The Decolonial Comparative Law project (DeCoLa) at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, in partnership with the Fondation Afric’Avenir, is inviting submissions that seek to rethink the divide between the formal and informal economy through a decolonial comparative legal approach for its upcoming conference workshop in May 2027. The DeCoLa programme will host the fourth edition of its Decolonial Comparative Law Workshop series in Cameroon. The programme will comprise two events in Douala: a workshop on 5–6 May 2027, followed by an Epupa school on 10–12 May 2027.

An information session will take place on March 18 at 10 GMT and 16 GMT. Register here: https://events.mpipriv.de/b?p=decola_and_the_informal_forma_leconomy_information_session.

The overarching theme of the 2027 edition is decolonial comparative law and the informal/formal economy. The workshop takes the informal economy seriously as a site of legality in its own right, examined through a decolonial and comparative lens attentive to legal pluralism and situated practices.

The full call can be found on our webpage: https://www.mpipriv.de/2020710/decola-informal-formal-economy (English, French, Arabic, Portuguese, and Spanish).

WORKSHOP CONFERENCE THEME:

The exclusion of the many from access to, and the benefits of, means of production and resources has long been a colonial enterprise. Today, around 60% of the world’s labour force works in the informal economy. In legal terms, informality often translates into insecure social and economic

rights – in short, precarity. At the same time, legal instruments designed to secure transactions,

access to capital, and property are typically associated with the formal economy. Yet across Global South – or Global Majority – contexts, and increasingly in the Global North, participation in the formal economy does not guarantee stable economic rights.

This is paralleled by an exclusion of the informal economy within comparative law scholarship, which either ignores informality altogether or views it merely as a problem to be solved by law modelled

after Global North law. This imbalance has limited the documentation of alternative legal

instruments for human economies. Coloniality continues to sustain a narrow reading of how Global South and Indigenous societies structure their economic lives, including when they choose not to practise “economy” in a conventional sense. Acknowledging the heterogeneity of the informal

economy requires attention to everyday legalities across both informal and formal work.

This workshop is not only interested in papers recommending or problematising formalisation initiatives. The main focus of the workshop is to take the informal economy seriously as a space of

legality as such, in the context of legal pluralism. We are looking for attempts to document, compare, and assess legal approaches – in formal and informal law – to the informal economy and the

intersections between formal and informal economic life. We welcome papers analysing how

informal workers mobilise, transform, ignore, or reject state and non-state legal instruments in their economic lives, and examining how formal institutions engage with the informal sector.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Informal cross-border trade, including commerce conducted by groups transcending state borders, regardless of their legality under state law.
• Local and digital currencies created or used for noncolonial purposes.
• Indigenous and customary economies, including their own value systems, exchange practices, and non-colonial monetary forms.
• Ecofeminist, pastoralist, rural, and intentional communities (e.g. Auroville in India) as well as precolonial or other traditional modes of value creation (irrespective of the effective ancestry of the practice).
• Labour rights in informal work, including economic dependence within and beyond the

employer–employee relationship, dispute resolution practices, and collective organisation (e.g., trade unions, associations, cooperatives).

• Microlending, alternative securities, and property rights as mechanisms for accessing capital.
• Legal (mis)recognition of informal workers.
• Migration and the (in)formal economy.
• Globalisation and the informal labour serving the global supply chain.
• Digital businesses, platform-based livelihoods (e.g. TikTok influencers, delivery and domestic workers hired online) and (in)formality.
• State constraints on local economic sovereignty, including the spatial distribution and regulation of formal and informal economic activities.
• Blurred lines between formal and informal economies: workers operating in both settings

(e.g. civil servants’ side jobs; or ‘hustlers’, ‘débrouillards’, and ‘rebuscadores’).

If your research does not fit into any of these themes, we still encourage you to submit a proposal. In general, we invite papers that analyse and destabilise coloniality by examining, comparatively, the

economic and legal imaginaries through which communities (typically, but not necessarily, in the Global South) define, practise, or decline to practise an economy beyond (or in spite of) coloniality.

REVIEW CRITERIA

Preference will be given to papers that (i) are comparative, (ii) describe economic activities beyond their informality, (iii) avoid using or directly problematise the language of the state and coloniality,

(iv) engage directly with existing scholarly literature, citing especially South-based authors and activists and being mindful of race, class, and gender. Co-authorship is welcome; South/South comparison is encouraged; and the mobilisation of extra-legal methods is appreciated.

Authors are strongly encouraged to draw on the bibliographies found on the Decolonial Comparative Law Project website, as well as the bibliographies provided by Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ).

Please submit your paper to our secure Cloud: (i) as an attachment using the template provided on the Decolonial Comparative Law Project website; (ii) in any language; (iii) in no more than 5,000 words; (iv) by 1 September 2026.

PEER REVIEW

The peer review advisory board is interdisciplinary and multilingual. The board includes Kamala Sankaran (National Law School of India University), Jonathan Bashi Rudahindwa (School of Oriental and African Studies), Luis Eslava (University of La Trobe), and Dina Waked (SciencesPo).

ACCEPTED PAPERS

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit revised versions for the workshop. Papers written in languages other than English will be professionally translated. Papers will be circulated prior to the workshop; authors will not formally present their papers at the event. Following peer review, the papers will be published in an edited volume or special journal issue.