Synthesis, part of a special feature on Enhancing Social-Ecological Resilience and Equity in Southern Africa: insights from Research and Practice

INTRODUCTION

Efforts to build urban resilience in southern Africa have yet to grapple with a distinguishing characteristic of the region’s cities: informality. Strongly associated with inequality, informality is prevalent in institutional, spatial, political-economic, and social-ecological interactions (Banks et al. 2020) and challenges resilience work both conceptually and in practice (Parthasarathy 2015, Nagendra et al. 2018). On the one hand, informality is often perceived as a scourge that undermines resilience and needs to be “regularized” into formal management schemes (Ohnsorge and Yu 2022). On the other, informal socioeconomic activity can be a source of grassroots innovation and social resilience when formal institutions are inadequate or overwhelmed (Kumar and Bhaduri 2014). Data on informality are often lacking, making accounting for it in urban planning difficult (Tellman et al. 2021). Nevertheless, failure to do so may undermine efforts to ensure equity and justice in urban resilience.

Resilience generally refers to a system’s capacity to absorb, adapt to, or transform in the face of disturbance without losing key properties (Johannessen and Wamsler 2017, Elmqvist et al. 2019). Urban policies often treat resilience as a normative goal or desired state linked to sustainability (Meerow et al. 2016). As urban resilience and climate adaptation efforts advance to consider impacts on equity (Meerow et al. 2019) and justice (Bulkeley et al. 2014), resilience scholars increasingly recognize the value-laden nature of urban resilience-building (Elmqvist et al. 2019, McPhearson et al. 2021), asking: resilience for whom, what, when, where, and why? (Meerow and Newell 2016).

In much of the Global South, and increasingly in the Global North, these questions require attention to informality. Urbanization in the African continent is likely to occur faster than on any other continent (United Nations 2018). The expansion of irregular or informal settlements and economic activities are already noted as both an implication of climatic change and a concern in climate vulnerability (Brown et al. 2014, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] 2023). The complexity and multilevel nature of urban social-ecological systems (Elmqvist et al. 2019) mean that people, places, processes, and structures designated as informal will experience shocks and stressors differently than those designated as “formal.” Efforts to promote urban resilience must therefore draw on context-specific knowledge about the nature and function of informality (e.g., Fig. 1) to minimize the risk of unexpected and inequitable outcomes. Such knowledge can enhance efforts across the urban Global South where informality is prevalent (Brown et al. 2014, Taylor and Peter 2014), making it critical for resilience scholars, urban practitioners, and the transdisciplinary partnerships where they collaborate to enhance equitable outcomes in urban spaces.

This paper posits that achieving greater equity in pursuit of urban resilience requires engaging with informality in its diverse manifestations. We combine a literature synthesis on informality, resilience, and equity in the Global South, a brief review of urban resilience policies, co-author experience from research and practice in the southern African region, and resilience lessons drawn from illustrative cases on flooding in Lilongwe and drought in Cape Town. Such examples of rapid system disturbance help to “make the invisible visible” and allow for examining how informality both underpins and undermines urban system resilience. We show the day-to-day contributions of informality in so-called “normal” times become visible and even essential in moments of turbulence, before formal institutions and actors take over responses, regulate processes, and convey formal rights and responsibilities. Lastly, we reflect on the implications for social equity of expanding urban resilience strategies to encompass informality.

INFORMALITY

Informality is a relational term, impossible to define without referring to what is codified, legislated, and regulated by “formal” institutions and governance arrangements, and to prevailing social norms. Any definition of what constitutes the “informal” is therefore highly contextual. Informal activities and spaces are typically unregulated by the state (Auerbach et al. 2018). Informality refers to a range of unwritten rules, social norms, and activities that circumvent or are beyond the law, and to practices that get things done where formal institutions are absent, ineffective, or irrelevant. Although often stigmatized through linkages to rule-breaking, corruption, and illicit activities, many informal practices emerge out of people’s desire to help family, friends, and neighbors (Global Informality Project 2024). From a more critical perspective, Roy (2005) argues that informality in urban contexts is not a “state of exception” to formal order but rather a “mode of urbanization”—part of the way the politics of urban development occurs. Informality is thus socially constructed, and defining what is or is not “formal” wields considerable power (Roy 2005, 2009). Informality is a function of which specific authorities are considered legitimate (and thus “formal”), how that legitimacy is conferred, by whom, and through what procedures (McClymont and Sheppard 2020). Problematically, in much of international development discourse, informality continues to be reduced to an (undesirable) anomaly, an unfortunate condition where something is lacking or has failed, with the formal being the “norm” and the preferred end-state of social dynamics (Kooy 2014). In reality the formal–informal is more of a continuum than a binary, where some “unregulated” relations may be considered completely legitimate (e.g., the direct hire of a domestic worker), and others considered illegal (e.g., an unregistered miner of minerals in an abandoned mine).

In southern Africa and the Global South more broadly, unregulated, unregistered, or otherwise unrecognized practices are the norm in terms of the social-spatial prevalence and temporal dynamism of cities (Chapman and Sasman 2012, Charmes 2019). Informal labor, economies, and settlements are common and tend to persist, uncodified, undefined, and unrecognized in parallel and interdependent with the formal (Roy 2005, Ahlers et al. 2014, Kooy 2014, Banks et al. 2020, Sheppard et al. 2020). In the Southern African region alone, informal labor force estimates range from 31% to over 95%, with 28% to 58% of GDP derived from the informal sector (Fig. 1). These figures reflect significant challenges to growth and employment in formally regulated non-agricultural activities in countries such as Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, and the continued importance of semi-subsistence agriculture across the region, the majority of which is considered part of the informal economy. As urbanization has increased across the region in the last few decades, urban populations now exceed rural ones in Angola, Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa, putting additional pressure on housing stock. Informal practices could be considered the social-ecological foundation from which formal governance carves out spaces of political, economic, and spatial authority, usually under norms of capitalist expansion (Sheppard et al. 2020). Deciding which activities, spaces, and practices become publicly recognized and legitimized is a matter of state strategy, as it influences how and when the state can be seen as accomplishing public sector goals and services (Roy 2005, McFarlane 2012, Tellman et al. 2021).

Whether understood as a mode of urbanization or state of exception, informality entails risks for the activities and actors that are given the label. Further, the designation of “informal” implies significant inequities in the distribution of the burdens and benefits of urban life, and often a lack of recognition and representation in formal governance procedures (Sarmiento and Tilly 2018). Lacking access to formal urban services of water, energy, transport, finance, and housing, populations designated informal often bear disproportionate risks from the pursuit of unregulated livelihood activities and environmental exposure (UN-Habitat 2015, Sandoval and Sarmiento 2020). Lacking access to the protections afforded populations living in formal locations may force populations of informal status to rely on exploitative and violent relations to meet basic needs (Wood 2003, Peters et al. 2022). They are more often subject to the urban externalities of municipal waste, industrial contaminants, environmental hazards, organized crime, and exploitation (Wood 2003, Brown et al. 2014, Banks et al. 2020). Climate change is exacerbating this disproportionate exposure (Dodman and Satterthwaite 2008, Revi et al. 2022) and presenting new challenges for informality (Finn and Cobbinah 2022). Women and undocumented immigrants often are among the most vulnerable to these hazards, as intersectional discrimination excludes them from both formal and informal spaces (Brown et al. 2014). High rates of un- and underemployment among populations of informal status can thwart young people’s entrepreneurial energy by limiting access to educational resources and opportunities in the formal economy, pushing many into illicit activities (Losch 2016, Darvas et al. 2017).

Yet, so-called informal places and practices can also display considerable innovative, problem-solving, and entrepreneurial capacities (Daniels 2010, Akinola 2016, Enqvist et al. 2020). Informal activities can produce significant benefits for people involved in them, for their immediate communities (e.g., economic and livelihood enhancement) and for the cities where they occur. For example, informally governed economic and social networks help provide key municipal services, such as waste management and food and water provision (Ahlers et al. 2014, Battersby et al. 2016, Simatele et al. 2017, Chigwenya and Wadzanai 2020, Sheppard et al. 2020). Institutional scholars have long recognized the important resource accessing and management roles and functions of informal institutions, rules, and norms (Whaley 2018, Tellman et al. 2021).

Despite a potential for constructive social and technical innovations from informal places and activities, the complex relationships inherent in the formal–informal urban system creates uncertainty for policy and planning. In many global and local policy documents on urban resilience and sustainability planning (Box 1), informality is predominantly treated as a development problem and challenge. If such policies were based on a more comprehensive understanding of the systemic role informality plays in urban systems, they could play an important role in promoting norms and practices that recognize informality.

Building on the reviewed literature, we view “the informal” not merely as an absence of, but co-constituted by “formal” processes, places, and outcomes. The informal designation is a product of power relations in urban systems and thus a social and political construction. Nevertheless, it is also undeniably a material and social reality entangling many—likely a majority—in southern Africa’s urban systems. As cities in this region and beyond seek to develop resilience strategies and plans in the face of growing internal constraints (e.g., population growth, finance limitations, rapid urbanization) and exogenous challenges (e.g., climate change, refugee crises), the role and reality of informality need recognition as a key influence on the resilience of urban systems (Brown et al. 2014).

URBAN RESILIENCE, JUSTICE, AND EQUITY

In resilience work, equity is usually considered either a necessary functional component of resilience (e.g., Cote and Nightingale 2011, Matin et al. 2018) or a desired and normative addition to what resilience should be (e.g., Garcia et al. 2022). Fitzgibbons and Mitchell (2019) caution that despite critical scholars’ concern that failing to address equity and justice undermines resilience goals, there is limited empirical evidence to test these claims. Here we embrace both arguments, positing that a focus on informality illustrates that equity is indeed functionally critical for achieving a more resilient urban system, and that equity is a normative goal for urban system resilience that demands attention to informality.

Environmental justice research typically entails three dimensions of justice: the allocation of services, opportunities, resources, and associated costs (distributional justice); the nature and inclusiveness of participation in decision-making processes (procedural justice); and the acknowledgment of and respect for different groups, identities, and societal status resulting from historic injustice (recognitional justice; Schlosberg 2004, 2007). For urban adaptation governance, Bulkeley et al. (2014) extend their analysis to also include rights and responsibilities, and further highlight recognition as foundational for the pursuit of equitable responsibility, distribution, and governance procedures. Like justice, equity has also been described as having distributional, procedural, and recognitional dimensions (Pascual et al. 2014, Leach et al. 2018). More specifically, equity refers to positions of differential access to resources, capacities, and power among populations of interest (Matin et al. 2018). Attention to equity thus helps promote justice; circumstances of injustice create and perpetuate inequities.

Recognitional justice is particularly relevant for the analysis of informality, given that informality almost by definition mis-recognizes specific populations, activities, and places by labeling them as illegitimate, illegal, or lacking rights. Recognition “brings into focus the ways in which inequalities are created and sustained by the same social, political and economic processes which determine what ‛fairness’ means” (Bulkeley et al. 2014:33). With a critical role in making the invisible visible, recognition can expand and more accurately define the scope and scale of urban system dynamics for resilience work. It is critical for negotiating and establishing more equitable and just procedures, resource distribution, and associated rights and responsibilities, thus helping make citizen-state social contract arrangements explicit (Schlosberg 2004, Bulkeley et al. 2014). Grappling with contentious issues of recognition, distribution, responsibilities, and procedure underscores the political nature of resilience work (Meerow et al. 2019, Eakin et al. 2022).

Although equity and justice are chronic concerns, we posit that they become more critical during periods of significant and rapid system change. Structural vulnerabilities (e.g., food insecurity, unaffordable housing, or inaccessible public services) that are masked as tolerated inequities in so-called normal times can become acutely visible in moments of crisis (Sultana 2021). They can also reveal how informal places, processes, and activities have already adapted to conditions of precarity. This “adaptedness,” though often coming at a very high cost to those undertaking such adaptations, is what helps keep informality invisible and out of sight during so-called normal times (Eakin et al. 2016). Populations, activities, and places designated as informal in normal times can be further marginalized in moments of crisis, despite often being on the frontlines of adverse effects (Peters et al. 2022). Furthermore, disruptions can exacerbate equity issues by incentivizing people to act in their own self-interest without having time to consider broader implications (Simpson et al. 2019a, Dade et al. 2022). We posit that while disturbance may create windows of opportunity for new urban governance arrangements, recognition is key to allowing a renegotiation of procedures as well as of distributions of rights and responsibilities in support of enhanced urban equity. An ability to recognize how urban development and intervention (re)produce forms of social, political, and economic inequality thereby becomes central to developing new social contracts that enhance resilience at multiple levels.

CASE STUDIES

To illustrate how systemic crises can reveal informality’s various functions and implications for urban resilience, we examine two cases in more detail. First is the multiyear drought that struck South Africa’s second largest city. Despite having a relatively well-resourced municipality, Cape Town is characterized by extreme levels of socioeconomic inequality, where affluent households could adapt through informal groundwater sourcing, in turn impacting equity and resilience at the city-scale. The second case illustrates how informality shapes resilience to repeated flood events in Malawi’s capital Lilongwe, where rapid urbanization has overwhelmed municipal service provisioning capacities. During flooding, the populations, settlements, and activities labeled informal play key roles in altering the city’s exposure and resilience. In addition to these case studies, our working group has also produced a blog post, an insights brief, two posters, an infographic, and a cartoon to illustrate and communicate our message to a diverse, non-academic audience. These are available at https://www.globalresiliencepartnership.org/what-we-do/knowledge/south-to-south-resilience-academy/southern-african-resilience-academy/building-equitable-resilience-in-southern-africa/informality-and-equitable-urban-resilience/.

Cape Town

Informality, resilience, and equity came to the fore in Cape Town’s 2015–2018 drought, as the city was almost completely reliant on surface water sources to serve its economically and demographically diverse population (Ziervogel 2019). Efforts to address highly inequitable Apartheid-era water access along racial lines have had results, but entrenched economic inequality impedes progress (Enqvist and Ziervogel 2019). Prior to the drought, only 4% of the municipal supply was consumed by the 15% of Cape Town’s residents who live in informal settlement “townships” (almost exclusively black African and colored: a term that, while controversial in some parts in the world, is still used in South Africa’s official census in reference to one of the country’s four main population groups) (Department of Water and Sanitation 2018). The City provided eligible poor households with 350L of water/day for free as part of its constitutional obligations, but populations in informal settlements often lacked connections within their homes and instead relied on communal taps or more ad-hoc water delivery services. Furthermore, many household connections had access restricted by municipal “water management devices,” designed to cap use to 350L and keep households from going into debt, and to help detect leaks (Mahlanza et al. 2016). In contrast, municipal water was readily accessible in more affluent and largely white neighborhoods, and, prior to drought restrictions, was often used to water lush gardens, fill pools, and other non-essential uses.

From the outset, households’ drought resilience thus varied greatly. Wealthier households could meet tighter water restrictions and mitigate tariff hikes by limiting non-essential water use without endangering health or sanitation. For residents in informal settlements, on the other hand, water was typically used for cooking, washing, and cleaning, which meant that higher tariffs forced many households to choose between higher water costs or risks to basic safety and survival (Robins 2019). Their problems were exacerbated as low-income households in formally constituted areas often have “backyard dwellers,” i.e., people living informally on the same property, who were essentially invisible in the drought response policy process (Ziervogel 2019). As water restrictions were set at the household rather than individual level, such dwelling arrangements often drove even essential water use above the 350L cut-off point.

The city did recognize the high vulnerability of populations in informal settlements, their right to sufficient water, and its responsibility to guarantee such rights. Communal standpipes in informal settlements were therefore not turned off during drought restrictions. Nevertheless, the interdependence of water and livelihoods in the townships was often not sufficiently appreciated by the public. During rising media scrutiny of water use, wasteful behavior was called out both at informal car washes using communal taps and in affluent areas when residents watered their lawns (Jack et al. 2019, Robins 2019). However, the expectation of equal reductions in water use from all, without regard for loss of livelihoods, created inequitable outcomes in terms of household resilience.

As the drought continued, many wealthy households responded by seeking alternative, unregulated (and thus informal) water supplies, namely, drilling boreholes and wellpoints and installing rainwater tanks and graywater systems (Simpson et al. 2019a). The number of borehole sales increased from 1500 in 2016 to 26,000 by early 2019 (Simpson et al. 2019a), but because groundwater management is a national government mandate, the city struggled to enforce a request to register household boreholes. A World Wildlife Fund [WWF] study found that 90% of boreholes in the affluent Newlands suburb were not registered in any city or national database (WWF 2020).

These informal supply strategies had a complex impact on resilience: they helped reduce strain on the municipal supply in the short term but also produced negative externalities (Simpson et al. 2020). For example, backflow from graywater systems risked contaminating the city’s water mains, and unchecked groundwater use could impact longer term water availability for ecosystems and the wider community. In addition, privatized water supply also had serious indirect equity implications. This was a result of the city’s progressive water tariff system, where high-volume users pay a higher rate to cross-subsidize access for low-income households and users in informal settlements. Because of this, wealthy households’ shift to informal water provisioning strategies created a loss in revenue that was disproportionate to the water saved, posing a risk for the resilience of the city’s water systems—especially its capacity to ensure water security for the most vulnerable (Simpson et al. 2019b).

Post-drought, the city’s new water strategy is taking steps to recognize existing inequities by, for example, acknowledging backyard dwellers’ rights to water, and the specific need to ensure water access in informal settlements (City of Cape Town 2019). It also recognizes the need to better understand the state of groundwater resources, and what local and national governance responsibilities regulate access and sustainable use. The city has also implemented a fixed cost for pipe connection to recuperate some of the revenue lost because of households’ increased reliance on alternative (informal) sources such as boreholes and rainwater harvesting systems for non-drinking purposes.

Furthermore, the city has made efforts to engage in dialogue with civil society to address service delivery challenges in low-income neighborhoods and informal settlements. Historically, such attempts have often been one-sided and constrained by mistrust, but recent efforts have shown that bridging organizations and actors such as local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or academics can help create legitimacy and focus dialogues, for instance by working with residents in knowledge co-production to strengthen their credibility as partners (Ziervogel et al. 2021). A different kind of bridging between the informal and formal can be seen in a “citizen science” project initiated by WWF in partnership with private consultancies, inviting private borehole owners to help monitor groundwater levels (WWF 2020). Although the WWF strategy does not attempt to “regularize” these users, it helps draw attention to their potential implications for urban resilience and equity. These examples are still the exception, however, and there has been limited success in institutionalizing them as a way to address procedural justice.

Lilongwe

Between 2017 and 2019, a series of severe floods and related disasters took place in several of Malawi’s riparian cities, including the capital, Lilongwe (Kita 2017, Makuwira 2022). Although the capital is highly dependent on the Lilongwe River, rapid urbanization has made the city highly vulnerable to floods that disrupt living conditions and livelihoods (World Bank 2019), damage infrastructure, and threaten human lives (Global Center on Adaptation 2022). Vulnerability is particularly acute in burgeoning informal settlements and communities, which have high levels of poverty and limited access to the formal system of land allocation, and hence often settle on riverbanks. Flood risk is likely to persist into the future as climate change makes rainfall events more intense (World Bank 2019, African Cities Research Consortium [ACRC] 2021).

Lilongwe’s population of 1.2 million is growing by 4%–5% annually (ICLEI 2020, World Population Review 2023), and authorities struggle to effectively provide basic services, such as healthcare, housing, education, waste collection, and disaster response (Adams 2017, Makuwira 2022). Inadequate infrastructure leaves many with poor sanitation and water drainage, particularly exposing informal settlements to water-borne diseases such as diarrhea and cholera (ACRC 2021). Municipal water and electricity are provided only to citizens who pay for these services (UN-Habitat 2011). This means that although Lilongwe’s government has extended pipes into informal settlements, many poor people cannot afford the actual water, instead relying on community standpipes, private wells, boreholes, springs, and streams (Alda-Vidal et al. 2017, Mitlin and Walnycki 2019).

Informal economic activities offer a means of survival under highly precarious conditions. A majority of Lilongwe’s vendors trade illegally outside of the council’s designated areas for trade (Budlender and Gondwe 2019). Informal trade plays a key role in providing food security and income, strengthening individual, household, and community resilience (Budlender and Gondwe 2019); however, it also generates a significant amount of waste. Because formal waste removal is limited to commercial sites (UN-Habitat 2011, Lilongwe Water Board 2021), much waste is dumped along Lilongwe’s roadsides and in the river, exacerbating flood risk and affecting the river’s ecology. Officials see informal traders as exacerbating city congestion and competing with formal land use planning (Budlender and Gondwe 2019, ICLEI 2020), and strained relations often undermine problem-solving.

Small-scale and artisanal sand mining is also practiced in and along rivers, for use in both informal and formal settlement construction. It is illegal, but plays an important role in poverty reduction and is a source of income for both men and women lacking formal employment (Makuwira 2022). Sand miners sell sand to intermediaries who transport the product to markets, creating a value chain (Malebana 2021). However, sand mining bears its own inequities as established miners control the earning power of less established and temporary miners (Fandamu and Fandamu 2018). Sand mining also alters river morphology, exacerbating flood risks both on-site and in downstream riparian areas (Ramkumar et al. 2015, Makuwira 2022).

Informality is also implicated in flood responses. Community-based flood risk management plays a critical role in Malawi, facilitated by donor funds and implemented by local NGOs (Šakić Trogrlić et al. 2017). For decades, this system has mobilized local knowledge and skills to stimulate cost-effective flood risk preparedness and mitigation. Activities include reforestation, installing gauges to track water levels, social innovations such as disseminating warning messages to cellphones, search and rescue protocols, and distribution of relief items. However, since government policies rarely incorporate these community-level systems, the burden of disaster response remains with communities themselves while underlying drivers of vulnerability remain unaddressed. This long-practiced, externally supported, local-level resilience thus alleviates the city administration’s obligation to address disaster-related assistance. Ironically, external assistance by NGOs to local communities may entrench these communities’ reliance on their own (informal) risk management strategies, and exacerbate the lack of recognition of their rights by the formal governance system.

As in Cape Town, bridging organizations can help to forge more constructive relationships between formal and informal actors and processes. One example is the Malawi Alliance, a Slum Dwellers International Affiliate made up of the Centre for Community Organization and Development and the Federation of the Rural and Urban Poor, a network of community-based organizations. These partners work together to promote public/private partnerships in efforts to enhance service delivery in informal settlements, in particular leveraging land tenure for housing, sanitation projects, and the creation of climate risk awareness and accountability in community-led monitoring and evaluation. The federation has historically worked closely with city officials (on early warning systems, emergency response, and the rebuilding of informal communities), despite consisting of informally organized savings groups. NGOs have also been able to mediate relations among informal market traders and local government authorities to address the problem of solid waste contamination in the Lilongwe River. An international network organization, ICLEI, was able to broker improved relations between traders operating informally on the Lilongwe River banks and the Lilongwe municipality (ICLEI 2020). As a result, city officials have recognized the informal market’s governance structures and worked with informal market leaders to co-design a program for waste composting and a plan for rehabilitating the affected riparian area (ICLEI 2020). These examples illustrate how NGOs can facilitate knowledge flows and broker relations to bridge informal and formal actors and systems (Frantzeskaki et al. 2019), something that Lilongwe City Council has explicitly acknowledged with regard to the Malawi Alliance (Global Center on Adaptation 2022:27). (Several authors in this paper have played a part in these types of brokering efforts, both in Cape Town and Lilongwe.)

DISCUSSION

Far from being an anomaly, informality is the norm across cities in the southern African region. As formal urban planning and development processes seek to promote resilience, it is critical that they grapple with the complex ways in which resilience dynamics are shaped by informal land use, informal economic activities, informal institutional arrangements, and even designations of people as “informal.” This requires attention to how the structure of informality varies between countries in the region. For example, urban resilience work is likely to entail different considerations in Zimbabwe, where the economy is mostly informal but a minority of the population lives in informal settlements, and Lesotho, where these parameters are reversed (Fig. 1). Our cases illustrate how that informality can be associated with exacerbated exposure to risk for both people’s homes and incomes through a lack of access to publicly regulated water and sanitation infrastructure, land tenure insecurity, and poor housing options. Yet, the absence of formal actors and institutions also gives rise to innovation, with both local and systemic social-ecological implications. Affluent households find ways to source their own water during drought, vendors trade illegally to secure livelihoods, and people settle precariously on riverbanks as they have little or no access to the formal system of land allocation. These strategies and innovations (particularly those that substitute for actions normally assumed by public authorities, or that generate positive systemic externalities) are embedded in social-political relations. They often entail inequities in relation to burdens and benefits, as well as raise questions of responsibility and accountability. We discuss these issues below.

Making informality visible and confronting power

Informality is everywhere: it is part and parcel of economic transactions, natural resource use, and is often the means through which diverse populations—affluent and poor, in gated communities or unregulated settlements—innovate to meet critical needs (Fig. 2). However, official statistics and measures rarely capture this ubiquity, often leaving informality invisible until a crisis strikes. At the heart of this paradox is the critical role of recognitional justice (Bulkeley et al. 2014). Formal urban governance institutions largely have the power to determine what is included or excluded from urban services, what rights (and whose) are acknowledged and formally upheld, and which places and populations have claims to urban resources (Ziervogel et al. 2017).

Which informal activities, or actors involved in such activities, are “recognized” in formal governance or formal economic activities, are political and contested choices (Alfaro d’Alençon et al. 2018). In Lilongwe, public sector and formally recognized real estate actors are implicated in informal land transactions and construction supply chains (Fig. 2A) that exacerbate systemic exposure to flooding (Makuwira 2022). This undermines both locally experienced and city-scale resilience, echoing similar dynamics elsewhere (Weinstein 2008, Lambert 2020, Tellman et al. 2021). In Cape Town, affluent residents, in formally zoned areas with access to municipal water, secure additional water informally for non-potable use via unregistered boreholes (Fig. 2D), an activity that becomes normatively accepted and perceived as a formal right of property ownership. In contrast, informal food traders in Lilongwe and backyard dwellers in Cape Town struggle to get their interests legitimized and recognized. Thus, what is made visible, and what remains hidden or considered illegitimate, depends on how actors in power view the desirability of that particular form of informality.

Labeling activities and, most important, people, as “informal” is ultimately a process of othering and “moral exclusion” (Opotow 1990). When city authorities formally recognize informal activities, there is an assumption that they will assume some responsibility for any emergent externalities associated with these activities that undermine resilience. Denying such recognition thus buries both positive and negative externalities resulting from these activities from “formal” responsibility and purview (Eakin et al. 2016).

The informal can enhance or undermine resilience

The connections between local- and city-level resilience are complex, and made even more so by relations of informality. In Cape Town, the informal extraction of groundwater by affluent residents enhances their immediate and longer-term resilience during the drought, but the broader impacts on the city’s revenue is negative, and there is considerable uncertainty about the longer-term sustainability of underground aquifers and the roles these play in regional ecosystems and water security (WWF 2020). Similarly, Lilongwe’s informal waste management and sand mining may provide immediate economic benefits for some residents, but over time they increase the risk of disease and flooding for the city and communities further downstream. Viewing the informal and formal as an intertwined whole, interacting across spatial and temporal scales, forces reflexivity around setting system boundaries for resilience planning (Harris et al. 2018).

Systems are in constant flux, punctuated by crises when functional boundaries of systems can become visible and provide opportunities for learning and innovation in governance (Eakin et al. 2023). The adaptive cycle heuristic describes social-ecological systems as they move through phases of growth, accumulation, restructuring (often after some kind of shock or release), and renewal or transformation (Gunderson and Holling 2002; see also Rocha et al. 2022). Informal activities can play critical roles in urban systems’ adaptive cycle, especially as innovators and pioneers who can use newly available niches or provide services lacking when formal responses are absent. Learning is fundamental during such times (Eakin et al. 2023, Hamann et al. 2023), as in the case of Cape Town’s post-drought re-think of water supplies and new strategy to build system resilience against future droughts.

Nevertheless, while system dynamics (and particularly crises) can provide opportunity for recognition, innovation, and learning, this does not always happen. In resilience theory, taking advantage of “windows of opportunity” often requires adaptive or transformative capacity, including resources and bridging organizations that facilitate networking and collaboration (Olsson et al. 2006, Wolfram et al. 2019). Despite repeated crises in Lilongwe, the governance system’s response has barely changed. Instead, the externally supported informal institutions provide an invisible backbone of adaptive capacity during crises, allowing the formal system to remain in the conservation phase with little incentive to reform or innovate (Dovey 2012).

Innovations in governance may hinge on organizations that can bridge informal/formal divides

While the formal/informal distinction is mutable, porous, and politically created, once it has been applied and even institutionalized, governing across it can be very difficult. Approaches to governance range from expanding the regulatory reach of the state (“regularization”), legal recognition and incorporation of informality (“formalization”), or embracing the innovation emerging in informality through recognition, support, and policy reform (Brown et al. 2014).

Bridging organizations and intermediary actors connect distinct spheres of governance or influence (Crona and Parker 2012, de Kraker 2017). They can help coordinate action between actors who lack resources, capacity, mandates, or even interest in collaborating (Rathwell and Peterson 2012). Bridging organizations that are formally constituted (typically registered non-profits and civil society groups) can have the legal and institutional standing to command the attention of government and the public through media and advocacy. Bridging organizations are key players in building system resilience through facilitating learning and knowledge sharing across stakeholders with distinct values and norms, and most effectively influence governance when they can build relations of trust, navigate asymmetrical power relations, and create depoliticized spaces for negotiation (Crona and Parker 2012). This work can enable cities to experiment with service co-production across informal-formal divides in an effort to solve urban problems (Fig. 2C; Brown et al. 2014). By having a foot in both worlds, such organizations, and sometimes single individuals with leadership capacity, may form bridges that enable a merging of top-down/bottom-up binaries, and thus forming more equitable approaches to urban resilience planning and policy (Sarmiento and Tilly 2018, Ziervogel 2019, Enqvist et al. 2020).

Such brokerage can be direct, facilitating explicit partnerships and alliances where people representing voices from informal activities and spaces are brought into formal decision-making processes (Nagendra et al. 2018, Ziervogel 2019, Ziervogel et al. 2021). One example is the ICLEI–brokered, jointly developed river restoration plan where informal vendors and the Lilongwe City Council partnered to minimize market waste disposal in the river. In another case, an NGO in Lusaka (Waste Recyclers Association of Zambia) advocated for informal waste pickers’ interests, safety needs, and livelihood priorities in negotiations about the city’s waste management policy (Chileshe and Moonga 2017). By supporting the political agency of informal groups and activists, bridging organizations can help ensure more equitable negotiations of roles and responsibilities across informal and formal spaces. This creates opportunities for not only recognition and procedural justice but also institutional innovation (Brown et al. 2014, Sarmiento and Tilly 2018).

Beyond having legitimacy, trust, and respect among actors in both formal and informal systems, bridging organizations need to have influence in decision-making at multiple organizational levels (province, city, neighborhood), and skills to convene disparate groups and broker differences in knowledge, values, and needs (Crona and Parker 2012). Without attention to recognitional justice, bridging organizations may inadvertently leave formal actors unaccountable to informal systems. This may be occurring in Lilongwe, where external support for informal disaster response (Fig. 2B) may enable the continuation of inequitable policies that exclude some people and areas from public services and risk management. Bridging organizations are also subject to the power and perceived legitimacy of different stakeholders, and the expressed urgency of their needs (Crona and Parker 2012). A city struggling to meet urgent public safety needs along an urban river may therefore have greater sway over residents of a riparian informal settlement advocating for greater economic opportunities. Thus, although clearly there is a role for these intermediaries, the specific attributes that make them effective bridging organizations between informal and formal spheres require more attention (de Kraker 2017).

Enhancing collective capacities to address equity in urban system resilience

Acknowledging the informal as part and parcel of urban fabric can create opportunities for governance innovations to strengthen urban resilience. Yet, for these to emerge and be sustained, both formal and informal sectors and actors need financial, technical, and political capacity (Dodman and Satterthwaite 2008). Engaging with both formal and informal activities and spaces in the multi-level and complex temporal dynamics of urban resilience is an enormous challenge. It involves anticipating the impacts and social-spatial distribution of shocks and stressors, understanding and accounting for complex system feedback and thresholds of change, and gaining insight into how local level actions embedded within larger urban economic and demographic processes can affect resilience outcomes. Such “resilience thinking” requires diverse knowledge and often unconventional ways of approaching problems.

Most cities in the Global South, and many in the Global North, are financially constrained (Serageldin et al. 2008, Smoke 2017) and face institutional and jurisdictional limits to what they can or cannot do in relation to informal activities, settlements, or labor (Lehmann et al. 2015, Hernández Aguilar et al. 2021). Cities may be prohibited from offering services to informal settlements, as mandates to do so reside with regional or national agencies, or because technical capacities are lacking (Tellman et al. 2021). Across the formal-informal continuum, actors often also lack the experience and expertise in equitable social engagement, undermining well-intentioned initiatives (Wolfram et al. 2019).

These capacity gaps can be filled by advocacy organizations that help design procedures that foster recognition of the rights of different actors in the urban space, and that bring attention to inequities in resilience work. Academic and non-profit groups can assist urban administrators in designing modes of engagement that are conducive to learning in both informal and formal social and spatial contexts. For example, experimental approaches such as “Learning Journeys” or “Transformation Laboratories” and “sense-making” have demonstrated that the process of bridging informal and formal divides is as important as the outcome (Enqvist et al. 2020, Pereira et al. 2022). In Lilongwe, an intermediary organization, ICLEI, encouraged the city to work with an informal site for a river restoration project (as part of SwedBio’s Urban Natural Assets Programme) as a means of shifting officials’ perceptions about how best to work with informality. Through a series of trust-building engagements the city, the organization, and local communities collectively developed ideas on ways to manage waste at the site and restore the river system (ICLEI 2020). In another example, the resilience strategy of Accra, Ghana, intentionally and explicitly integrated the perspective of residents in informal settlements and those involved in the informal economy in its planning process. The result is a strategy that “embraces informality in its urban system” as one of the three strategic pillars (Accra Metropolitan Assembly 2019), where bridging organizations like the Slum Union of Ghana, Slum Dwellers International and the People’s Dialogue on Human Settlements have been instrumental in achieving the recognition and procedural justice expressed in the strategy (Cobbinah and Finn 2023). Nevertheless, implementation of plans to foreground informality in enhancing resilience are partially impeded because authorities “lack the confidence to engage, integrate, and build on informal grassroots initiatives and networks to deliver transformative climate adaptation” (Cobbinah and Finn 2023:376).

CONCLUSION

Cities are inherently complex and dynamic. Informality is an inextricable part of the urban fabric, particularly in the Global South. As cities turn to resilience as part of their policy efforts in pursuing more sustainable and equitable future development, informality in all its complexity needs to take center stage. Informality cannot be reduced to the spatial margins of urban administration, or the social exceptions to the rule of law and order—it is interdependent with formal policy processes, embedded within formal spaces, and an emergent property of the decisions made by “formal” entities and state actors. Planning for resilience for urban systems must involve grappling with this complexity if resilience is to reflect equity and social justice. How are the boundaries of urban systems defined and who or what is made invisible in such definitions? Whose voices are excluded or “mis-recognized” and why? What activities, undertaken by what actors, are villainized or sanctioned? And who bears the burdens and benefits of innovation, problem solving, and managing the inevitable risks of urban development?

Our analysis illustrates how informality of place, activity, and in rules and norms can simultaneously serve to undermine resilience (pushing social-ecological systems toward thresholds of undesirable change) as well as reinforce resilience by enabling capacities to manage disturbance, respond proactively to opportunity, and innovate to ensure viability. That said, our analysis is based on a literature synthesis and the collective experience and meaning-making of a group of researchers and practitioners familiar with the southern African context. It is not a systematic review or quantitative case study analysis, meaning that this paper’s arguments should be seen as a call for more research on informality’s role in urban resilience rather than a conclusive account of it. How informality’s relation to resilience is interpreted will depend on spatial and temporal scale, relations of power, and how the benefits and burdens of actions to manage risk and change are distributed. Shining a spotlight on the diverse informal spaces and processes that constitute and contribute to urban dynamics may not always be desired or welcomed. Nevertheless, ignoring the ubiquity of informality and the complex roles and implications it has in urban systems is also problematic. Trusted intermediaries (boundary organizations that can legitimately bridge the fuzzy but undeniable formal/informal divide) can help navigate the complex politics of recognition, inclusion and legitimization that are critical in pursuing more equitable urban resilience.

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