Effects of psychosocial and environmental factors on social conflicts between urban street vendors and municipalities: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Globally, conflicts between municipalities and street vendors perpetuate poverty, inequality, and social exclusion, which has motivated the decision to carry out this systematic literature review. This review hypothesized that noncompliance with municipal vending laws is driven not merely by economic defiance, but by a complex interplay of systemic psychosocial and environmental factors. Consequently, the purpose of this desktop research was to identify psychosocial and socio-structural drivers of street vending and how they influence noncompliance behavior among street vendors. To achieve this, databases such as JSTOR, Google Scholar, Elicit, and Consensus AI were queried, and they yielded 21 peer-reviewed studies meeting the rigorous inclusion criteria that were set. The main findings revealed that noncompliance behavior was driven by psychosocial factors such as educational level, age, perceptions of enforcement agents, and attitudes towards change, which heavily interact with socio-structural deficits, such as lack of employment opportunities and safety nets. This study innovated by shifting from the norm of focusing on street vendors as the source of urban disorder, land pollution, and walkway congestion without looking at the role of the municipalities and other stakeholders in contributing to this problem. Municipalities have been harassing, arresting, and confiscating goods from street vendors because the narrative has always been that street vendors are non-compliant with municipal bylaws. Using the social work lens of person-in-environment theory, this review found that political, structural, economic, social, and personal factors make compliance with municipal laws on licensing, zoning, and product quality impossible; hence the recommendation that policies about street vendors should be revisited to align with the current personal and environmental circumstances that people are facing.