Doctoral Dissertation Research: Participatory Cities? The Sexual Politics of Waste in Dakar, Senegal

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The rise of neoliberalism as a development paradigm has brought to the fore a constellation of ideas promoting community-based development strategies. Spearheaded by a variety of institutional sources, these approaches dominate contemporary development policy in Africa and are increasingly being employed in the provision of urban public services of water, housing upgrades, and waste management. The impacts and implications of participatory development, however, are the subject of intense debate. This doctoral dissertation project interrogates the empowerment claims of participatory development through examining the sexual politics of community-based waste projects in Dakar, Senegal. It will compare divergent neighborhood outcomes"ranging from complete abandonment to long-term expansion" of women-led trash collection projects initiated by a Senegalese NGO in three severely under-serviced, socio-economically similar Lebou neighborhoods on the periphery of Dakar. Using participant observation, surveys, archival research, mapping of waste practices, and in-depth interviews with project leaders, household members, and leaders of civic and public institutions, the project will be conducted in two phases. The first phase will establish the gendered discourses surrounding waste and thus how cultural meanings surrounding waste shape the socio-spatial organization of waste-work and thus the political landscape of waste management. The second phase builds on the first through a comparative analysis of struggles around three key variables in each neighborhood: Islam, gender roles, and the role of the local state, expressed through the discursive idiom of waste. Through exposing the contours of the local political economy of waste, the project will reveal the landscape of benefit and responsibility in these projects and thus shed light on the very different outcomes in each neighborhood and their empowerment implications. This project probes the empowerment claims of community-based trash collection projects in order to lend insight into participation as a primary strategy for urban development in Africa. This study asserts the political nature of participatory development projects and places local political contestation at the conjuncture of intra-household dynamics and larger political-economic forces. As such, it promises to lend insight into development policy and practice as well as a wide-ranging set of questions regarding urban governance in the exploding metropolises of the global South. Furthermore, it will contribute to development debates on civil society and the state as well as geographical approaches considering place, gender, and particularly, African trajectories within the uneven expressions of neoliberal globalization. This award is co-funded by NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering.