The Dark Side of Inclusion: Informal Economies, Inclusive Markets, and Islamic Extremism in Northern Nigeria

Focusing on the concept of inclusive markets, this paper examines whether current development strategies for including the poor in market-led development involves a reining in or a deepening of market-led inequalities.  It will examine the inclusive remastering of market organization taking place through the engagement of global business and finance with workers and consumers at the bottom of the pyramid.  New models of ‘inclusive business’ and ‘bottom of the pyramid capitalism’ emphasize the role of business in poverty alleviation and the constructive potential of informal economies in promoting economic growth, pointing the way to a win-win situation of ‘doing well by doing good’.  The question is whether the new emphasis on more inclusive models of market-led growth involves any fundamental change in dominant actors and interests, and whether it effectively addresses problems of mounting poverty, inequality and disaffection that plague contemporary development outcomes.

Drawing on the critical anthropology of markets, this paper will examine the gap between the rhetoric of economic inclusion and the actual processes at play.  A close examination of the institutional infrastructure of inclusive markets and inclusive finance will highlight the implications of apparently inclusive engagement with informal economies for workers and consumers at the bottom of the pyramid.  The paper highlights the exploitative and selective dynamics of inclusive market initiatives, in which inclusion generates new processes inequality and exclusion.  Recent fieldwork in northern Nigeria is used to illustrate how inclusive market initiatives reinforce pre-existing patterns of regional inequality within the country, generating a perfect storm of informalization, poverty and Islamic extremism in the Muslim north.  Analysis of the interface between informalization and Islamic extremism in northern Nigeria reveals an intensification of inequalities, not just at the regional level, but within the northern Nigerian informal economy.  Inclusive initiatives are found to intensify competitive struggles within the informal economy in which stronger actors are crowding out poorer, less educated and migrant actors, contributing to a deepening of economic inequality, disaffection and vulnerability to radicalization among those excluded by inclusive markets.