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Abstract
This dissertation deals with the kind of economic activities usually grouped under the label "informal sector" or, as used here, the "grass-roots economy," and aims to explain why these economic activities became so widespread in Zaire from the mid-1970s to 1992.
The study shows that during the decades covered by this research, ordinary Zairians struggled to achieve a greater control over their destinies. However, their efforts were thwarted by a dominant, top-down paradigm of economic development, and by the political institutions that sponsored it. These constraints eventually led ordinary people to call for an end of the existing political order, and for the creation of new political institutions capable of promoting local initiatives and the population's welfare.
Capital accumulation, state regulation and development are thus the study's three core concepts. To conceptualize them, I have borrowed from three theoretical frameworks: the regulation approach, more precisely the work published by Alain Lipietz, Robert Boyer and Carlos Ominami; the analysis of the Zairian state conducted by Nzongola Ntalaja and Ilunga Kabongo; and Alain Touraine's concept of historicity. The methodology is qualitative: it relies on life histories, interviews, personal observations, statistics and reports as primary and secondary sources of data.
The novelty in this study is primarily that I do not treat the grass-roots phenomenon as a "survival strategy," and not even as evidence of a retreat from politics. Instead, this phenomenon shows the existence in Zaire of a capacity for economic initiative and of a mobilizing force towards more political openness.
The study's main policy implication is that the complexity of the grass-roots phenomenon, the internal articulation among its components, and the dynamism grass-roots entrepreneurs exhibit, are an essential foundation for the expansion of capitalism in Zaire. Any long-term program of this country's economic reconstruction must therefore begin with the expansion of entrepreneurship and markets at the local level.
