“I salute them for their hardwork and contribution”: inclusive urbanism and organizing women recyclers in Ahmedabad, India

Abstract

This paper focuses on the politics of inclusion produced in the roll-out of recent Solid Waste Management (SWM) initiatives seeking to formalize informal recycling labor in India. I contest the notion that formalization is necessarily the antidote to the precarities of informal work by taking seriously the experiences of women recyclers and organizers in responding to exclusions produced in the city of Ahmedabad's increasingly privatized solid waste landscape since the early 2000s. Drawing upon mixed qualitative methods and interviews with women recyclers and organizers, I argue that recent governance initiatives discursively aiming to “integrate” informal recyclers in SWM can paradoxically result in the material exclusion of most workers from opportunities. This paper contributes an articulation of how livelihood opportunities, organizing strategies, and citizenship experiences are always shifting and contingent in relation to local groundings of capitalist and colonial power geometries and dynamics of gendered and casted social differentiation.