The promise of economic sociology of law for thinking about informality in law and development in Africa

Abstract This article brings Cotterrell’s legal concept of community based on trust-based interactions in social life to expand the critical horizons of economic sociology of law (ESL) in its analytical, normative and empirical aspects for law and development in Africa. Dominant law and economics approaches sometimes see informal economic activity as an aberration and/or an obstacle in development. This article proposes an alternative way of looking at informality in development in Africa through the lens of ESL. As part of wider social life, economic life is about social interactions in production, exchange, distribution and consumption while legal life is about social relations in and under the law. Furthermore, ‘legal and economic life shape and are shaped by each other, as well as by the wider social, and more-than-human, world’. This calls for a framework that reconceptualises law in ways that are inclusive of the many state, social, economic and other normative orders such as informal economic activity in African societies that are continually interacting as part of wider social life.