Informal Markets

Analytical tools & literature

• Applying archetype analysis to the results of the scoping review (Oberlack et al., 2019) and classifying observed informal water supply chains with analytical building blocks from the Bloomington institutionalist tradition (Aligica and Boettke, 2009), drawing on frameworks from Sansom (2006), Kariuki & Schwartz (2005), and Rayamajhee and Paniagua (2021).
• We pair insights from 20 years of research in Kisumu, Kenya with the results of fieldwork, including semi-structured surveys along the supply chain and semi-structured interviews with key informants. A historical institutional analysis details how trust has evolved alongside the implementation of a hybrid water system, asking what configuration of formal and informal rules affect the trustworthiness of water supply. To characterise trust, we use measures of trust that include both institutional trust and social trust approaches (Kaasa and Andriani, 2022; Godefroidt et al., 2017; Berg and Hjerm, 2010; Munro and Kweka 2021).
• The critical discourse analysis is combined with power analysis, rooted in the power in institutions framework (Kashwan et al., 2019).

Recommended resources

• Alejandro, A. et al. (2023) Discourse analysis. International Organizations and Research Methods. 162.
• Aligica, P. D. & Boettke, P. J. (2009) Challenging institutional analysis and development: The Bloomington school. Routledge. Deliverable 6.2 23
• Berg, L. & Hjerm, M. (2010) National identity and political trust. Perspectives on European Politics and Society. 11 (4), 390–407.
• Cresswell, J. W. & Plano Clark, V. L. (2011) Designing and Conducting Mixed Method Research; 2nd Sage: Thousand Oaks.
• Kaasa, A. & Andriani, L. (2022) Determinants of institutional trust: The role of cultural context. Journal of Institutional Economics. 18 (1), 45–65.
• Kariuki, M. & Schwartz, J. (2005) Small-scale private service providers of water supply and electricity. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper. 1–38.
• Kashwan, P. et al. (2019) Rethinking power and institutions in the shadows of neoliberalism: (An introduction to a special issue of World Development). World Development. [Online] 120133–146. [online]. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.05.026.
• Munro, N. & Kweka, O. (2021) Trust in Providers of Domestic Water: A Comparison of the Public Utility and Informal Vendors in Dar Es Salaam. Journal of Development Studies. [Online] 00 (00), 1–13. [online]. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2021.1887479.
• Penrod, J. et al. (2003) A discussion of chain referral as a method of sampling hard-to-reach populations. Journal of Transcultural nursing. 14 (2), 100–107.
• Rayamajhee, V. & Paniagua, P. (2020) The Ostroms and the contestable nature of goods: beyond taxonomies and toward institutional polycentricity. Journal of Institutional Economics. [Online] 1–19.
• Sansom, K. R. (2006) Government engagement with non-state providers of water and sanitation services. Public Administration and Development. [Online] 26 (3), 207–217.

Reflections and recommendations by the researcher

First, I think it is very easy to get excited about your topic and about the potential of different methods, and as a result, it's easy to bite off more than you can chew. If I were to go back, I would think more clearly about my results: what am I hoping to find? And then work backwards from there. Though these are the methods I used in my final research, there are many methods and frameworks that I used and eventually excluded.

Second, my tendency is to pick a very clear and straightforward framework that I can justify easily. This sort of research is 'safe.' I could have used 'safe' metrics to understand the performance of a hybrid formal-informal system, but instead used trust to measure performance. Though more challenging to organise, this helped me better prepare for my research, and ultimately revealed dynamics within my case study that I may have missed otherwise.