Informal Tax Institutions and Redistribution Beyond the State

Abstract

Across much of the Global South, taxation and redistribution extend well beyond the formal state. A range of transnational and community-based actors routinely mobilise resources for public goods, including diaspora networks, informal cooperatives, religious organisations, and neighbourhood associations. These practices, often described as “informal taxation”, play a significant role in shaping welfare provision, public goods delivery, authority relations, and everyday experiences of citizenship. Yet despite their centrality to the fiscal lives of millions, informal tax institutions remain under-examined within the politics of development. This panel brings together research that explores the political, social, and distributional dynamics of informal taxation and non-state redistribution. Moving beyond the dominant focus on armed groups, contributions examine how transnational and community-based actors mobilise contributions, construct fiscal obligations, and distribute resources within and across borders. The panel engages with questions such as: Who collects and redistributes resources outside the state, through which mechanisms, and with what effects? Under what conditions do informal fiscal systems reproduce inequality and exclusion, and when might they mitigate them? How do people experience, perceive, negotiate, resist, or comply with these demands in their everyday lives? What do these practices reveal about authority, legitimacy, and accountability in contexts of plural and hybrid governance? Drawing on evidence from regions including Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, contributions explore informal taxation in relation to themes such as: - The micro-politics of everyday extraction, negotiation, and resistance - Distributional logics and biases within non-state welfare and taxation systems - Interactions between formal and informal institutions in shaping fiscal authority - Implications for state legitimacy, social cohesion, and political order - The role of norms, gender, ethnicity, and local power relations in mediating obligations and entitlements - Informal fiscal arrangements across policy domains, including health, infrastructure, emergency response, and climate resilience - Hybrid governance and the ways non-state actors supplement, substitute for, or compete with the state By foregrounding the logics, tensions, and lived experiences of informal fiscal practices across diverse contexts, the panel advances understanding of redistribution and state–society relations, and highlights informal taxation as a critical yet often overlooked arena in which development, authority, and inequality are negotiated, contested, and reproduced. As such, it speaks directly to core debates in the politics of development around governance, accountability, and the everyday making of the state.

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