Day-to-night, road-to-road: Fine-scale livelihood negotiations in coastal Kenya

This article argues that livelihood security in precarious informal economies is not a stable condition but a continuous practice of navigation, shaped by fine-scale spatial and temporal fluctuations that existing frameworks do not systematically address. Drawing on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork with boda boda drivers, fisherfolk, and beach operators in Kilifi County, coastal Kenya, we examine how livelihood security fluctuates at sub-daily and sub-locational scales — across the shift from day to night, the transition from one road or stretch of water to the next, the micro-shifts in enforcement presence and commodity prices that reshape the conditions of survival hour by hour. We argue that fine-scale spatial and temporal variation does not merely modulate livelihood outcomes but fundamentally shapes the labor involved in securing a livelihood: navigating these fluctuations demands constant vigilance and real-time decision-making that is physical, cognitive, and emotional in equal measure. Building on scholarship in livelihood studies and precarity theory, we show that the sub-daily and sub-locational grain of livelihood negotiation remains underexplored even within the rich tradition of micro-scale research, and that attending to it reveals forms of labor and exposure that coarser-grained frameworks systematically miss. The affective and embodied dimensions of this labor — the anxiety of operating in spaces of uncertain legality, the fatigue of a survival mode that never fully switches off — are constitutive of livelihood insecurity at this scale, not merely its outcomes.