Mediating Response-ability in Planning: The Elusiveness of the Cambodia Waste Management Report

Abstract

This article examines how the notion of ‘shared responsibility’ is enacted in Cambodia’s waste management planning report, Phnom Penh Waste Management Strategy and Action Plan 2018–2035. Reframing the concept of ‘responsibility’ as ‘responseability’, I aim to foreground the relational aspects of responsibility, particularly human and more-than-human relations, to which the anthropology of planning has paid relatively little attention. I demonstrate how the report envisions various stakeholders’ abilities to respond to the current waste management challenges by examining three modes of mediation: legality, visibility and infrastructural microbiopolitics. Methodologically, I demonstrate that the bureaucratic report can serve as a helpful tool for waste scholars to uncover how different realities of waste are enacted and made manageable ‘on paper’. I argue that planning not only produces an ‘elusive promise’ but also engenders ‘elusive responses’: waste planning always involves managing complex relations in addition to mere waste materials.