Abstract
This paper examines the shift towards centralized waste-to-energy (WTE) as a singular solution to Delhi’s solid waste crisis and describes a transdisciplinary research process that sought to understand how and why this dominant waste management pathway emerged. It also sought to engage with and facilitate debate on the potential for alternative waste management pathways, which may better address combined environmental and social justice concerns. We explain the emergence of a transforming narrative that reframed waste from a risk to a resource, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant trajectory of socio-technical-ecological change in urban development, and reconfiguring waste related infrastructure to involve public private participation and WTE technology. Drawing on empirical studies, involving local residents, wastepickers associations, NGOs, and government officials, we discuss implications of WTE projects in Delhi. We argue that the current WTE focused approach, without modification, may simply displace health hazards across time, space and social groups and exacerbate social justice concerns. The dominant narrative on waste management priorities appear to make certain health risks protected and recognized whilst others are made invisible. We make the case for possible alternative waste management scenarios, institutional and regulatory arrangements that may better address environmental health and social justice concerns. These are summarized under eight principles for reframing urban waste management policy challenges in the context of sustainable urban development. These principles include a reframing of waste management through a sustainability lens that links currently divergent initiatives on environmental health and social justice. It involves an appreciation of complex socio-material flows of waste, the need to move beyond perspectives of waste management as an environmental policy issue alone, appreciation in policy development that the informal sector will remain a key player despite attempts to formalize waste management and the need to provide incentives for diverse waste management strategies that move beyond the private.
Highlights
India faces an urban waste management crisis driven by a combination of increasing municipal solid waste (MSW) generation, an inadequate waste management infrastructure and routine lack of compliance with waste management rules
Why can’t we focus on recycling and composting as a means to tackle the problem of waste management?”
This led to a policy stakeholder forum organized by the project team in January 2014 attended by senior officials from the Ministry of Environment and Forests, the Ministry of Urban Development and the Central Pollution Control Board and a range of other stakeholders representing academic institutions, NGOs and wastepicker associations
Summary
India faces an urban waste management crisis driven by a combination of increasing municipal solid waste (MSW) generation (the result of a growing population, rapid urbanization and changing consumption patterns associated with economic growth), an inadequate waste management infrastructure and routine lack of compliance with waste management rules. The pathways approach for action-oriented research seeks to open up dialogue about what exactly is to be sustained by different pathways (or self- reinforcing trajectories of change) within socio-technicalecological systems and for whom, and to create possibilities to develop alternative social, technological and environmental pathways to sustainability that favor the rights, interests and values of marginalized and excluded people. In line with these aims, the research was guided by the following research questions: 1.
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