ABSTRACT The crucial role of the informal economy in urban environmental management is yet to be acknowledged in policy-making. This paper explores the sustainability discourses that shape urban environmental policies, and how they relate to different conceptualisations of the informal economy. Focusing on Mexico City, this paper analyses the discourses of policy-makers and their reflection in the city’s waste management plan. Results show reformist and radical discourses of sustainability are correlated with preferences as to the integration or exclusion of the informal economy in environmental policy. In addressing Mexico City’s environmental challenges, policy-makers have embraced a reformist sustainability discourse that focuses on technological fixes to environmental degradation and promotes a techno-managerial mode of governing. This discourse is correlated with a view of the informal economy as a barrier to the sustainability transition, which leads to the exclusion of informal workers from the policy arena and renders invisible their working conditions and their contribution to urban life. The paper concludes that the reformist sustainability discourse obscures and reproduces environmental injustices – repoliticization of the sustainability discourses shaping urban environmental policies is necessary to achieve sustainability transitions that are also socially just.

中文翻译：

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改革主义的可持续性话语和非正规经济被排除在墨西哥城的环境政策之外

摘要 非正规经济在城市环境管理中的关键作用尚未在政策制定中得到承认。本文探讨了塑造城市环境政策的可持续性话语，以及它们如何与非正规经济的不同概念化相关联。本文以墨西哥城为中心，分析了决策者的话语及其在城市废物管理计划中的反映。结果表明，关于可持续性的改革主义和激进话语与将非正规经济纳入或排除在环境政策中的偏好相关。在应对墨西哥城的环境挑战时，政策制定者已经接受了一种改革主义的可持续性话语，该话语侧重于解决环境退化的技术并促进技术管理模式。这种话语与将非正规经济视为可持续转型障碍的观点相关联，这导致非正规工人被排除在政策领域之外，并使他们的工作条件和对城市生活的贡献隐形。该论文的结论是，改革派的可持续性话语掩盖并再现了环境不公正——塑造城市环境政策的可持续性话语的再政治化对于实现社会公正的可持续性转型是必要的。