A marriage of convenience: Street vendors' everyday accommodation of power in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Highlights

• Access to public space is vital for informal street vendors in cities in the Global South.

• In many cities, vendors collectivise to resist the state and protect livelihoods.

• In Dhaka the state acts locally to extort vendors in return for access to public space.

• ‘Gray space’ between the legal and illegal gives vendors precarious access.

• But denies them legitimate access to public space

Abstract

Studies of informal street vending in the Global South often investigate grassroots resistance to formal and informal power as a collective and organised phenomenon. In our case study in the megacity of Dhaka, we show collective resistance is not possible due to an overwhelming threat from a coercive state. Informal vendors must resort to other tactics to appropriate public space to preserve their livelihoods. This is achieved by street vendors entering into locally embedded social and economic relations with agents of the state working informally to extort regular payments from them in return for access to public space. These local relations work in opposition to the neoliberalising ambitions of the state to clear and sanitise public space. Vendors look to local police and petty criminals for livelihood security rather than each other. This atomisation, reinforced by the culture of suspicion and kinship insularity, prevents vendors from organising across local boundaries to press claims for greater protection from the state. We argue that in cases where formal power is acting informally, this need to be taken into account to understand the social and economic realities of informal trade and the subsequent obstacles to collective action by the poor in cities such as Dhaka.

Introduction

The everyday struggles between street vendors and authorities over access to public space in the Global South have their roots in the complexity of the informal sector. Conflict over access to urban space is routine in cities of the Global South, including Dhaka, one of the world's fastest growing megacities. Though street vendors sell legal goods, they rarely have legal rights to use public space and so occupy a tenuous day to day position (Pratt, 2006). This ambiguity and conflict has drawn the attention of scholars with studies that address issues such as political repression, regulation, contestation and conflicts over public space between vendors and local authorities (Anjaria, 2010; Bromley, 2000; Bromley & Mackie, 2009; Brown, 2006; Steel, 2012). Many governments in the Global South have hostile policies towards informal street vending (Bhowmik & Saha, 2012; Donovan, 2002; Huang, Xue, & Li, 2014). Vendors are subject to intimidation, coercion and exploitation by a range of formal and informal actors and depending on their resources, street vendors varying abilities to resist (Anjaria, 2010; Etzold & Keck, 2009).

In some cities, vendors are able to use collective agency, and therefore political power, to defend their livelihoods (Crossa, 2009; Mackie, Bromley, & Brown, 2014; Roever, 2016). However, there are also cities where vendors have not been able to collectively resist. In cities such as Dhaka, Bangladesh, overt or collective resistance is not possible due to prevailing political and cultural arrangements (Etzold, 2013; Jackman, 2017). The only alternative for vendors is to enter into a series of individual or localised informal ‘contracts’ with agents of the state working informally. It is these arrangements, based on extortion and the threat of violence that allow street vendors to occupy public space and maintain a tenuous grip on their livelihoods. In this context, this paper uses Sattola, an informal settlement in Dhaka as a case study to investigate how localised arrangements and socially embedded relations with local agents of the state allow informal street vendors to make a meagre, but uncertain, living. We will present our empirical findings by examining the individual practices of social and political agency by street vendors and representatives of local power. We argue that these arrangements, where formal power is acting informally, need to be taken into account to fully understand the social and economic realities of informal street vending and how these relationships prevent any move to collective action by the poor in cities such as Dhaka.