The Myth of Formality in the Global North: Informality-as-Innovation in Dutch Governance.

Rivke Jaffe,Martijn Koster

doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12706

Abstract

Why has urban informality in the global North received so little attention? We suggest that this neglect can be explained in part by the tendency of scholarship to reproduce the myth of Northern formality: the widely held belief that informality occurs only in corrupt and clientelist ‘developing countries’. This myth has allowed activities and connections that would generally be framed as clientelist or corrupt in the global South to be rebranded as policy innovation in Western Europe and North America. In this brief paper, we challenge the myth of Northern formality by focusing on two empirical cases of informality in Dutch governance that demonstrate how the state frames the toleration and deliberate use of informality as policy innovations. Specifically, we focus on strategic, uncodified and non‐transparent deviation from legal procedure in order to achieve compliance and/or effectiveness. Relying on ethnographic methods and secondary sources, we discuss firstly the governance of Amsterdam's red light district and secondly participatory infrastructure projects in the surrounding province of North Holland. The first case highlights the strategic non‐enforcement or non‐application of laws, while the second case points to the use of personalized relationships and non‐transparency in participatory governance.

Highlights

As the editors of this forum argue in their introduction, informality is ubiquitous in cities across the world
This neglect, we suggest, might be explained by the fact that many urban scholars working in Western Europe and North America have tended to reproduce the stories that their governments like to tell: that these countries and their cities are governed in a formal fashion––if informality was ever a prevalent mechanism of governance here, it is a thing of the past, which only occurs in corrupt and clientelist ‘developing countries’
While these widely held beliefs contrast with the reliance of the same governments on various informal methods of governance, this myth has allowed activities and connections that would generally be framed as clientelist or corrupt in the global South to be rebranded as indications of policy innovation in the global North

Summary

Introduction

As the editors of this forum argue in their introduction, informality is ubiquitous in cities across the world. This neglect, we suggest, might be explained by the fact that many urban scholars working in Western Europe and North America have tended to reproduce the stories that their governments like to tell: that these countries and their cities are governed in a formal fashion––if informality was ever a prevalent mechanism of governance here, it is a thing of the past, which only occurs in corrupt and clientelist ‘developing countries’ While these widely held beliefs contrast with the reliance of the same governments on various informal methods of governance, this myth has allowed activities and connections that would generally be framed as clientelist or corrupt in the global South to be rebranded as indications of policy innovation in the global North. As our case of the RLD shows, successive Dutch governments were quick to frame informality as innovation well before their general turn to neoliberal policies in the 1990s

Partial unrule of law

Conclusion