Originally published by Elsevier in Habitat International 49 (2015) 393e402. DOI: 10.1016/j.habitatint.2015.06.010 Foreign aid in waste management: A case of Kathmandu, Nepal * Mohan B. Dangi , Erica Schoenberger, John J. Boland Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, United States Abstract: Four decades of reorganization of waste management in Kathmandu, Nepal funded by foreign aid failed to provide adequate services and led to the return of riverbank waste disposal by 1994. To assess the results of foreign aid in waste management in Kathmandu from 1970 to 2010, the researchers utilized qualitative and field methods and examined three major international projects sponsored by the gov-ernments of Germany, India, and Japan. Results suggest that German aid was too technical, undermining municipal capacity and burdening the city with a second waste disposal institution while failing to sustain its own infrastructure. The Indian project lacked focus and follow up programs and encumbered a poor country with outdated equipment that did not meet the local needs. Japanese aid depended on wrong assumptions, stressing costly landfilling that employed heavy machinery and upgraded equip-ment inappropriate for local conditions. The study recommends that Nepal institute bottom-up and participatory style of waste management that identifies where the resources will come from, who will manage them, and how they will be sustained. Keywords: Municipal solid waste, Solid waste management, Foreign aid in waste management, Effectiveness of foreign aid in Kathmandu, Nepal 1. Introduction transfer to these local authorities. Nevertheless, even as the local government assumed public solid waste disposal in the city, the In Nepal, only three municipalities have some sort of formal deposition of solid wastes into the Bagmati and the Bishnumati management of municipal solid waste (MSW). One of the three, rivers via municipal kuchikars continued. From that point, the Kathmandu has a semi-formal solid waste management (SWM). public shunned participation in SWM. Kathmandu has 35 wards, each of which is responsible for cleaning In 1970, the Nepalese government commissioned a World and organizing the collection and disposal of wastes, done by 1047 Health Organization (WHO) expert to study SWM in Kathmandu kuchikars (sweepers). Traditionally, the Safai Adda (sanitary office) (Flintoff, 1971) that was followed by German aid via SWM Project established in 1919 assigned urban sanitation duties to kuchikars, from 1978 to 1993. The SWM Project developed a national orga- who mostly come from Podey, Chyame, and Halahulu castes. This nization, the Solid Waste Management and Resource Mobilization practice institutionalized street sweeping, collecting garbage from Center (SWMRMC),1 to carry out SWM in Kathmandu Valley mu- quadrangles and palaces, and dumping the wastes into rivers or nicipalities, built a permanent facility-the Gokarna Landfill Site open places. Though the Safai Adda was renamed Municipality (GLS) situated 16 km northeast of Kathmandu, and constructed a Office in 1931, the kuchikars and public continued to follow the compost plant in Teku located at the southern edge of Kathmandu historical cleaning system. In this setting citizens were also directly city near the bank of the Bagmati River. See Fig. 1. The compost involved in maintaining cleanliness in their neighborhood and plant with a capacity of 15 metric tons per day of compost pro- quadrangles. duction from food and yard wastes was closed prematurely in 1990. In 1950, Kathmandu Valley established three municipalities as The GLS that had been projected to accommodate comingled MSW its core city centers: Kathmandu, Lalitpur, and Bhaktapur (Thapa, from Kathmandu Valley municipalities for 200 years was shut 1998), and with this change, SWM responsibility began to down in 1993. These closures thus exacerbated the SWM problem in Kathmandu in early 1994. The government then designated dump sites near the banks of * Corresponding author. Department of Geography and City & Regional Planning, California State University, Fresno, 2555 E. San Ramon Avenue, M/S SB69, Fresno, CA 93740, United States. E-mail addresses: [email protected], 1 SWMRMC is now called Solid Waste Management Technical Support Center [email protected] (M.B. Dangi). under the Ministry of Urban Development. 1 Fig. 1. Location of MSW facilities for Kathmandu city (Dangi, 2009). AD ¼ Active dump, AL ¼ Active landfill, CD ¼ Closed dump, CL ¼ Closed landfill, PL ¼ Proposed landfill, PTS ¼ Proposed transfer station, TS ¼ Transfer station. the Bagmati and Bishnumati rivers that served as the only disposal that of most developing countries, i.e. US$2.71/capita/annum or facilities for over ten years. At the same time, India provided a large 1.01% of Gross National Product (Dangi, 2009). consignment of equipment and a handful of countries contributed To examine the outcomes of foreign aid in SWM in Nepal mostly some indirect aid in the 1990s. As these aid packages proved un- between 1970 and 2010, the researchers utilized qualitative and helpful, the government secured assistance from Japan to develop a field methods and studied three major international projects in permanent landfill, Banchare Danda (hill) Landfill Site (BLS), 28 km SWM provided by the governments of Germany, India, and Japan. from Kathmandu in Okharpauwa village in Nuwakot district (Fig. 1). The paper is organized into five sections. This includes introduction, A nearby temporary landfill, Sisdol Landfill Site (SLS), began oper- methods, foreign aid in SWM, conclusions, and recommendations. ation in June 2005. The development of this region as a lasting landfill is contingent upon the government's ability to complete 2. Methods local development work. More on local development work can be found in Dangi (2009). The field study conducted from June to August 2007 investi- Despite the temporary landfill's operation, the MSW problem gated 336 Kathmandu city households from four strata that were appears chronic in Kathmandu. The method of management is defined and modified after a pilot study. The details of the methods technology driven, which disregards a cradle-to-grave approach in used in the pilot study, conducted from December 14 to 31, 2005, SWM and consistently pursues landfilling even though 71% of can be found in Dangi, Urynowicz, Gerow, and Thapa (2008) and waste (household) is organic (Dangi, Pretz, Urynowicz, Gerow, & Dangi, Cohen, Urynowicz, and Poudyal (2009). Field study results Reddy, 2011). This has driven the unit management cost above dealing with waste generation and characterization and methods 2 used are provided in Dangi et al. (2011). Similar methods were used non-threatening environment (Schoenberger, 1991). in two other studies (Dangi, Urynowicz, & Belbase, 2013; Dangi, A large part of the primary information was gathered from 38 Fernandez, Bom, Belbase, & Kaphle, 2015). The 336 households structured individual interviews coming from five categories of selected come from 20 of the 35 Kathmandu city wards using three- people including kuchikars and kavadi (scrap) owners; non- stage cluster sampling techniques representing four socio- governmental organization (NGO) representatives and private economic strata (Scheaffer, Mendenhall, & Ott, 2006). Using the waste collectors; Kathmandu city officials; government managers, pilot study as a basis, a total of 336 households were chosen for the secretaries and ministers; and foreign aid officials (Table 1). The field study. The description of the field study that is relevant to this interviews were conducted using open-ended questions aimed at manuscript is in the following subsections. understanding institutional behavior, history, circumstances (Schoenberger, 1991), and applicability of foreign aid resources 2.1. Household survey from the bottom up. The list of interviewees was developed to ac- count for the frequent changes at the central and local levels in A household interview survey was conducted to understand government and personnel that are responsible for SWM in Nepal. household solid waste information, the effectiveness of local pol- While the researcher interviewed the participating individuals, the icies and governance records, applicability of organizational func- conversations were recorded using a Sony Cassette-Corder (TCM- tions and capacity, transparency and use of foreign aid in waste 200DV) and typed simultaneously as a backup. All the recorded management, and demographic information. To lessen the effect of tapes were later analyzed and compared with the typed transcript. the rapidly changing political and physical environmental condi- tions in Nepal, it was important to complete the survey in a short 2.4. Group interviews duration. Therefore, the entire survey was accomplished in a ten- day period during July 5e15, 2007 by fifteen scientists, including The focus group interviews were held during site visits to the lead author that had completed human subjects research ed- Gokarna, Okharpauwa, and the corridors of Bagmati and Bishnu- ucation. The information from the survey was triangulated with the mati rivers in July 2007. The researcher, with professors from findings of the interviews and details from reports and government Tribhuvan University and Kathmandu University, local experts, and publications. selected student scientists, conducted these interviews. They 2.2. Disposal site observation Table 1 List of individuals