Changing The Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania.

• Author: El-Ghobashy, Mona
• Position: Review

Changing The Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania

Aili Mari Tripp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 260 pp.

Aili Tripp's core argument in her finely crafted new book is at poor urban Tanzanians not only were extraordinarily resourceful in filling the vacuums left by a weakened state, but that they actually effected fundamental institutional change by remaking economic institutions at the local level, which in turn had a decisive impact on national economic restructuring. Particularly strong is how the author moves beyond the now familiar assertions of the "agency" of poor people to argue that their quotidian survival strategies and noncompliance with official regulations actually forced the state to abandon its interventionist role in the economy and tacitly accept an altered urban economic structure, namely the informal economy In fact, it was not only external pressure from the World Bank and IMF that prompted the Tanzanian state to liberalize, but domestic pressures from urban dwellers engaged in informal "income generating activities."

Remarkably similar to De Soto's study of the informal economy in Peru(1) (though more concerned with theoretical treatments of power and without the confident anti-statist stance of that book), Changing The Rules synthesizes the literature on informal economies, economic liberalization and everyday forms of resistance. It is an elegantly written and often moving monograph, based on fieldwork in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam in 1987-88.(2) Tripp carried out 300 interviews with local party leaders and surveyed 287 residents in the neighborhoods of Manzese and Buguruni, populated primarily by workers and small-scale entrepreneurs. The central puzzle is: how were the people of Dar es Salaam surviving on official wages, which had remained constant (or declined sharply) while inflation soared? Real wages fell by 83 percent from 1974 to 1988. By August 1995, the minimum wage was still only U.S.$31.50 per month under conditions of 28 percent inflation, when the bare minimum wage needed to survive should have been $200 per month. How were workers and civil servants, not to mention poor urbanites like women and the elderly, scraping by? Tripp found that they were engaging in "income generating activities" such as food vending, tailoring, making arts and crafts, repairing everything from radios to car radiators, raising poultry, cows and pigs, writing signs, making and selling paper bags, taking in laundry, dying cloth and offering traditional healing services. The list represents a small sampling of the sundry productive activities that have come to characterize the urban landscape of Dar es Salaam and so many other growing Third World cities.

Urban dwellers have become highly adept at identifying various needs and organizing small-scale productive units to fill those needs. The image of overcrowded Third World cities teeming with inefficiency and sclerotic service provision is belied by the emergence of an increasingly sophisticated informal sector in which acquiring fine tapestry to fixing a watch strap to having your car engine fixed have become as accessible and efficient as purchasing a samosa or falafel sandwich at the corner stall. This is due solely to the...