James Christopher Mizes, Liza Rose Ciriola, “Bypass : Informal exceptions to urban land taxation in M’Bour and Kisumu” in Politique africaIne Volume 151, Issue 3, July 2018, pages 17 to 37

This article is a comparative analysis of property tax collection in M’Bour (Senegal) and Kisumu (Kenya). In our research, we observed that tax administrators often do not collect the property taxes that they are legally obliged and entitled to collect. In this article, we outline two practices of—and justifications for—such informal exceptions to tax law. In M’Bour, tax administrators refrain from collecting from land owners whom they perceive to be poor. And in Kisumu, city administrators do not enforce property tax collection in areas they believe are underserviced by roads, electricity, and public markets. These exceptions are a form of bypass, a spatial practice in which state bureaucrats and institutions purposefully circumvent the official work of public service in specific areas of the urban landscape. We argue that bypass reconfigures the locus and form of state fiscal authority, often with surprisingly progressive effects.

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