Sustainable Development Strategies: what roles for informal economy initiatives in the Post-2015 SDGs?

Powerful and continuing processes of globalization hold implications for the capacities of different sectors to contribute to well-being. Conventional thinking is nevertheless still focused on top-down strategies that seek to include and integrate people and places into the global capitalist economy. But, as a safeguard against the vagaries of the formal economic system, an important complementary approach could be to embrace and support bottom-up options for poverty relief and welfare delivery that operate outside the realm of the money economy. This implies recognizing the role of the informal economy more explicitly and creating a facilitating context for social innovations that can play important roles in more sustainable development. This chapter frames the issues as a contribution to discourse over the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals.