Waste and Public Policy Problems for Equitable Development-Micro-level Insights

Abstract

The economy is a waste-producing system, but waste is one of the least studied sectors of the economy. Waste is a part of the ecological crisis, an ever more serious development problem and a labour sponge for low caste workers. For lack of alternative evidence, waste is studied through case material-here, the differentiated waste economy of a small south Indian town. There are about 10-15 times as many informal livelihoods as there are municipal sanitation labourers, many living in multidimensional poverty, suffering lives of physical, social and workplace exclusion, and incomplete citizenship. The waste economy is at the intersection of policies for waste and for social welfare/inclusion. In this chapter, the constitutive contexts for policies for waste and social inclusion are analysed in three ways. First, policy discourse is found to be formulated in a language neutral to/ignorant of the lifeworlds of waste workers. Second, its fractured and sectoralised bureaucratic architecture, in which networked or territorialised responsibilities for waste are dispersed across ministries/departments in institutional tangles, prevents the state from linking waste and social policy and ensures its low status and underfunding. Third, the pervasive informalisation of policy practices (tax evasion, casualisation, formal informalisation through contractualisation, private substitutes for enforcement failures, bribes and top-slicing budgets) creates a constitutive context for lack of policy. The state therefore must need its army of waste workers to be excluded. Policy fields require not just context but analyses of intersectionality. Policy research must attend to (i) the institutional preconditions and (ii) the institutional opposition to evidence-based policy suggestions.