Wastewater technopolitics on the southern coast of Belize

Abstract

After a massive hurricane devastated Belize's south coast in 2001, “sustainable tourism” was the national government's answer to spurring economic redevelopment. Since then, the communities of the Placencia Peninsula, in particular, have engaged in rapid tourism development as an economic strategy for securing local livelihoods, culminating in the arrival of mass cruise tourism in 2016. In a region where environmental resources and services shape the backbone of the tourism industry, controversies have erupted around current and future impacts of tourism on the environment. One of the more polarizing debates to emerge surrounds the role of wastewater management, which is not centralized in the region and has resulted in discharges of untreated or partially treated wastewater into local waterways where many residents and nongovernmental organizations perceive negative consequences for both human and environmental health. Friction between local residents and government technocrats on how to address the issue reveals how infrastructure planning can become a technopolitical practice in which cost–benefit analyses in the form of life cycle costing and environmental impact assessment, presented through the rhetoric of sustainability, are used to influence how water and wastewater are governed in Placencia. More broadly, our findings suggest that the micropolitics of infrastructure design and development can be a powerful force that organizes technocratic governance.

Effect of COVID-19 Anthropause on Water Clarity in the Belize Coastal Lagoon

“…Furthermore, it is critical that future work considers in situ datasets that would allow improved tuning of remote sensing based estimates of water quality as well as improved characterization of plume constituents. It has been observed that these Belize coastal plumes can be comprised of a variety of constituents, including sediments, agricultural runoff, and sewage (Maidens and Burke, 2005;Macintyre et al, 2009;Emrich et al, 2017;Wells et al, 2019), with Soto et al (2009) observing a consistent year-to-year river plume occurrences with coral ecosystems (Soto et al, 2009). Though classified as oligotrophic, river plumes can often cause Caribbean waters to become mesotrophic (Warne et al, 2005;Torregroza-Espinosa et al, 2021).…”

Ethics and ambiguity in wastewater development on the Placencia Peninsula, Belize

“…Despite team members sharing methodologies, there were slightly different project outcomes, albeit with a fair amount of crossover. Engineers investigated niche treatment solutions for residents who could afford it and consulted with BWS (Haberstroh, 2017; Kalivoda, 2017; Prouty et al., 2018), while anthropology team members worked with community groups to develop cultural tourism (Koenig, 2016) and understand ideals around growth, governance, and the levers of large‐scale change (Prouty et al., 2017; Vitous & Zarger, 2020; Wells, et al., 2016; Wells, et al, 2019).…”