空间使用方面的冲突更频繁，以及非正规工人在法律上更不稳定。

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.