Managed Informality: Regulating Street Vendors in Bangkok

Abstract

The article focuses on the relationship between street vendors and local authorities in Bangkok. We examine the goals, the means, and the effects of everyday regulation of street vending. We document how the district administration produces and maintains informality by creating a parallel set of rules where street vendors enjoy negligible rents and little competition. We provide detailed empirical evidence on earnings, rents, fines, and rules regarding commercial real estate. The district administration's policy of "managed informality" results in a situation where more established informal vendors control less established ones. We hypothesize in the conclusion that the district administration's parallel legal system adjusts to the population's expectations in a political system where the law has little popular support.

Revisiting policy epistemologies on urban informality: Towards a post-dualist view

“…1 The vendors may be stationary in that they occupy space on the pavements or mobile as they move from place to place by carrying their wares on pushcarts or in baskets (Bhowmik, 2005). While there have been studies on government policies and street hawking, the literature mainly focuses on the nature and purpose of the rules and how they impact on street vendors (Illy, 1986;Peña, 1999;Hlela, 2003;Setšabi & Leduka, 2008;Xue & Huang, 2015;Flock & Breitung, 2016;Batréau & Bonnet, 2016). Beyond policy discourses, the question on how formal state rules on street vending relate to the notions of informality remains unexamined.…”

Who Governs the 'Ungovernable'? Examining Governing Relations in Urban Informality

“…In the Asia-Pacific region, for instance, the United Nations has recognized how workers and enterprises move along the formal-informal continuum (UN Habitat & UN ESCAP, 2015). Even governments in some countries have resorted to formal and informal approaches in dealing with livelihoods like street vending (Batréau & Bonnet, 2016;Etemadi, 2004;Hlela, 2003;Peña, 1999;Recio & Gomez, 2013;Shuaib, 2007). In the face of persistent apocalyptic view of informality and the increasing attention to the formal-informal links, it is crucial to ask, who governs the seemingly 'ungovernable' practices in urban informality?…”

“…Meanwhile, social systems often refer to socio-economic conditions -poverty, unemployment, migration (Musoni, 2010;Xue & Huang, 2015) and state policies aimed at regulating, controlling or purging informal hawkers (Batréau & Bonnet, 2016;Hlela, 2003;Illy, 1986;Setšabi & Leduka, 2008). Indeed, this growing body of literature has alluded to the dynamic agent-social systems interaction, which is evident in how vendors respond to state policies and even in how the state acts as agent in inscribing what is illegal and informal.…”

“…Government officials who have direct contact with vendors allow the latter to continue their activities within certain bounds (Batréau & Bonnet, 2016;Etemadi, 2004;Recio, 2010;Turner & Schoenberger, 2012). The parameters are defined through dialogues and agreements between hawkers and government heads.…”

“…This indicates a realization of how the formalinformal practices are engrained in different structural processes and agency expressions. In street vending literature, this appreciation becomes apparent in notions of 'adaptive resistance' (Musoni, 2010), 'managed informality' (Batréau & Bonnet, 2016) and 'informal governance' (Roever, 2016), where resistance and governing norms blur the formal-informal divide.…”