Why Informal Sustainability? Why now?

Below is a lightly edited excerpt from Brandon Finn’s recent piece,
Informality at the Heart of Sustainable Development:

The first-ever global assessment of informal labor estimates that 61% of the world's working population is employed informally (International Labor Organization, 2018). Half of the world's total urban population is estimated to be living in informal settlements by 2050 (Samper et al., 2020). Informal settlements are exposed to disproportionate physical risks because of insufficient public infrastructure and inadequate public support systems and are expanding into areas that are at higher risk of flooding (Rentschler et al., 2023) and onto fertile agricultural land (Abd-Elmabod et al., 2019). These trends are emerging as the global geographies of urbanization are changing dramatically. By 2100, for example, 13 of the world's 20 most populous cities are predicted to be on the African continent (Bearak et al., 2021).

Given these trends, it is a non-controversial argument to suggest that studying informality ought to be at the heart of sustainable development and sustainability discourse and practice. It is imperative that large organizations like the United Nations and The World Bank prioritize informality as central to climate change responses, and academic researchers understand that informality is one of the defining features of global social and environmental change in the twenty-first century.

How do scholars, policymakers, and development organizations confront neocolonial practices that exacerbate inequalities forged over the past hundred years? Why do some populations disproportionately work in informal economies and live in informal settlements? How do these realities impact contemporary notions of environmental and social justice – which are routinely misunderstood as predominantly place-based phenomena? Finally, how can the imperatives of sustainable development meaningfully include informality at the heart of equitable responses to climate change, which subjects the world's most vulnerable people to its harshest impacts?

These questions open new directions for the future study of informality. They also seek to prompt readers to consider how local case studies of informality can speak to processes that are inherently global. These processes are central to the history of global capitalism and colonialism and are increasingly at the nexus of climate change and neocolonialism. The imperative within this debate is not to discard ‘informality’ as a theoretical or empirical term, nor is it to demarcate development trajectories and practices as inherently place-based, and not to romanticize informality in all its different modes. The central task of researchers at the forefront of this topic is to understand the logics and rationales of informality to ask how and why it is produced and how that production influences global inequalities and sustainability outcomes through socio-spatial and economic transformations. Without answering these questions, we will not be able to remedy or meaningfully and inclusively respond to the inequalities produced by the structure of informality.