The affective economies of private renting in the Majority World

Conference paper: Early draft (do not quote)

The interest in the private renting sector as a mechanism generator of new inequalities has been uncomfortably dominated by Anglo-Saxon accounts. In these countries, given their better institutionalised regulatory, welfare and tenant-activism regimes, much of the focus has fallen on economic and policy studies to propose ways to increase the sector’s efficiency and address precarity. But what about the Majority World?

For instance, in Ghana, landlords’ requirements for a two to five years advanced rent has persisted for decades (Arku et al. 2012). Jumping continents to India, insecure property rights tie both tenants and landlords into risky arrangements (Naik 2015). Bouncing west to Brazil favelas (Lonardoni and Bolay 2016), positive synergies are created between employment-included tenants/lodgers and employment-excluded landlords. Closer to the Minority World but in many ways subaltern, access to subsidised energy price in Romania was initially tied in December 2022 to one’s first residence, turning for once the attention to the estimated one million renters who could not benefit as landlords prefer to control utility contracts (Serban 2022). Far from dismissing the plight of private tenants in the over-studied Anglo-Saxon countries and other jurisdictions of the Minority World (Gustafsson et al. 2019; Soaita et al. 2020), practices as exemplified above stem from and construct completely different and far more precarious political and ‘affective regimes’ (Anderson 2014) in the tenant/landlord relationship.

Following Kumar’s (1996, 2016) renewed call to start understanding the renting arrangements in the Majority World away of theories born from the realities and aspirations of the Minority World, this presentation presents a Critical Interpretative Synthesis of the academic literature (77 studies were identified for reviewing and 65 to contextualize findings). The ongoing analysis pays attention to the ways by which the economies and politics of private renting are assembled through a multiplicity of social relations between actors (tenants, landlords, their families, employes, communities, authorities), materialities (money, houses, infrastructure, geology and landscape), cultural norms, regulatory and ideological landscapes which form diverse regimes of affect, power, risk and trust flowing through any and every tenant-landlord relationship, often simultaneously making and unmaking ‘home’ be it materially or socially, in the real or the imaginary. It is hope that findings will enrich our theoretical lenses in understanding the social universe of private renting.