Clean city politics: An urban political ecology of solid waste in West Bengal, India

Abstract

Solid waste management is often perceived as one of the most pressing environmental problems facing local governments in urban India and elsewhere in the global south. However, solid waste is not simply a managerial problem but is in many ways a highly political issue that involves diverse political actors at different scales. Particularly at the local level, solid waste management can also be a key part of broader political strategies, acting through its unique materiality as an environmental artefact and social relic. In this paper, we use an urban political ecology approach to examine a recent segregation-at-source project in a small town in West Bengal as a lens to understand more general multi-scalar, socio-political urban processes. Drawing primarily upon qualitative field research, the paper shows how diffuse forms of power and different governmentalities were applied between and within state-level government agents, municipal authorities, local waste workers and local communities to implement and (re)shape this project. The research points to the complexity of urban environmental governance and everyday politics in which action repertoires ranging from threats, the creation of environmental and hygienic subjects, moral appeals and economic rationality, underpinned by the harmful character of waste and by socio-cultural imaginaries thereof, (re)produced uneven political ecologies of waste between and within different neighbourhoods of the city.

Transformative top-down planning in a small African city: How residents in Bagamoyo, Tanzania connect with a city in motion

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Domestic groundwater abstraction in Lagos, Nigeria: a disjuncture in the science-policy-practice interface?

“…Cavallini's perspective accords with new theorisations of the state that emphasise the role of multiple actors in shaping the production of urban space, highlighting how power rests with both state and non-state actors (Schindler 2014). In areas where access to infrastructure is uneven and contested, stateled policy actions are just one shaper of practice (Mac-Farlane and Desai 2015, Cornea et al 2017).…”

Uneven urban metabolisms: toward an integrative (ex)urban political ecology of sustainability in and around the city

“…Studies claiming the mantle of urban political ecology tend to take distinctly Marxist approach, focusing on cities to the exclusion of other urbanizing spaces and highlighting economic, political, and ecological processes taking place on the scale of urban regions. It is not uncommon now for scholars to call urban political ecology a paradigm, conceptual lens, sub-field, or approach (Karpouzoglou and Zimmer 2016;Cornea, Véron, and Zimmer 2017; Silver 2015; Holifield and Schuelke 2015), yet how this would differ from a "general" political ecology approach, is unclear. In contrast, literature on the ExPE has tended to borrow from cultural landscape studies, focusing on representations of nature and differing ideals at the local scale.…”