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This chapter develops various propositions on the dynamics between informal groups of states and the UN Security Council by applying the analytical framework of exit, voice, and loyalty. It argues that informal mechanisms may enhance SC governance if they are able to strike a balance between inclusiveness, efficiency, informality, transparency, and accountability.

The concept of informality has encompassed an increasing number of meanings; referred to highly heterogeneous phenomena and measurement methods; and has been explored by development microeconomics (informal contracts) and institutional economics (informal institutions). This plurality of meanings and instruments calls into question the concept’s validity. This paper synthesizes the critical issues within both a development economics and an institutional economics perspective. First to be examined are the conceptual problems inherent in the concept of informality, especially its inconsistencies and the heterogeneity of the phenomena and measurement. The concept is then analysed according to an institutionalist perspective. A more relevant distinction than the formal-informal one is proposed, which relies on an alternative theory of institutions and different distinctions, particularly between the forms, contents, and meanings of institutions.

This chapter argues that property in modern western legal culture tends to hinge on the logic of centrality. According to this logic, lawyers, owners, and users of property accept that property institutions naturally assume a central place in society, law, and legal theory. The logic of centrality relies on unreflective intellectual habits and practices that inhibit much-needed social and legal transformation in that they condemn certain persons to the margins of society and of the law, either by design or by default. The chapter surveys efforts to undermine or escape from the hold that centrality logic continues to exercise over property thinking.

This chapter examines informality and collegiality at PubliCare Hospital. In part, informality and collegiality at PubliCare seemed to result from organizational inertia—the same people had been working in the same ways for decades. However, this environment also seemed to reflect the care that the hospital delivered. Just as practitioners were forced to rely on informal ties and reciprocal obligations to take care of their patients, the same ties and obligations found their way into practitioners' relationships with one another. As one doctor put it, “You're in it together, and there's a camaraderie [at PubliCare].” The chapter considers the possible factors that contributed to PubliCare's egalitarianism, as well as the shared responsibility between its doctors, nurses, and managers. It also looks at Westside Health Corporation's alliance with Sierra Medical Foundation, its enlistment of entrepreneurs, and its decision to close PubliCare.

The difference between middle-ranking policy bureaucrats and politicians is distinguished in this chapter which presents the different aspects of decision-making in policy initiatives. It also takes an example from the informality of Whitehall departments where hierarchy is not an issue and this informality is linked to middle-ranking officials and ministers, thus providing insights to the role of bureaucratic superiors and the complexity of policy work. Policy officials tend to not have direct and clear instructions from ministers and are only offered advice from senior officials rather than commands and injunctions. This is where administrative discretion is found: where formal rules and relations are silent and officials are allowed to exercise their own preferences.

This chapter summarizes the results of the volume and discusses relevant issues and areas for further research. Once viewed as a precipitate of formal activities, the informal sector has gradually expanded in as many forms as imaginable in a complex economy. Yet it has received less than its due emphasis in appropriate contexts essentially because it predominantly remained a feature of underdevelopment. It emphasizes the need for more research in order to comprehend how formal institutional support may be extended to informal enterprises for inclusive development.

This chapter examines the political economy aspects of the survival and performance of the informal sector. It develops a political support model and an interlinked reforms-bribery model to show that the level of ‘informality’ can, on the one hand, be the outcome of a conscious choice of society and, on the other, may behave unexpectedly in the presence of corruption in the system. In such societies where income levels in the informal sector depend significantly on the level of governance adopted by the state, the government chooses lower levels of governance and tax rates. As poverty increases in these economies, similar choices are manifested by state authorities. Introduction of the informal sector in such models plays a pivotal role in challenging the prediction of conventional political economy models where more poverty and inequality triggers a choice of higher tax rates at the political equilibrium.

Contract lawyers perform two principal tasks: first, to help plan a transaction, and second, to participate in dispute settlement. The planning role forms the larger part of their work. This chapter begins by considering the significance of this planning role to the practice of creating and performing contracts. It then examines the difficulties encountered by lawyers in devising appropriate plans for business relations. The major difficulty concerns the inevitable incompleteness of contractual planning.

This chapter examines the much-debated question of conflict and democratization. It argues that over its first quarter-century the Armenian-Azerbaijani rivalry was sustained by the interactions of two hybrid regimes, in which authoritarian leaders were secure enough to secure power but not to enforce unpopular compromise. It then examines the roles of informal power structures and the persistent insecurity generated by prolonged militarised competition. It argues that while the causal relationship between regime type and rivalry is complex, over the long-term insecurity has provided important resources to authoritarian regimes ‘demobilizing’ constituencies for reform and democratic change. The chapter acknowledges revolutionary changes in Armenia in 2018, while highlighting the capacity of enduring rivalries to outlast democratic openings and remain stable across mixed-regime dyads.

The challenge of legislating for the informal economy affords us a unique opportunity to look beyond traditional labour law and capture forms of work and activity that currently fall through the cracks of labour law. It also allows us to focus on the goals of labour law in ensuring fair outcomes through addressing issues of unpaid work vulnerability. The creation of broad, inclusive legal categories and mechanisms can help capture the work arrangements in the informal economy. Social protection (as much as trade unions and collective bargaining) becomes a central vehicle through which labour law’s ‘transformative’ capacity can create a level playing field. This chapter examines the possibilities that such an approach opens up for the idea of labour law.

This chapter examines the contrast between street vending and city regulatory responses in Vancouver, Canada during two time periods—the 1970s and the 2010s. The comparison of “hippy” vending in the 1970s and “hip” food carts and trucks four decades later illustrates the contradictory impulses that shape regulation of commercial activity on city streets. First, there is a process of “formalization” that seeks to tame the informality and messiness of street vending through new rules, standards and regulations. But by the 2010s, a second, contradictory, impulse appears: an embrace of informality reflecting new ideas about “vital” city streets and identifying street vending, in the form of food trucks and carts, as “hip.” But the apparent embrace of the informal has unfolded through highly formalized procedures, and the vitality associated with vending in Vancouver is acceptable precisely because it has been (re)introduced in a highly formalized, regulated form.

The conclusion unites the study’s implications for the contemporary city and the book’s conceptual and theoretical contributions to urban studies. First, it confronts the theme of a formality-informality binary in urbanism, which the findings significantly complicate, positing social legitimacy as the better term for understanding the success or acceptability of an urban space intervention. The chapter describes how some of the problems with DIY urbanism—and many forms of urban placemaking—can be addressed through the operationalizing of legitimacy as a democratic, community-based metric of value and validity. But it also considers what additional and perhaps more intangible value DIY urban design still has in its very informality; along with the critical theory of Lefebvre, Harvey, and others and with sociological research on participatory citizenship and its limitations, it posits an inherent promise of unauthorized creative actions as sparks of popular participation and transformative potential.

The principle of the separation of powers seemed like an attractive idea at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but one in steady decline, drawn from the arsenal of a classical political modernity that has grown old. The prevailing impression is that public authority has been centralized in executive organizations, and that the internationalization of the legal system has outpaced the classical structure of separated powers. This book has attempted to offer a model of legitimacy in reply to this flawed narrative, which tends to petrify a certain idea of statehood that has probably never been historically true in the first place. This chapter summarizes a few tendencies that run across the path of the argument yet figure significantly in the discussion. It discusses the issues of informality, governance, constitutionalization, and the diffusion of accountability.

Most Indian cities have large pockets of informal settlements that urban planners, policy makers and the middle classes see as disorderly and in need of formalization. This formalization-focused perspective, on the one hand, undervalues the existing, unique patterns of urban development that have evolved in previous centuries and which continue to serve the residents who live and work there. On the other hand, this perspective instills great faith in modernist housing alternatives that have had limited success worldwide. This chapter focuses on Kathputli Colony—a settlement of traditional artists, street performers and other working classes—in Delhi that has been slated for demolition and redevelopment since 2007. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the form of oral interviews, participant and field observation and field reconnaissance, the work presents four vignettes of homes and clusters to demonstrate the uniqueness of these self- and incrementally-built spaces, particularly the connection between spatial ordering and sociocultural and economic practices of the residents. The authors argue that Kathputli Colony’s apparent “disorder” has in fact multiple layers of ordering and the planned modernist resettlement alternative would be highly disruptive to the traditional ways of living and livelihoods of the residents.

This chapter details the various aspects of urban informality and methods of property registration in informal settlements in Aleppo, as well as the tribal codes that govern social relations in these neighborhoods. It describes how, by making a false declaration of breach of contract in court, the parties officially set out the details of a plot and the names of its owners. The author carries out a micro-sociological study of working-class neighborhoods in Aleppo in order to show that their residents handle crimes and homicides themselves, following customary tribal law, before referring cases to the police.