Authors

Discussion

The UCL-led Global Informality Project (2014-) is an open-access database that maps open secrets, unwritten rules and informal practices, highlighting the importance of informal problem-solving. Its printed version, the three volumes of The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, published by the UCL Press, have been downloaded over 160,000 times from 189 countries. Aimed at non-academic, business and scientific communities around the world, the project has proven to be a successful platform for interdisciplinary efforts. Enabled by the collaboration of a network of over 600 researchers, the platform informs the World Economic Forum's Strategic and Contextual Intelligence team and serves to develop informality studies as a field. Interdisciplinarity is not on the list of streams, but it is crucial for the problem-solving approaches. The idea of this presentation is to illustrate both the challenges and the potential of interdisciplinarity.