Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Political Ecology of Waste Management in India

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Discourses and practices of development consistently have held that urbanization is the key to progress. But urbanization also brings a set of problems, two of which are an informal sector that perpetually escapes the purview of the state and mounting piles of unmanaged and oft-times unmanageable garbage. At the intersection of these two problems are waste-pickers, individuals who informally manage the city's garbage. In the city of Delhi, India, the waste-pickers livelihoods are threatened as the city of Delhi privatizes its waste management services in its aspirations to be become a "world-class" and "global" city. This doctoral dissertation research project seeks answers to the following broad question: How can the problem of dealing with garbage tell us about relations within and between classes, the state and private capital in the process of urbanization in Delhi? More specifically, the doctoral student will pursue the following questions: (1) How has the state treated garbage and waste-pickers as objects of urban planning? (2) What information about the urbanizing process is provided from an examination of the tactics and strategies of private waste firms? (3) How have middle- and upper-class desires for a particular kind of urban modernity been enacted through the management of garbage? (4) How are informal sector waste-pickers organizing and contesting the discourses and practices of city-making? Drawing upon existing work in urban metabolism, the role of class relations in shaping urban spaces, the place of the informal sector in the urban economy, urban infrastructure privatization, and the growth of the waste management industry, the student will seek connections among these research areas by examining the different facets of the urban waste management problem in developing countries. The student will use semi-structured interviews with government officials, non-governmental organization, and development agency personnel and waste-firm managers; participant observation at six Resident Welfare Association (RWA) meetings, a waste picker organization (Safai Sena), and a waste firm; and household surveys in six neighborhoods where participant observation at RWA meetings will be conducted.This project will provide alternatives and guidance for municipal managers to develop policy solutions that are more just and inclusive for some of the city's most vulnerable populations by pointing out the distributional impacts of waste management program implementations. From a theoretical perspective, the project will contribute to the growing literature in urban political ecology; draw attention to garbage as a unique form of a common pool resource; contribute to the debates on the relationship between waste and value from a political economy perspective; and pose new questions for studying agglomeration economies and diseconomies. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.