Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish?

TLR — Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish? Impacts of Formalisation, Financialisation and Technologization of Waste Management on the Urban Poor (2016-2019)

Project Description

This three-year project examines global trends in waste management which are reducing access to the livelihoods generated from waste for the urban poor. Environmental concerns from different actors, and awareness of the financial benefits of waste are contributing to the formalization, the financialisation, and the use of technology to replace the labour of handling waste. This could improve health for the urban poor, but also undermine livelihoods developed around waste and recycling and feeds into a wider arena of governance responsibilities.

We examine specific interventions in South African waste management, from collaborative efforts between state and civil society to contested issues of using incineration to burn waste. In parallel we trace national-to-international waste business/state capital relations, in particular those linked to clean development mechanisms. Together this seeks to understand competing claims to waste and the governance processes through which these claims are adjudicated. In collaboration with partners we have done desk-top research on the situation in Ghana and Uganda to increase the comparability of our research to low-income countries of Southern Africa. Theoretically we draw upon research in urban political ecology and development studies.

The project is based at the School of Environment at the University of Manchester in collaboration with the Department of Geography at the University of Florida, the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town and KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The project runs from 2016 to end of 2018 with fieldwork starting in 2017. The research team will engage stakeholders through two workshops in 2017 and 2018 and a regional workshop in 2018. Research outputs include video and digital story telling for wider dissemination.

Project Resources

Documentary film about the contested chain of extracting value out of waste in urban South Africa: Turning Livelihoods to Waste? created by film-maker Yvette Kruger and TLR researchers Nate Millington and Henrik Ernstson (35 minutes, 2019). Suitable for teaching, online and face-to-face.

[expand title=”Click for more about the film.”]This film, one of the primary outputs of the broader Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish? project, introduces a creative look at the politics of waste in Cape Town, South Africa. This film is designed to highlight the unequal, power-laden relations through which waste circulates, and to offer insight into an industry that is often out of sight. Drawing from interviews with a number of different role players within the waste economy, the film highlights different perspectives on waste in order to call attention to some of the central tensions of the industry. The film situates waste management within a city defined by intense inequality and unevenness, highlighting the perspectives of reclaimers who perform much of the necessary collection of recyclables. Current efforts to formalize waste management and recycling initiatives have implications for informal waste pickers or reclaimers, who do much of the primary work with waste in the global south. Our film subsequently highlights the often fraught relationships between waste reclaimers and the formal waste management sector.

The title of the film – Turning Livelihoods to Waste? – is designed to raise a serious of questions about ongoing processes of formalization in the waste sector and the implications for those who currently work in the waste sector. Many who work with waste in South Africa work as waste pickers or reclaimers, and they are often subjected to extremely difficult work conditions. Ongoing attempts to formalize these systems threaten their livelihoods, creating new uncertainties and vulnerabilities. At the same time, there are serious questions about whether reclaimers should be expected to work in dangerous conditions, and what sorts of alternate arrangements may be more just and more ecologically sustainable.

There is no easy answer to the problem of waste. As such, we show multiple perspectives that are not necessarily complementary. Our intention is not to tell a proscribed story, but rather to allow for different viewpoints to be articulated. Our hope is that viewers will be able to develop their own takeaways from the film, and that the film could be used as a springboard for in-class discussions with students around themes such as dignified work, inequality, and waste management. The film provides a visual look at the environments in which waste is found and handled in the city. Combined with sound-bites and insights from the role players, we explore the way different people in the city handle waste, for what purpose and for what outcomes.

Scholarly reference:
Kruger, Yvette, Nate Millington, and Henrik Ernstson. 2019. Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish? (Documentary film, 35 minutes). South Africa & UK: Situated Urban Political Ecologies. http://www.situatedupe.net/tlr/turning-livelihoods-to-rubbish/.
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Presentations and Publications

TLR Project Workshops

Nate Millington & Kathleen Stokes, Proceedings from 2017 Project Workshop
Erik Swyngedouw, Henrik Ernstson, Mary Lawhon, Nate Millington, Kathleen Stokes, February 17 TLR Workshop

Presentations from TLR Final Stakeholder Workshop (August 2018)

Henrik Ernstson, Workshop Introduction
Nate Millington, Salvage Accumulation and the South African Wastescape: Preliminary Reflections
Henrik Ernstson & Erik Swyngedouw, Wasting CO2: Preliminary Reflections on the Remarkable Success of a Climate Governance Failure. Or: On the Efforts of Linking International Financial Flows with Waste Flows in South Africa
Anesu Makina, Understanding informal waste picking using an agonistically transgressive appropriations framework
Andreas Bracht, Increased Value Participation of small and informal actors through the establishment of governmental policy – The case of e-waste in South Africa

Research Team

Professor Erik Swyngedouw, The University of Manchester, Principal Investigator
Dr. Mary Lawhon, Oklahoma University, Co-I
Dr. Henrik Ernstson, The University of Manchester, and African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, Co-I
Dr. Nate Millington, The University of Manchester, and African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Kathleen Stokes, The University of Manchester, PhD student
Ms Anesu Makina, Oklahoma University, PhD student

Funder

ESRC-DFID (Poverty Alleviation; Ref: ES/M009408/1)

Project time

2016, 2017, 2018, Feb 2019.

Changing prices for recycled materials, Cape Town, 2017.

TLR News

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Nate Millington

11 April 2018

Invitation to Apply: Heterogeneous Infrastructures in African Cities

As part of broader efforts to develop regional learning across the continent, the Situated Urban Political Ecology collective and Urban Action Lab at Makerere University will be hosting a workshop on urban infrastructures in Africa from November 12-15, 2018 in Kampala, Uganda. Scholars and practitioners are increasingly grappling with alternative modes of infrastructural provision. This is motivated by scholarly interest in everyday infrastructural practices and politics as well as concerns about the economic, environmental, social and political viability of universal, uniform infrastructure networks. In theory and practice, this is resulting in challenges to existing urban theorization, political agendas and infrastructure provision. The multiplicity of infrastructures undoubtedly creates challenges for both our scholarly generalization and normative practices. While there has been a growth of scholarship, much of this is case-based and performative, usefully focused on what is there and how it works. At this workshop, we will seek to develop new research questions, outputs and networks with the aim of thinking through the heterogeneity of infrastructure provisioning in cities across sub-Saharan Africa (see e.g. Lawhon et al., 2018; Monstadt and Schramm, 2017; Jaglin, 2016; please contact us at situatedupe@gmail.com if you have difficulties accessing any of these materials). We are interested […]

Nate Millington

23 February 2018

Reflections on Situating Urban Political Ecology at the African Centre for Cities’s International Urban Conference

As part of the African Centre for Cities‘ International Urban Conference, Kathleen Stokes and Nate Millington organized a series of sessions dedicated to thinking about the relationships between labor, infrastructure, and politics in cities of the global south. We received numerous papers from scholars working in cities all over the world, from Accra to Delhi. Below, we highlight the presentations that were given in order to highlight the work being done by researchers interested in situating urban political ecological research through sustained engagements with cities of the global south. Old engines, pipes, pumps, and cables at a SACMEX workshop. Photograph by Alejandro De Coss. In his presentation, Maintaining Mexico City’s Lerma water supply system: an ethnography of labour and infrastructure, Alejandro De Coss (Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science), looked at the ways in which the Mexico City water system is maintained and repaired. In particular, he focused on the Lerma System, an inter-basin transfer built between 1942 and 1951, which still supplies the city with approximately 14% of its daily water use. During the course of one year, Alejandro worked alongside the repair and maintenance teams of the Mexico City Water System in two different sites. One was the Lerma […]

Nate Millington

19 February 2018

Provincializing Urban Appropriation

In a new article, SUPE members Joseph Pierce, Mary Lawhon, and Anesu Makina reflect on theorizations of urban appropriation in South African urban contexts. Engaging with Lefebvrian theorizations of the ‘Right to the City‘ as well as Bayat’s idea of ‘quiet encroachment,’ the authors argue that actors in South Africa operate using a different model of appropriation. They note that urban actors in South Africa often act in ways that could be characterized as appropriative, yet do not work to consolidate a right to occupy or appropriate land founded on durable permission. These acts are, they argue, not adequately explained as apolitical or individualistic even as the logic used to justify them is often based neither on rights nor needs. Drawing from these dynamics, the authors propose a ‘third’ mode of urban appropriation, alongside Lefebvre’s and Bayat’s, that they argue is present in South African cities. They label such appropriation ‘agonistically transgressive,’ and argue that it can be tentatively defined by three conceptual characteristics: Agonistic transgression is not oriented toward securing use of the city in an ongoing way, but entails always-ongoing efforts to appropriate. Agonistically transgressive appropriation thus deflects rhetorical efforts by both state and private actors to invoke authoritative adjudication or closure, because closure (whether […]

Nate Millington

16 May 2017

CFP: Working infrastructures in cities of the Global South

Call for Papers: African Centre for Cities International Urban Conference, 1-2 February 2018 Session: Working infrastructures in cities of the Global South Organisers: Kathleen Stokes (University of Manchester) and Nate Millington (University of Cape Town) Infrastructures contribute to the collective flows and metabolisms that produce urban space. From sanitation to transport, electricity to water, these socionatural configurations are essential to the organising and delivering of the resources that shape human livelihoods, economic markets, and urban environments. Urban inhabitants not only draw upon and contribute to infrastructural flows and processes – their environments and lives are influenced and informed by the nature of infrastructures themselves. According to Easterling, “far from hidden, infrastructure is now the overt point of contact and access between us all – the rules governing the space of everyday life” (2014, 11). Recent scholarship has theorised infrastructure as ‘splintering’ (Graham & Marvin, 2001), ‘lively’ (Amin, 2014), ‘incremental’ (Silver, 2014), and ‘vital’ (Fredericks, 2014). Meanwhile, efforts to situate and decolonise research concerning urban life in the global South have challenged conventional or universalist approaches to researching urban infrastructures, along with their associated actors and processes (Lawhon, Ernstson, & Silver, 2014; Roy, 2009; Simone, 2015). How can we continue to […]

Kathleen Stokes

10 May 2017

Reflections on ‘Opening the Bin’ (and waste research more generally)

On the 27th April, over fifty scholars met in Helsingborg, Sweden for a three-day workshop dedicated to waste research in the social sciences and humanities. Organised by Lund University, the ‘Opening the Bin’ workshop sought to critically investigate waste perceptions, materialities, politics, and practices. One of the first workshops of its kind, this gathering provided an unprecedented opportunity for scholars to share research and develop international transdiciplinary connections. Most participants were based in Europe, although several participants joined from further afield – including India, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Over the course of the workshop, paper presentations reflected a variety of social science and humanities disciplines, including STS, history, philosophy, and anthropology. By examining different contexts, infrastructures and conditions surrounding waste, participants also connected waste scholarship to broader academic discussions surrounding urban governance, de-growth, and the circular economy. While diverse in subject matter and approach, these interventions highlighted several recurring themes and questions within contemporary waste research. Given concurrent sessions ran throughout the workshop, these themes were only drawn from sessions I had the privilege of attending. Nevertheless, I believe these themes and questions point to fruitful areas of investigation for contemporary waste scholarship. Themes and questions […]

Henrik Ernstson

14 April 2017

Re-blog: Talk in Cape Town by Erik Swyngedouw “The Return of the Political: Insurgent Architects and The City.”

To keep our new site SituatedUPE post up-to-date on our various activities, I am re-posting this blog that announced the talk by Professor Erik Swyngedouw who gave an ACC Special Lecture at The Cape Institute for Architecture (CIFA) on 8 March 2017. We have yet to create the link to the video we did of the event (AAG and book submission came in between). Departing from the aftermaths of the magical year of 2011’s urban insurrections across many different cities, Professor Erik Swyngedouw will aim to understand our present historical moment under capitalism through re-configuring how we think about urban struggles, politics and the political. This will be followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Henrik Ernstson centering on what it means to politicize and radically democratize the city, making connections to ongoing urban struggles in Cape Town and South Africa. The event is co-hosted by the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town and The Cape Institute for Architecture (CIFA). We welcome you at 18:00 for drinks and snacks with the talk starting at 18:30 (sharp), followed by a discussion. Please join us at CIFA in Cape Town CBD, 71 Hout Street, 18:00-20:00. Free entry with drinks and snacks. RSVP by […]

Nate Millington

27 February 2017

Report from ‘Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish?’ Project Workshop

Report from “Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish? Project Workshop” with stakeholders at UCT, Cape Town, 17 February 2017 Nate Millington reports from a rewarding and constructive stakeholder workshop in Cape Town on the politics of waste management in South Africa. On 17 February 2017, researchers from the ‘Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish?’ (TLR) project met with researchers and activists associated with the waste sector in South Africa. The purpose of this meeting was to create connections between researchers and learn from local activists and experts. During a wide-ranging conversation that moved from the specific dynamics of research to broader questions about the nature of politics, TLR researchers explained their interests and were given suggestions about how best to conduct their projects. Participants in the workshop included Dr. Derick Blaauw (North-Western University),  Musa Chamane (groundWork),  Rico Euripidou (groundWork),  Dr. Linda Godfrey (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research), Dr. Melanie Samson (University of the Witwatersrand), Dr. Andreas Scheba (Human Sciences Research Council), Dr. Catherina Schenck (University of the Western Cape), Caitlin Tonkin (Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation), Dr. Kotie Viljoen (University of Johannesburg),  Dr. Harro von Blottnitz (University of Cape Town), and Quinton Williams (Green Cape), alongside the TLR research team. After an introductory presentation […]

Kathleen Stokes

5 October 2016

Waste management in Cape Town: understanding responsibility and labour

Kathleen Stokes reflects on waste management and political ecology in Cape Town. Kathleen is a PhD student in Human Geography at the University of Manchester with a research focus on community responsibility and labour in waste management. She is part of the Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish Project, which is run in collaboration between the University of Cape Town, the University of Manchester and Florida State University. While attending the ACC’s winter school on democratic practices, I was fortunate enough to meet with a range of people involved in Cape Town’s waste management system. Through these discussions, and my own encounters with the city’s sites of disposal and decomposition, I was struck by the variety of imperatives driving waste management, and the relations between people whose livelihoods depend on the sector. Managing rubbish is a complex affair in any city. In Cape Town, the municipal government is responsible for waste management services, and informed by legislation and policy imperatives from national and provincial government. Within the context of rapid urbanization, enduring inequalities, and state promises of universal service provision, municipal strategies have tended towards neoliberal strategies of contracting out, public-private partnerships, and cost recovery. In addition to contracting service responsibilities out to businesses, […]