Institutional informalism in city life and the public sector: Its implications for planning, policy and local governance and urban residents' access to public services in Accra

First, this study draws on a multidisciplinary social science literature on institutions to outline the concept of institutional informalism, which is then developed further into two related sub-concepts: urban informalism and bureaucratic informalism. The central thesis of both frameworks is that informality can be seen as a process of interaction between the institutional rationalities of the formal institutions of the state and informal institutions of society in which the former is shaped by the latter. Second, as part of the critical review of literature, the concept of `urban informalism' is used to analyze five empirical case examples drawn from the literature as a way to assess what the contemporary idea of urban informality means for policy and practice and the governance of local areas when considered in its alternative understandings as urban informalism. The critical review concludes that urban informality can be seen as a constantly ongoing institutional process in which urban informal actors in pursuit of everyday aspirations of city life knit and reknit the composite institutional fabric and appropriate the monopolized epistemic enactments of the city in an urban theater of unequal power. This can be seen in the infinite processes of experimentation, power play and institutionalization that sustain the effective governing framework in a constant state of flux and reinvention.;Third, using the second sub-concept of bureaucratic informalism, I use qualitative methods of study to examine the transactional experiences of urban residents of Accra as it relates to the access to public sector services and opportunities and I identify the informal structures and relations that shape such public sector transactions. Firstly, consistent with theory and existing empirical work, the study finds that informal relational structures in the form of kinship, friendship and co-ethnicity play an important role in facilitating access to public sector services and opportunities. Secondly, the study finds new evidence regarding informal structures and relations of power associated with partisanship and the exploitation of incumbency and the leveraging of power by officialdom and the wealthy urban middle class. The study finds that such leveraging of power enables powerful individuals and their affiliates to obtain privileged access to services and opportunities in the public sector. Such leveraging of power also enables the powerful and the wealthy to appropriate legally and illegally the resources and protections of the law and public policy. It also enables them to play by different sets of rules and standards outside the framework of law and public policy.