The Geographies of Garbage Governance: Interventions, Interactions and Outcomes.

Previously perceived as a local, technical issue for governments, waste management is now also a global, socio-political process involving complex patterns of multi-level governance. Yet these geographical complexities have not previously been considered in any detail. This book examines the neglected geographies of waste management, in particular, the integral processes of trans-localization and politicization that are emerging in waste networks.

The Geographies of Garbage Governance: Interventions, Interactions and Outcomes.

Previously perceived as a local, technical issue for governments, waste management is now also a global, socio-political process involving complex patterns of multi-level governance. Yet these geographical complexities have not previously been considered in any detail. This book examines the neglected geographies of waste management, in particular, the integral processes of trans-localization and politicization that are emerging in waste networks.

Until recently and despite its familiarity the garbage (rubbish, trash or municipal waste as it is also known) we generate through commercial and household activities has been considered worthy of little attention except as something to be removed from immediate experience as quickly as possible. Garbage is omnipresent in our lives, but mostly overlooked in terms of its production, value or governance. From a management perspective such garbage has tended to be conceptualized as a technical issue, a concern mainly for local authorities with a statutory duty to provide waste collection and disposal. That the production and management of garbage might have political or cultural dimensions was, until relatively recently, barely acknowledged, leading to its characterisation as a lost continent for social science.

Critical examination of the ways in which our garbage is governed remains embryonic. This is rather surprising for while municipal solid waste (the formal term for garbage) is not the largest waste stream globally it is the most widespread being produced by literally billions of people on a daily basis. There is diversity, both in terms of spatial reach and material content, in municipal solid waste that means it demands significant financial and logistical resources to control, collect, recycle and arrange final disposal. Given the extent of the resources required for waste management in recent years attention to it has moved beyond the realm of engineered solutions to become a matter for political consideration within municipal government (the sub-national tier of government), nation states and international organizations. At the same time non-state actors are increasingly familiar participants in discussions about the ways in which waste could and should be governed as well as being active waste service providers.

Despite the groundswell of participants becoming involved in municipal solid waste management the amounts being produced continue to rise across the globe. It is estimated that more than 2 billion tonnes are produced annually. Municipal solid waste is increasingly fluid, moving both within and between nation states, traversing administrative and political boundaries and encountering differing management conditions. The manifold costs, to the environment and society, of dealing with such mobile mountains of municipal solid waste are such that it is increasingly being considered a key environmental driver and it was in recognition of these conditions that the seeds of this book were sown.

The volume confronts the processes of translocalisation and politicisation that have emerged within the arena of municipal waste by adopting a comparative governance perspective that permits consideration of the multitude of actors involved in waste. In particular it examines the socio-political and spatial dimensions of municipal waste management to complement the dominant technical analyses, essentially paying detailed attention to the geographies of waste governance. As a result it expands sectoral coverage and sits alongside other studies of environmental governance that have focused mostly on issues such as climate change or specific spheres of governance such as new social movements, but it also progresses analytical intervention within the field of comparative governance.

Ultimately the volume provides a critical account of the governance of municipal waste in different locations by examining public sector practices in the waste field, from the local to the supra-national level, and the interactions between these public sector practices and the activities of private and civil society sectors. This interaction between the tiers of government and spheres of governance, frequently termed multilevel governance, provides the starting point for the analysis. It extends existing research in both waste and governance fields in three ways. First, by inserting a socio-political and spatial dimension to environmental science literature on waste management, complementing the existing technical analyses. Second, by extending sectoral coverage of multilevel environmental governance studies that have been dominated by other issues such as global climate change or specific spheres of governance such as new social movements and third, by bringing an important cross-cultural dimension to studies of waste management that have concentrated on single nation states.