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Informality is growing in a context of increasing inequity, and in many places becoming the norm. However, despite decades of studies and interventions, ‘recognising informality’ is still a key issue. This paper provides a review of the literature on informality showing the shifts in its conceptualisations. The paper firstly discusses conceptual approaches related to the term ‘informality’ in the context of urban development; it then examines practices within, and related to, informality; and it concludes with an appraisal of policy approaches and their impact as reported in the literature. The paper finds a wide range of conceptualisations, including the questioning of the usefulness and appropriateness of the term. It finds reported evidence of ‘informality’ (as understood to date) spreading to the middle classes, and increasingly emerging in the Global North. Policies seem to be lagging behind in how they engage with so-called informality, with little acknowledgement of theory and limited understanding of their impacts on ‘informal’ practices. Finally, the paper identifies the need for better understanding of governance frameworks that include the range of actors that would normally be associated with so-called ‘informality’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The informal sector in developing countries plays a particularly important role in the overall economic development, yet due to epistemological neglect, its conceptualization focuses on the prism of poverty and social exclusion, hence overshadowing its embedded innovativeness, adaptability and contributions to job creation, poverty alleviation and environmental management. This paper contributes in bridging this knowledge dearth by focusing on how informal e-waste recyclers negotiate the challenges of contemporary political economy contexts. Using an urban mining lens, this paper shows how crucial this sector is for the success of any municipal waste management system and Accra's local economy in general. It is contended that the continuous denial of the sector's virtues in the economy is a poor situational analysis and the research emphasizes instead the need to consider as well as harness the sector's potential in order to create not only employment for the poor but also to bring e-waste recycling into mainstream waste management scholarship. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper contributes to the conceptual discourse of urban informality with empirical findings taken from a rapidly growing informal settlement in the periphery of Dhaka, Bangladesh. It considers the case of a public water utility dealing with the rationality of the decision-making process and the working culture of the public authority, and with the consequent local practices embedded in water supply. It explains how the informal behaviour of the public utility and the practices of the study community are constructed, legitimated and negotiated and thus become everyday reality. The findings characterise the public utility as an informalised entity whose decisions lack any prescribed set of statutory institutions and are, instead, rationalised politically, based on the location and individual interests of actors in a power matrix. This mode of water governance produces discriminatory practices of differential treatment and tolerance, thus informing questions of difference and urban division. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]