The Politics of Value and Valuation in South Africa's Urban Waste Sector

Turning livelihood to rubbish? The politics of value and valuation in South Africa’s urban waste sector Henrik Ernstson, Mary Lawhon, Anesu Makina, Nate Millington, Kathleen Stokes and Erik Swyngedouw Introduction Urban waste is increasingly garnering attention for multiple reasons. Cities are responsible for producing – and thus, managing – a growing proportion of global waste flows, now at about 80 percent of the world’s waste (Myers, 2005). Waste produces a variety of negative socio-ecological externalities, and these are exacerbated by the high densities of population and waste in cities. Concerns over the health impacts of proximity to decomposing materials and the plastics that clog waterways have recently been complemented by worries over the greenhouse gas emissions that arise from waste and its management. But in many cities across the global south, the positive potential of waste has long been recognised. Actors, particularly in the informal sector, harness the value of this waste: waste makes essential contributions to the precarious livelihoods of millions of poor urban dwellers through waste-picking for use, recycling, recuperation and sale, and through practices, markets and production processes associated with urban waste circulation processes (Miraftab, 2004; Samson, 2010a and b). More recently, public policies and discourses in the north and south (often promoted by the state, environmentalists and international donors) are seeking to reframe waste as a resource and promote a more regular and efficient capturing of value through the construction of metabolic value chains. It is not surprising, therefore, that urban sustainability and socio-ecological transition policies consider the urban waste metabolic cycle as a key leverage point for securing more ecologically benign, economically viable and socially inclusive waste management technologies, procedures, policies and mechanisms. While attention is paid to reducing or avoiding waste, significant effort has been focused on how to move from waste as useless and dangerous ‘excrement’ or as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 2004 [1966]) to incorporating (part of) the waste cycle within a value chain (Crang et al., 2013; Lepawsky and Billah, 2011). The idea here is to render waste ‘valuable’ in economic terms as well as ecologically more ‘sustainable’, while also generating positive social outcomes. And yet, as we argue through our examination of recent efforts to intervene in the South African wastescape, it is extremely difficult to address this triad of objectives. Competing interests, dynamic economies and the very real materiality and thus heterogeneity of waste shape the ability of various actors to make either cents or sense of what is and ought to be. Instead of a well-ordered, efficient system of waste management (in the sense of the modern infrastructure ideal as defined by Graham and Marvin (2001)), we see in practice a diverse, highly politicised, multi-scalar set of interventions seeking to push waste management towards an implausible set of countervailing goals. This chapter is a summary of research into different types of waste interventions in South Africa. In a context of growing global and local inequality and deteriorating socio- ecological conditions, the case of South Africa is particularly instructive. The neoliberalisation of the South African state, the widening socio-ecological polarisation, and the discursive emphasis on pursuing a more socially inclusive and ecologically benign development trajectory turn the South African case into an emblematic example of urban waste transition. The examination of interventions in the urban metabolic waste stream provides a lens through which to capture some of the key processes, contradictions and transformations. We chose these interventions as indicative of wider trends in waste management, particularly in southern cities seeking to harness global finance, create more ‘modern’, uniform and universal (and therefore legible and countable) economies, generate employment opportunities, and demonstrate due diligence towards responsible ecological governance. We are ultimately interested in how change happens and how the impact of specific interventions interacts with officially stated objectives of poverty reduction. The chapter therefore describes the dynamic institutional, technical, social and political- ecological landscape of waste management in South Africa and how this in turn is shaping the practices by which waste is transformed into economic and social value, who is allowed to claim such benefits, and what makes for successful claims. We call attention to the competing mandates of government – to manage waste, support social development, and increase employment while limiting the cost of both and nurturing a green sustainable transition model – and the ways in which various actors respond to these often countervailing mandates. The empirical work is based on investigations into i) the technologisation of waste management, ii) the differential impacts of the internationalisation of waste management finance, and iii) initiatives that emphasise collaborative governance and community participation and awareness as means of improving waste management. Before we examine this triad, we provide a conceptual and theoretical entry into the problem. An urban political-ecology of waste metabolism We mobilise theoretical and empirical insights from urban political ecology (UPE) (Swyngedouw, 1996; Heynen et al., 2006), while extending and reformulating this perspective through the inclusion of theoretical and empirical insights from the global south (Roy, 2009; Robinson, 2011; Ernstson et al., 2014). Urban scholars have increasingly demonstrated that research on 'ordinary' cities is necessary for understanding future urbanisation, particularly as urbanisation is happening most rapidly in cities of the south (Robinson, 2011; Simone, 2011). This demands reconsidering the universality of aspects of urban theory, and the development of new theory from new locations. Importantly, this argument is not a rejection of the ability of theory to travel; it is an argument for a more careful and grounded consideration of what aspects of theory can and ought to travel (Parnell and Oldfield, 2014; Lawhon and Truelove, 2020; Ernstson and Sörlin, 2019; Lawhon with Le Roux, Makina and Truelove, 2020). Specifically, therefore, we seek to develop a situated urban political ecological analysis that is grounded in the challenges of cities in the global south and that has the potential to inform practice that is based on this context, while still inform wider circulations of theory (Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver, 2014). We use this as an entry point for further developing the range of theoretical innovations and interventions in the field of urban political ecology. Urban political ecologies show how socio-material flows (e.g. of water, electricity or waste) produce cities and their ‘hinterlands’ and influence their socio-physical environments. Such studies forefront the ways in which these socio-material flows shape and are shaped by ecological, social, political and economic relations and the associated distribution of use- and exchange- values. Viewing waste as a sociomaterial flow that can be reworked by social actors to extract value through the mobilisation of specific knowledges, technologies and infrastructures provides a lens through which to unpack social, cultural, economic and political relations, winners and losers, and to understand how urbanisation structures society and the environment (Heynen et al., 2006). This chapter combines insights from southern cities with UPE to understand everyday environmental injustices in the context of political economic forces and everyday micropolitics (Loftus, 2012; Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan, 2013; Lawhon et al., 2014, 2020; Ernstson and Sörlin, 2019). We build on and inform such theoretical frameworks by simultaneously exploring the impact of international capital, decision-making strategies and expectations about modernity, employment and the moral value of work on local contestations over waste beneficiation. Much of the existing literature on contestations over waste management draws from cases in the global north (for example, Bulkeley et al., 2007). As argued in urban studies more generally, this provides limited grounding through which to study cases where informality and poverty significantly shape waste practices. A large part of the current research on waste in the global south focuses on the practices of informal waste collectors (Millington and Lawhon, 2019; Mitchell, 2008; Samson 2010a; Schenck and Blaauw, 2011; Gutberlet, 2012; Thieme, 2013; Millar, 2014) and broader patterns of neoliberalisation, privatisation and enclosure (Millington and Lawhon, 2019; Njeru, 2006; Holifield, 2004; Miraftab, 2004; Gidwani and Reddy, 2011; Gutberlet, 2012; Fredericks, 2014; Gidwani, 2015; Samson, 2015; Rosaldo, 2016). Our work draws from these analyses in order to develop understandings of the links between policy, technology, poverty, power and waste itself, particularly in light of the changing political economy of waste internationally, regionally and nationally and associated political and technological interventions. This is to say, we argue that the possibilities for making a decent livelihood from waste are shaped by factors as diverse as global carbon finance, the roll-out of curbside collection of recyclables, and the amount of food a household is willing to throw

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