Supporting youth livelihoods in an informal “sub-field” in the Global South

Abstract

In this chapter, I argue that informal sector youth livelihoods can be understood as generated in a spatialised “sub-field” of the Global South, on the peripheries of urban areas where the state has limited control. This sub-field operates mainly in slums, favelas, or townships, as well as on the streets of city centers or even in certain factories. In post-colonial contexts, autonomous domains of activity – fields – do not emerge as clearly because state hegemony is more tenuous, meaning that governments are unable to regulate social life as easily across entire territories. Rather than understanding how people generate livelihoods as their accumulation of capitals in a field, a number of linked sub-fields have therefore emerged spatially in the Global South, with informal economies existing alongside the mainstream capitalist one. The informal sub-field plays out relationally, through interactions between structural forces and the resources or capitals youth accumulate, producing specific informal forms of habitus. Research illuminates three distinct kinds of livelihoods in this sub-field: informal trade, informal artisans/apprentices, and a kind of informal survivalism, or “hustle”. I make preliminary suggestions about how skills and education can help support each of these kinds of informal sector youth livelihoods from a relational approach.