MAKING CHAINS THAT (UN)MAKE THINGS: WASTE–VALUE RELATIONS AND THE BANGLADESHI RUBBISH ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY

There is growing empirical and theoretical interest in post‐consumption activity that results in the capture and creation of value from waste in the global economy. This article engages with two dominant approaches to tracing the capture and creation of value, global value chains (GVCs) and global production networks (GPNs), and their shared call to examine waste disposal and recycling. Using non‐participant observation, semi‐structured interviews, and a survey we examine what happens to the products of one of GVCs ‘and GPNs’ paradigmatic industries, electronics, when they are labelled e‐waste and are imported into Dhaka, Bangladesh, as rubbish electronics. Rather than wasting and final disposal predominating, our research documents a substantial rubbish recovery economy that captures and creates value anew. Consequently, we argue that both GVC and GPN approaches must rethink how they theorize the capture and creation of value.     

Waste Political Settlements in Colombia and Chile: Power,Inequality and Informality in Recycling

There are stark differences between the waste recycling literature from the global North and that from the global South. The literature from the global North tends to focus on empirical analyses of existing municipal recycling services and rarely considers institutional factors. When it does, the theoretical approaches adopted are limited, especially regarding the role of informal institutions. In contrast, recycling literature from the global South does focus on informal institutions, but it does so by concentrating on the struggles of waste pickers rather than on the performance of waste management services provided by local authorities. This divergence in the literature suggests the need for an analytical framework that integrates institutions and recycling performance. This article analyses waste disposal regimes in two Latin American metropolitan areas, Medellín (Colombia) and Santiago (Chile), and explores the link between income inequality and recycling. It focuses on the political settlements that lie at the heart of the waste regimes. As such, waste regimes in these two cities are understood to be a product of the interplay of balances of power, institutions and distribution of benefits. The study also highlights the need to understand informal institutions as relational phenomena that affect both the rich and the poor, and not just as a subsistence strategy by the latter.     

ROUTINE MAGIC,MUNDANE RITUAL: TOWARDS A UNIFIED NOTION OF DEPOSITIONAL PRACTICE

This article seeks to advance ongoing discussions within archaeology concerning the relationship between ritual and depositional practices. Previous researchers have argued that ‘structured’ or ‘placed’ deposits are the result of ritual activities, but also that in many societies the disposal of refuse is governed by social ‘rules’. Distinguishing ‘technical’ actions such as rubbish disposal from deliberately ‘placed’ deposits is extremely difficult, however, and reinforces modern dualistic thought. Instead, this article argues that there was a continuum of practices from formal and ritualized events through to small‐scale, informal acts undertaken on a routine basis, including everyday refuse discard. It also questions purely utilitarian interpretations of storage structures. Drawing on ethnographic and ethnohistorical examples, it explores case studies from the later prehistoric and Romano‐British periods of north central England, and concludes by proposing methodologies through which these practices can be explored more fully in the future.     

Working the Waste Commodity Frontier: Metabolic Value and Informal Waste Work

Ambitions for a European “circular economy” imply waste is becoming an important “commodity frontier”. Increased recycling in Europe has been accompanied by a proliferation of informal waste work. “Southern” geographies of informal recyclers provide resources for interpreting this phenomenon but studies of a commodity frontier in urban waste have tended to focus on moments when informal waste workers are displaced by capital intensive waste management systems. I draw on concepts in world-ecology and materialist ecofeminism to explore the proliferation of informal waste workers in Barcelona and the way their (re)production produces “Metabolic Value”. Informal waste work is shown to emerge and persist as part of a commodity frontier process—where the appropriation of unpaid work from non-commodified spaces is the hallmark of how capitalism secures “Cheap Nature”. The study suggests that, rather than internalising ecological costs, recycling often rests on the appropriation of value from uncommodified spaces.     

Nuclear dreams and realities in contemporary Russia and Ukraine

This article examines the evolution of the nuclear enterprises in Russia and Ukraine after the break-up of the USSR in 1991 to the present and contributes to better understanding of interrelation between large-scale technologies and politics. It compares how economic crises and recovery, political considerations, and nuclear imaginaries – visions of the role that nuclear power will play in conceptions of a national future – have determined the direction of nuclear energy policy. It explores institutional, legal, and other developments surrounding the 34 operating power reactors in Russia and 15 in Ukraine including promotion and regulation; operation; license life extension; decommissioning and spent fuel and waste handling. Russia and Ukraine are connected by history, Soviet reactor technology, and nuclear fuel and waste disposal agreements that shape and constrain the countries’ behavior, and leave great uncertainty for the future given the ongoing conflict between the two nations. Yet both nations hope for some grand nuclear ‘renaissance.’     

The Failure of Popular Justice in Uganda: Local Councils and Women’s Property Rights

Advocates of alternative dispute resolution argue that informal, community‐based institutions are better placed to provide inexpensive, expedient and culturally appropriate forms of justice. In 1988, the Ugandan government extended judicial capacity to local councils (LCs) on similar grounds. Drawing on attempts by women in southwestern Uganda to use the LCs to adjudicate property disputes, this article investigates why popular justice has failed to protect the customary property rights of women. The gap between theory and practice arises out of misconceptions of community. The tendency to ascribe a morality and autonomy to local spaces obscures the ability of elites to use informal institutions for purposes of social control. In the light of women’s attempts to escape the ‘rule of persons’ and to seek out arbiters whom they associate with the ‘rule of law’, it can be argued that the utility of the state to ordinary Ugandans should be reconsidered.     

Enclosures from Below: The Mushaa’ in Contemporary Palestine

This article traces the declining fortunes of the mushaa’, a once‐prominent Levantine culture of common land. Palestinians managed to resist attempts by the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate to break up the mushaa’. Under Israeli colonization, the remaining commons are now subject to another type of appropriation: individual Palestinian contractors seize hold of mushaa’ land and build on it. This article introduces the concept of “enclosures from below”, whilst looking at the dynamics of seizure of the commons by Palestinian refugees, who once were peasants practising mushaa’ on their lands and are now landless, some having become expert contractors. I show that the contractors consider their actions to be a form of resistance against the settler colonial project, manifested in the advancing of the Wall and settlement expansion. This is described through a case study of the Shu'faat area in Jerusalem. Changing uses of mushaa’ land reflect wider tendencies in the Palestinian national project that has become increasingly individualized.     

What is Waste that We Should Account for it? A Look Inside Queensland's Ecological Rucksack

While most Australians are conscious of the amount of waste that they place in garbage bins, relatively few would be aware of the waste that is generated in the course of producing the goods and services that they consume. This ‘embodied waste’ makes up a large part of the ‘ecological rucksack’ of those goods and services. This study develops a waste account for Queensland, using the ecological rucksack framework to illustrate patterns of waste production in the Australian economy. It classifies wastes both by type and broad sector of production. The study finds that the Queensland economy generated more than four billion tonnes of waste during the 2006–2007 financial year. The largest waste streams are produced at the resource extraction and distribution stages, and are predominantly materials that are disposed of without being used or are lost through inefficient use. The majority of the waste is produced upstream of the point of consumption and a large part is associated with materials produced for export.     

Ruling by Record: The Meaning of Rights,Rules and Registration in an Andean Comunidad

This contribution looks at land property relations in a peasant community in the central highlands of Peru. Rather than using a rights‐based approach, the authors propose a ‘practice force field approach’ for their analysis of property relations under communal land tenure regimes. Their study combines qualitative ethnographic case studies with quantitative analysis of data on land distribution. In contrast to rights‐based approaches, this perspective understands the legal discourses that people draw upon to explain property relations as ‘justifying rule talk’ rather than the reflection of a system of property rights. It is shown how property relations are shaped in mediated interactive processes, where official rules, moral principles, shared histories and strategic games come together. The authors use this practice force field approach to study Usibamba, an Andean community that has developed a true disciplinary regime of communal governance based on control over land. The role of ‘rule talk’ and the function of elaborate local systems of land registration are examined in the context of the annual reallocation of communal land. Particular attention is paid to the performance of the president of the comunidad during this delicate process and his reflections on the course of events.     

Deep commoning: public folklore and environmental policy on a resource frontier

Abstract

This article explores the concept and practice of the commons as a holistic, multi-sectoral, cross-disciplinary framework for critical heritage work on resource frontiers. Drawing from my research on forest commoning in the Appalachian coalfields, I argue that land-based systems of commoning vital to communities in the path of resource extraction merit more attention from heritage workers. Commons tend to disappear through their atomization into siloed objects of study and stewardship. This disappearance, partly a function of reductionist, dualistic thinking, also signals a persistent colonialist myth of emptiness. I argue that the embodied, participatory field methods of public folklorists are particularly well-suited to the study and accreditation of land-based commons as heritage. Building on the idea of ‘deep ecology’, the notion of ‘deep commoning’ espouses our implication in worlds we bring into dialogue through the practice of public folklore as critical heritage work.     

Communal Forest Management: The Honduran Resin Tappers

Natural resource tenure and economic feasibility of resource-based activities are two of the most important issues in the current debate around environmental degradation and rural poverty. While many analyses have blamed the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and government mismanagement for environmental destruction, this paper provides a case study of resin tapping in Honduras which formulates the hypotheses that common property regimes can be successful and that economic liberalization policies may be detrimental to community-level resource schemes. Over half of the 6000 farmer-resin tappers in Honduras are organized into forty-six co-operatives that market the tree sap, wood and other forest products. These activities combine the twin goals of community-based forest preservation and income generation. Established legally in 1974, the tapping groups have expanded to include a variety of organizational and technical arrangements. The two co-operatives of Villa Santa and San Juan de Ojojona demonstrate contrasting histories, ecological endowments and economic outcomes. Currently the Honduran resin tappers are facing problems over their access to forest resources, the fluctuating profitability of extractive activities and the stability of the co-operative organization. These three issues are relevant to a variety of community-based environmental activities, and the lessons of the Honduran experience can be applied to analyse the processes of environmental degradation and community response elsewhere in the Third World.     

International Environmental Regimes: Legalisation,Flexibility and Effectiveness

In one of the first quantitative designs, we explore the impact of both legalisation and flexibility on regime effectiveness, using data on international environmental institutions. One of the main implications is that ‘precision’ is an important determinant of regime performance. If the rule and norm system is well defined, well understood and clear, then a regime tends to be more effective in addressing an environmental problem. We do not find evidence, however, that ‘hard law’ is more effective than ‘soft law’ or that delegation mechanisms may be relevant. Second, flexibility in the regime structure increases regime performance – regular instead of subsidiary bodies enhance flexibility and thus have a positive effect on a regime's environmental problem management. Flexibility in states' agenda setting power, membership and decision making do not seem to have a crucial influence, though.     

Terra Economica: Waste and the Production of Enclosed Nature

Abstract: This essay provides an analysis of the “dirty” history and geography of enclosure, as both an instance of primitive accumulation and a production of nature. Specifically, I reconsider the English enclosures as a struggle over the land‐use designation of “waste”. Whereas both open fields and common waste lands were an essential and valuable part of the common right economy, advocates of enclosure came to see these same lands as wasted commons; lands that were potentially, but not yet, improved. This dialectic of waste and potential permeates the fabric of the nature produced through enclosure, which I name terra economica. Typically, this terrain has been understood as a passive repository of free resources, extending across absolute space. While such accounts consider the making of nature into a universal means of production, it is equally important to consider the ways in which nature is produced as a universal condition of production.     

Climate change and our heritage of low carbon comfort

This paper examines the viability of maintaining a heritage of low carbon comfort as an alternative to the energy intensive comfort regime of mechanical air conditioning. In many parts of the world, the carbon footprint of buildings is increasing significantly due to the widespread adoption of air conditioning. Current trends around indoor comfort are unsustainable, and alternative, less energy intensive comfort regimes need to be maintained or cultivated. To date, studies on this topic in heritage and preservation studies have focused on the architectural designs of ‘passive cooling’. This paper seeks to expand this conceptualisation of ‘cool living heritage’ to incorporate other forms of material culture and comfort practice.     

From Force to Legitimation: Rethinking Land Grabs in Cambodia

This article moves beyond a focus on the brute force involved in high‐profile land grabs to examine the way legitimation, regulation and coercion intersect in Cambodia's property regime. It builds on the ‘powers of exclusion’ framework developed by Hall, Hirsch and Li to argue that increased connections within civil society in Cambodia and engagement with Western commodity markets have motivated state and private concessionaires to use different means of land exclusion, with less outright force and a greater focus on repressive regulation and legitimation. These exclusionary powers work through informal political connections, secrecy and obfuscation, which the authors term the ‘power of informality’. This argument is substantiated with two case studies that illustrate a move away from the dominant narrative of forceful expulsion of land users in Economic Land Concessions (ELC) towards approaches that provide in‐kind compensation and carve out land for smallholders: a recent land titling campaign in ELC areas, and the first oil palm ELC to gain responsible investment certification. While the authors remain cautious of the implications of this shift, given the persistence of the power of informality, these cases illustrate the potential for new forms of state–society relations: a shift from fear of authorities to a demand for greater accountability and responsiveness.     

Property Rights and the Environment in Pastoral China: Evidence from the Field

It is widely perceived that the degradation of China’s rangelands has accelerated since the introduction of rural reforms in the late 1970s. The popular explanation for this phenomenon has been that a ‘tragedy of the commons’ exists, as privately‐owned livestock are being grazed on ‘common’ land. Since the passing of the Rangeland Law in 1985, Chinese pastoral tenure policy has emphasized the establishment of individual household tenure as a necessary condition for improving incentives for sustainable rangeland management. Yet household tenure has yet to be effectively established in many pastoral regions. The first objective of this article is to describe pastoral tenure arrangements in northern Xinjiang‐Uygur Autonomous Region. Its second objective is to explain pastoral tenure arrangements, particularly the observed persistence of collective action. It is argued that there is no ‘tragedy of the commons’ and that it is characteristics of rangeland resources and the social environment that give rise to the particular types of institutional arrangements found.     

Uncommon Ground: The ‘Poverty of History’ in Common Property Discourse

It would not be a great exaggeration to say that scholars of environmental conservation and conflict have re‐discovered the institutional foundations of social and economic life. At the heart of this ‘renaissance’ is the belief that property and property relations have a strong bearing on how people use, manage and abuse natural resource systems, and that institutional arrangements based on the creation and management of common property can have positive impacts on resource use and conservation. Two bodies of thought compete for a voice in this literature. One, which aims to resolve Hardin's tragedy of the commons, is primarily concerned with the problem of encouraging collective action to conserve resources that are both depletable and unregulated. A second, influenced by notions of moral economy and entitlement, deals with the problem of creating and sustaining resource access for poor and vulnerable groups in society. This article argues that the literature on common property has become divided between a body of scholarship that uses deductive models of individual decision‐making and rational choice to explain the ways in which different types of property rights arrangements emerge and change over time, and one whose questions, aims and methods are more modest, and historically‐specific. It then aims to understand this evolution by situating the mainstream common property discourse in the wider intellectual trend of positivism, methodological individualism and formal modelling that has come to dominate social science in the United States. In so doing, it attempts to unravel the political and ideological foundations of what has come to be a dominant mode of understanding environmental problems, and solutions to these problems.     

Dealing with the past and planning the future: the urban renewal of Rome and Barcelona through the Olympic Games

Is there a link between Rome and Barcelona's past and their Olympic legacies? This article sheds further light on the two cities' urban renewals through the Olympics on the basis of a historical and comparative analysis, as well as through the lenses of regime theory. It argues that Rome's modest outcome and Barcelona's success can be linked to their capacity to deal with their controversial past. The article shows that this capacity played a major role in shaping the composition and equilibrium of the two cities' informal networks of local elected officials, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs who planned and implemented the Games (‘growth regimes’). The difficulties of Rome in coping with the Fascist experience resulted in a growth regime in which weak and divided public actors – split along the Fascist/anti-Fascist and Communist/anti-Communist lines – were unable to counterbalance private agents' interests. In contrast, Barcelona's ability to reconcile itself with the past – facilitated by the Spanish entry in the European Economic Community and by the end of the Cold War – eased the Francoist/anti-Francoist and the centralist/Catalan divides, hence allowing the public actors to promote a coalition around a project of ‘democratic restoration’ of the city which involved planners, local businessmen and citizens.     

Rude Accountability: Informal Pressures on Frontline Bureaucrats in Bangladesh

This article is about ‘rude’ forms of accountability — the informal pressures used by citizens to claim public services and to sanction service failures. Rude accountability is characterized by a lack of official rules or formal basis and a reliance on the power of social norms and rules to influence and sanction official performance. The article draws on evidence from Bangladesh, a state which has not reformed its social sector governance, to explore when and why poor citizens resort to ‘rude’ accountability, whether they have a comparative advantage in the use of informal mechanisms, and whether these work, in terms of gaining better service. It asks what informal accountability mechanisms imply for governance reform in social services, and discusses lessons for other ‘unreformed’ states like Bangladesh.     

Regionalising resource security in the Asia-Pacific: the challenge of economic nationalism

In recent years, efforts to institutionalise resource security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region have intensified. Soaring world prices for minerals and energy have seen a range of resource security strategies launched—through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), ASEAN Plus Three, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and the East Asia Summit—all of which aim to promote intergovernmental dialogue, policy coordination and the integration of regional resource markets. However, the practical achievements of these regional efforts have been limited, as none have advanced beyond dialogue activities to more formalised types of resource security cooperation. This article examines the dynamics of these abortive attempts to regionalise resource cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, arguing that economic nationalist resource policy preferences held by governments have acted as a major obstacle to cooperation. Through an analysis of national resource policy regimes and the outputs of recent cooperative efforts, it demonstrates how economic nationalism has encouraged inward-looking and sovereignty-conscious actions on the part of major resource players in the Asia-Pacific. As a result, intergovernmental resource cooperation has been limited to informal and voluntary ‘soft-law’ initiatives, which have not made a substantive contribution to the resource security of economies in the region.