To understand how laws play out in workers’ daily lives and not just what they say on paper, WIEGO’s Law Team put workers in the drivers’ seat of research.
Street vendors and waste pickers are an essential part of urban life, but local authorities can disrupt their access to the public space they rely on to earn their living. WIEGO's Administrative Justice and R204 Project supports workers to address abuse and hold local authorities accountable for their actions and decisions. The first phase of the project was set in South Africa, Senegal, Ghana and Mexico, while the second phase was centered on Zimbabwe and Brazil.
The project empowers workers to know and use key legal instruments: administrative justice and ILO Recommendation 204. Administrative justice relates to how public authorities exercise their power, requiring them to act lawfully, reasonably, and through fair procedures. ILO Recommendation 204, meanwhile, sets the framework for a right-based transition from the informal to the formal economy.
But the practical application of these instruments varies across contexts, shaped by legal traditions, local governance structures, and institutional culture. For example, the way workers can hold authorities to account differs depending on the legal system, meaning they need to explore effective ways to resolve disputes and to negotiate. Asking questions about what rights violations street vendors face and their relationship with the law and authorities, helped our team to build the right tools to support workers. This context-sensitivity turns what can be a daunting labyrinth of the legal system into real levers for influence.
This is why the team used a 'scaling deep' approach to its research. Scaling deep centers lived experience and the building of long-term relationships of trust. This in turn helps create more durable pathways to change, calibrating advocacy strategies and movement building to local realities.
WIEGO embedded worker participation and prioritized collaborative relationships across every stage of research — from establishing research objectives to collecting data. Here are 5 lessons on how participatory research can act as a tool for workers’ legal empowerment and greater critical consciousness.
Lesson 1: Research Enables Multi-Layered Contextualization
Knowing how much local governance influences administrative justice, we examined multiple factors: the legal framework, daily challenges of workers’ ability to work, the actual power dynamics on the ground, and workers' understanding of how the law affects them.
In practice, this meant mapping local by-laws and urban governance institutions to understand who had decision-making power and authority. The team then asked critical questions about power – who wields it in practice, and how it is actually exercised.
This enabled workers to prioritize the issues for action and deploy administrative justice as a tool in their own advocacy.
Lesson 2: Iterative Research Design Strengthens Action-Oriented Goals
Rather than locking in a research plan, the Administrative Justice Project was iterative, with workers as co-researchers. This meant it evolved with workers' priorities rather than predetermined assumptions.
Initial scoping visits shaped research on legal frameworks and urban governance. That research informed the design of surveys with street vendors and interviews with local authorities and key informants. Follow-up focus groups then allowed workers to probe the critical findings from the data collected.
Workers’ inputs were at the center – influencing the design of research tools, participating in a reflection session on the research piloting, and revising the tools based on the pilot results. It also strengthened feedback loops between researchers and workers to ensure research stayed grounded in real-world application. This approach paved the way for workers to gain hands-on research experience and leverage it for collective action.
Lesson 3: Discursive Access Builds Common Ground and Ownership
A key dimension of participatory research is valuing and translating knowledge. By establishing common language across legal, experiential, and strategic knowledge, the project was able to bridge different mindsets, and create collective ownership.
Translating legal language demands an intensive process that honors precision and accessibility. This practice of gaining "discursive access," through the development of a shared language, creates meaningful participation and trust. It also means workers and researchers can explore complex legal concepts on more equal terms.
This involved breaking down barriers between ‘experts’ and ‘workers’, through training sessions and workshops with a co-learning approach. We unpacked information about local government structures and legal frameworks in accessible ways. In focus groups, workers did a “gallery walk,” writing Post-it note reactions to posters about laws affecting their work—and whether their experience differed from what the posters said. This allowed workers to ensure reports accurately reflected their realities, and to identify priority issues for capacity building.
Workers began claiming the research as "our research," transforming them from research participants into co-investigators.
Lesson 4: Participatory Research Catalyzes Movement Building
When workers were trained in research methods and co-led its implementation, research became a catalyst for movement building.
Worker leaders conducted surveys and co-led focus groups, so the data collection process became a vehicle for closer engagement with their own membership base. It was also an opportunity to recruit new members. This process led to strengthened relationships, and opened up spaces to deal with organizational complexities constructively.
In Plumtree, Zimbabwe, worker organisation Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Economy Associations (ZCIEA) used survey mobilization to strengthen connections with their base, attracting over 140 new members. In Karoi, Zimbabwe, ZCIEA worked strategically to use administrative justice principles to challenge the evictions of local street vendors. In São Paulo, Brazil, the leaders of the National Union of Street Vendors, Market Sellers, and Peddlers of Brazil (UNICAB) focused on where vendors faced urgent threats like evictions and police violence, while building solidarity across locations.
Lesson 5: Scaling Deep Fosters Critical Understanding and Use of the Law for Impact
The project's commitment to participatory research meant building organizations' capacity not just as an end in itself but as a means to challenge injustice.
ZCIEA has used research findings to present concrete demands around street vending to the local authority in Karoi, while actively working on an advocacy strategy to make new bylaws in Plumtree more responsive to workers' needs. In Brazil, UNICAB is working closely with city council members to constitute a municipal parliament front, where evidence-based demands from the research will be submitted.
Investment in workers' skills and knowledge strengthened their critical understanding of the law. In turn, this equipped them to advance evidence-based demands to local authorities and engage with power on their own terms.
In hostile or constrained policy environments, conventional advocacy pathways often narrow for worker and grassroots organizations. But our experience demonstrates that participatory research offers an alternative, rooted in scaling deep through relationship-building and worker-led knowledge production. It fundamentally transforms who holds knowledge, who shapes research, and who builds accountability. The law becomes both shield and sword for workers only when they can engage with it and critically understand how to deploy it.