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Reclaiming Territory from Below Grassroots Environmentalism and Waste Conflicts in Campania, Italy De Rosa, Salvatore Paolo

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Reclaiming Territory from Below Grassroots Environmentalism and Waste Conflicts in Campania, Italy De Rosa, Salvatore Paolo Reclaiming Territory from Below Grassroots Environmentalism and Waste Conflicts in Campania, Italy De Rosa, Salvatore Paolo 2017 Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): De Rosa, S. P. (2017). Reclaiming Territory from Below: Grassroots Environmentalism and Waste Conflicts in Campania, Italy. Lund University. Total number of authors: 1 Creative Commons License: CC BY-NC-SA General rights Unless other specific re-use rights are stated the following general rights apply: Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Read more about Creative commons licenses: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. LUND UNIVERSITY PO Box 117 221 00 Lund +46 46-222 00 00 SALVATORE PAOLO DE PAOLO ROSA SALVATORE Reclaiming Territory from Below This thesis is an engaged ethnography of grassroots environmental mobilizations during and beyond the waste conflicts of Campania. It retraces the history of the urban and toxic waste ’crises’ in the region Reclaiming from Below 2017 Territory Reclaiming Territory from Below and inquires the emergence, progression and legacies of popular Grassroots Environmentalism and Waste Conflicts in environmentalism from 2000 to 2015. Under siege of waste and contaminants, and struggling against Campania, Italy physical and epistemic violence, the grassroots committees and the Stop Biocide Coalition of Campania strive to defend and reclaim their SALVATORE PAOLO DE ROSA | FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES | LUND UNIVERSITY territories. Which kind of politics of society-nature relationships do their strategies and meanings outline? By interrogating the knowledges and the spatial interventions of grassroots movements, the dissertation elaborates conceptual contributions to political ecology based on a dialogue between activist and academic approaches. Popular environmental protests such as Campania, this thesis argues, deserve serious attention since they have the potential to progress into transformative political projects that challenge noxious socioecological configurations and perform alternative ones. LUND UNIVERSITY 533757 Faculty of Social Sciences Department of Human Geography ISBN 978-91-7753-375-7 789177 9 Reclaiming Territory from Below Salvatore Paolo De Rosa Keg, Lund University Reclaiming Territory from Below Grassroots Environmentalism and Waste Conflicts in Campania, Italy Salvatore Paolo De Rosa DOCTORAL DISSERTATION by due permission of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University, Sweden. To be defended at Världen, Geocentrum I. 22 September 2017. 1 pm. Faculty opponent Professor Julie Sze, University of California, Davis Organization Document name LUND UNIVERSITY Date of issue Author(s) Salvatore Paolo De Rosa Sponsoring organization Title: Reclaming Territory from Below. Grassroots Environmentalism and Waste Conflicts in Campania, Italy In the course of 2000s, the region of Campania in southern Italy and its capital city Naples became global icons of waste mismanagement after the images of piles of rubbish occluding their urban areas hit the headlines. Conventional explanations, in Italy and elsewhere, pointed to administrative failure, cultural backwardness and mafia infiltrations as the main causes of waste mishandling. In the same narratives, local people opposing the construction of landfills, incinerators and storage sites were labeled the root of the problem. However, what these explanations could not account for was the persistence, the breadth and the magnitude of social mobilizations around environmental concerns and their engagements with issues beyond the urban trash. With this thesis, I address this gap by unearthing the political, socioecological and cultural dynamics of grassroots environmentalism in Campania. My aim is twofold: one the one hand, to debunk hegemonic narratives of the waste ‘crises’, alongside certain framings of protests, through an analysis of the political economy and ecology of waste metabolisms and by investigating specific instances of popular environmentalism; on the other hand, to inquire the politics of society-nature relationships that emerges from grassroots environmental organizing so to work out conceptual contributions to political ecology based on a dialogue between activist and academic knowledges. Rooted in previous activist engagement and on ten months of empirical research with the grassroots committees and the Stop Biocide Coalition of Campania, this thesis reconsiders the recent history of the region’s urban and toxic waste ‘crises’ and investigates the emergence, the outcomes and the legacies of grassroots environmentalism from 2000 to 2015. Positioned across the fields of political ecology, anthropology and geography, the research traces the drivers, the historical depth, the spatial and ecological articulations, and the power relations embedded in the Campania’s waste metabolisms. Next to clarifying the processes leading to waste occupation, the main contribution is an ethnography of social mobilizations. By focusing on the knowledge generation and on the spatial interventions of the committees and the Coalition, the research explores the bottom-up defense, reimagination and reclamation of territory in the course of environmental conflicts, scrutinizing resistance strategies and meaning-making processes. The overarching question asks how the grassroots environmental movements experienced, contested and counteracted processes of waste accumulation and socio-environmental degradation. In particular, analytical attention is devoted to charting the emergence of alternative imaginaries and practices of socioecological relations with a transformative political scope. Accordingly, the four articles included in the thesis represent three empirically grounded theoretical interventions and one methodological reflection into the concerns of the research. The findings suggest that socio-environmental conflicts such as Campania epitomize a crucial question of our times: the relations between the unequal distribution of power, the physical and cultural survival of social groups, and the maintenance of ecological conditions suitable for life. The grassroots environmental movements of Campania have developed strategies and notions to tackle these issues that I bring to academic scrutiny. By elaborating the concepts of commoning, ecological decolonization and competing territorialisations, I expand and complement the groundwork of activists, establishing links with emerging debates that interrogate the relevance of grassroots environmental mobilizations for projects of broader political emancipation. Key words: grassroots movements, popular environmentalism, territory, waste management, environmental conflicts, organized crime, Southern Italy, political ecology, socioecological metabolism Classification system and/or index terms (if any) Supplementary bibliographical information Language ISSN and key title: 978-91-7753-376-4 ISBN: 978-91-7753-375-7 Recipient’s notes Number of pages 243281 Price Security classification I, the undersigned, being the copyright owner of the abstract of the above-mentioned dissertation, hereby grant to all reference sources permission to publish and disseminate the abstract of the above-mentioned dissertation. Signature Date 3/7/2017 Reclaiming Territory from Below Grassroots Environmentalism and Waste Conflicts in Campania, Italy Salvatore Paolo De Rosa Coverphoto by Roberto Carro Copyright Salvatore Paolo De Rosa Faculty of Social Sciences Department of Human Geography ISBN 978-91-7753-375-7 (print) ISSN 978-91-7753-376-4 (electronic) Printed in Sweden by Media-Tryck, Lund University Lund 2017 “The territorial question isn’t the same for us as it is for the State. For us it’s not about possessing territory. Rather, it’s a matter of increasing the density of the communes, of circulation, and of solidarities to the point that the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to all authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to be the territory” Invisible Committee (The Coming Insurrection, 2009) “Trash is gold” Nunzio Perrella (camorra boss, 1994) Content Content ..................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements ...................................................................................... iii List of articles ............................................................................................... vi List of abbreviations .................................................................................... vii List of maps and tables ................................................................................ vii 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................
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