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French

ID: <

10670/1.usodhm

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Between transgression and regulation. The organisation of informal trade in Kinshasa

Abstract

On the basis of an ethnographic research carried out in Kinshasa, Congo, this contribution proposes to examine the cross-normative dialectic/control regulation observable within the activities of the small informal trade in a large African city. As far as the southern countries are concerned, poverty and the economic crisis are rightly highlighted to explain the prevalence of the informal economy. However, we focus here on another aspect of the context, namely the weakening of the control capacity of the Congolese legal state institutions. In the southern countries, the dialectic of illegality and informal standardisation takes place not only in the narrow context of legal/illegal opposition, as is the case in Europe, where the state is successful (both well and poorly) in imposing its system of statutory audit regulation on all activities. In the southern countries, the weakness and instability of the State are reflected in multiple failures in all its control institutions. This creates a particularly favourable situation for the widespread use of informality, thus encouraging the organisation of self-regulatory informal market activities which go beyond the legal frameworks of collective action in many ways. However, the generalisation of informal economic activities — which play a decisive role in the economic supply of the city — does not seem to lead to their ‘formalisation’ but to their ‘self-regulation’.

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