Policy Sciences 19:61-81 (1986) 61

9 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands

Regulation and evasion: Street-vendors in Manila

H A N S F. ILLY
Hochschule fiir Verwaltungswissenschaften, 6720 Speyer, ER.G.

Abstract. There are various reasons why the often stated gap between policy formulation and poli-
cy implementation is especially large in developing countries: ambiguous policy goals, decision-
making without considering the needs of those affected, low degree of compliance and administra-
tive capacity of implementing agencies etc. What is perhaps most striking is the fact that interest
aggregation generally occurs at the enforcement stage only. This means that laws and regulations
can be sapped and distorted along the lines of the power constellations of the actors involved. The
case study presented here deals with the regulatory aspects of street-vending in the particular cul-
tural environment of a South-East Asian capital, Manila. It is demonstrated that regulations are
more inspired by Western images of modernization largely removed from the harsh socio-
economic realities of the sector.
Moreover, compliance is minimized by cultural values (conflict avoidance, respect of power
structures) governing the behavior of lower level administrative agents and hawkers alik~ The
overall result is that regulations are purely symbolic and ineffective, nevertheless maintaining a cli-
mate of harassment and extortion.
The paper advocates a more positive approach towards street-vendors combining minimal regu-
lation with measures of encouragement and public assistance..

The study presented here focuses o n the basic disjunction between policy for-
m u l a t i o n and policy implementation. Indeed, empirical studies have d e m o n -
strated that there is rarely a stream-lined policy implementation process follow-
ing the m o t t o "once a policy has been ' m a d e ' by a government, the policy will
be implemented and the desired results o f the policy will be near those expected
by the policy-makers" t. O n the contrary, "the problems o f implementation
are p r o f o u n d in Western and non-Western nations alike: they are generic to
complex organizations ''2. Dimensions like the intensity o f implementor's dis-
positions, interorganizational c o m m u n i c a t i o n , goal consensus, political
resources, economic and social conditions decisively determine the effective-
ness o f public action. In addition to that, it is obvious that a more static and
legal a p p r o a c h in policy studies should be replaced by a more d y n a m i c kind
o f analysis taking into consideration the behavioral properties o f organiza-
tions: how are regulations interpreted, what is the plausible response
repertoire 3, can the extent o f compliance have an effect on policy change
(feedback)?
Beyond these considerations, our attention is drawn to one important differ-
ence between Western and Third World countries: "while in the United States
and Western Europe m u c h political activity is focused on the input stage o f
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the policy process, in the Third World a large portion of individual and collec-
tive demand making, the representation of interests, and the emergence and
resolution of conflict occurs at the output stage''4. In authoritarian political
systems (the country in point belongs to this category), governments have de-
veloped a technocratic attitude to policy-making reducing popular participa-
tion to a minimum; but as their power of coercion is limited, they are open
to pressures at the implementation stage.
Moreover, there is another factor which should be taken into consideration:
socio-cultural values, paramount in all strata of the society, can reduce laws
and regulations to simply symbolic instruments of modernization. It is on the
basis of these assumptions that the main thesis of this paper can be formulat-
ed: In view of the cultural environment, comprehensive efforts on the part of
the ruling elite to regulate and restrict street-vending are doomed to be ineffec-
tive. The presently prevailing negative approach should be abandoned and
replaced by a more positive one, based on minimal regulation and the en-
couragement of the dynamic forces of the sector.
The arena of this case study is the so-called "informal sector" which has
been dealt with quite extensively during the last few years.
Much to the amazement of politicians and administrators that started from
the assumption that development could only be achieved through comprehen-
sive planning and all-encompassing government action, in the cities of the
Third World emerged a sector of petty activities in production and services ap-
parently governed by the "magic of the marketplace''5. Is it just an "economy
of survival''6 or the renaissance of pre-industrial modes of productionT? A
wide body of literature demonstrates that there is no satisfactory way of defin-
ing the informal sector, both analytically and empirically. 8 The remarkable
aspect about the genesis of the term is that it has not sprung up from purely
theoretical discussions, but from the more pragmatic concerns of ILO's World
Employment Programme drawing our attention to the conditions of the
poorest strata of the urban society and thus pressing for adequate policy
recommendations and actions. 9 The "discovery" of the "informal sector",
widely used since the early seventies, has indeed had some impact on the design
of urban development programmes, especially with international agencies such
as the ILO and the World Bank. lo Nevertheless, this decisively pragmatic fo-
cus does not mean that such projects are easy to handle, because both the in-
trinsic properties of the sector are difficult to influence and the respective en-
vironment is only rarely positive towards such measures. This question will be
taken up in the context of the target group which is in the center of interest
of this paper.
Whereas much of the literature is mainly concerned with the for-
mal/informal dichotomy, their hidden or apparent relationships and the eco-
nomic properties of the informal sector, we shall concentrate on one largely