Waste, Social Order, and Physical Disorder in Small-Town India

Abstract

India's waste is growing fast; so is its research, and so is the informal economy in which it is embedded. Here research on a small-town waste economy (WE) is situated in the literature on urban informal waste, making three contributions. First, an analytical grid is placed over this small-town formal-informal waste economy in terms of its circuits of capital in the generation of waste. These comprise factory production, physical and economic distribution, consumption, the production of labour and the reproduction of society. Second, field evidence for this waste economy is used to interrogate the three prevailing approaches to theorising informality, revealing how social and economic segmentation can simultaneously drive all three theorised relationships in a complementary fashion. Third, the municipal government's fragmented architecture and informal bureaucratic behaviour reveal not only severely compromised management capacities but also the local state's paradoxical dependence on, and distance from, the informal waste economy.

Urban Informality as a Site of Critical Analysis

“…A multi-scalar perspective is imperative if we are to take account of the broader spectrum of actors involved in urban informality and to understand how their roles, relationships, and strategies offer opportunities for extraction, exploitation, and exclusion for different groups, across different domains, but also in specific contexts. As demonstrated by the contributions of Goodfellow (2019) and Harriss-White and (2019) their rich empirical detail, the specificities of informal strategies are embedded in social processes that reflect both historical context and the political economic pressures and sub-structures of the present.…”

“…Firstly, changing attitudes to informality, framed in terms of state-society interactions and the ways in which a blend of activities along an informal-formal continuum is changing, with implications for urban poor and elite groups. Rarely is the 'informal' a space marked by the absence of the state, and this is particularly evident in Harriss-White's (2019) contribution that highlights how informal activity is hardwired into the State's business models to reduce cost, thereby directly and indirectly incentivising informality in the waste economy. In their four city contexts, too, Mitlin and Walnycki (2019) highlight the ways in which the state itself is learning from informal service provision.…”

“…The enduring nature of informality debates, and in particular the supposed conceptual separation of the formal and informal spheres (noted by Angotti, 2013;Rodgers, Beall, & Kanbur, 2012), is particularly surprising given previous assertions that formal and informal sectors are reciprocally related and entangled (Bromley, 1978). This conceptual separation in academic writing can perhaps be best understood as a construct put forward by academics against a 'pro-formal' argument rarely advanced in academic or professional literature, but manifest in anti-poor practices in towns and cities in the global South (as demonstrated by Goodfellow [2019] and Harriss-White [2019]). Economic and spatial informality are both seen as reason to repress, informally tax, and otherwise further disadvantage already disadvantaged groups (Varley, 2013).…”

“…Over subsequent decades, three divergent schools of thought have emerged, with informality being positioned within a dualist (that is marginal economic activities for low-income households distinct from modern capitalism), 'legalist' (that is excluded from the modern economy due to adverse bureaucracy), or 'structuralist' framework (that is subordinated economic units adversely related to formal enterprises within a capitalist economy) (Chen, Vanek, & Heintz, 2006;Rakowski, 1994). These debates can be detected in much current research, whether in terms of direct engagement with and critique of legalist approaches (for example Harriss-White, 2019;Meagher, 2016), the denial of dualist representations and challenge to the separation of formal and informal spheres (for example Angotti, 2013), or recognition of changing structural dynamics influencing the redefinition of the formal and informal (for example Mitlin & Walnycki, 2019).…”

“…In contrast, informal recyclers in Brazil have been invited to participate in formal waste management services through establishing cooperatives of previously informal recyclers (Dias, 2016;Fergutz, Dias, & Mitlin, 2011). Harriss-White's (2019) exploration of the waste sector in small-town India illustrates the contributions a sector-wide approach can make to our analysis of urban informality. Her ethnographic methodology captures dynamics and experiences across the entire spectrum of waste workers, waste management processes, and waste authorities in a specific urban context.…”