Abstract This article explores past and present understandings of the phenomena popularly known as the ‘informal sector’ in the global South in order to re‐appraise its continued credibility as a conceptual framework for understanding work in the 21st century. The reality of the contemporary global economy is that a majority of the workforce are employed in casual, contractual, home‐based or own‐account work in the informal economy, escaping government regulations and social legislation. New worker‐oriented and gendered definitions of the informal sector, which encompass new spaces of unregulated waged, home‐based and even‐forced labour, have re‐awakened an interest in informality from a gendered, social justice perspective. Drawing on examples from the global South, with a particular focus on the Caribbean, the article examines how thinking about the informal sector has evolved from traditional enterprise analyses to more gender sensitive worker‐focused perspectives. Following a critique of policies aimed to protect informal workers in old and new spaces of the global economy, it concludes by urging geographers to re‐engage with a new geography of informality which moves forward the goal of protecting and mobilising the world's informal workers in all their guises.
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