‘No one can just occupy the space without our permission’: informal governance mechanisms and the politics of street traders’ access to space in Harare’s contested Central Business District (CBD)

Drawing from focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews, this paper examines how street traders in Harare (Zimbabwe) negotiate and regulate access to trading spaces among themselves. While most studies on street trading focus on state – trader conflicts and traders’ resistance to exclusionary practices, this study shifts attention to the often-overlooked role of informal governance mechanisms that traders employ to regulate access to space. The findings reveal that access to vending space by street traders is negotiated through a range of informal mechanisms, including social control practices, personal networks, and, in some cases, heritability. The ability to negotiate and secure space is highly differentiated, often shaped by gender, experience, traders’ status and social influence within the vending community. The study therefore calls for a more nuanced understanding of intra-informal dynamics and everyday forms of governance that structure life in informal urban economies.