The vacuity of informal cross-border trade facilitation strategies in the SADC region

Abstract

In the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, there is the discourse that trade facilitation programmes have opened borders for actors like informal cross-border traders. Examples used in this narrative include the African Continental Free Trade Area. This article takes a different view and asserts that these state-driven initiatives were limited because regionalism as SADC institutional project was not in sync with the everyday regionalization processes. Such processes demonstrate the fluidity and multidimensionality of regional integration, which transcend state-centric paradigms and this invokes an alternative explanatory framework and understanding of the bottom-up process of regional integration in an African setting.