Who Governs the Wasteland? Bangkok’s Informal Recycling Sector in Urban Waste Management

Abstract

Amidst rapid population growth and urbanization, municipalities confront many challenges posed by waste generation, and its subsequent collection and disposal. In light of these challenges, an integrated solid waste management has emerged as an alternative and more holistic approach to tackling waste challenges, including a more serious consideration of power dynamics and relationships between different actors and interests. Integrated solid waste management in developing countries further reveals an active informal sector and various practices of informality in resource recovery and recycling. Yet, it remains unclear if solid waste management systems can further integrate the informal sector in such a way that will promote co-benefits in the form of more economic efficiency, less environmental pollution and higher recycling rates, and greater livelihood and social equity, particularly for those employed in the informal sector. This thesis examines the politics of urban governance and development through the case of solid waste management in the Bangkok Metropolitan Area, Thailand. It employs a discourse analysis to discern the power relations embedded within the discourses around informality, particularly in terms of who benefits and loses within the city’s solid waste management system and practices. This study primarily draws its data from 17 in-depth, unstructured interviews with waste actors in Bangkok from national and local governments, private companies, international organizations, NGOs, academics, media, and the informal recycling sector. The central finding from this study shows how informal practices and waste actors operate under a liberal economic logic in which waste is principally redefined from a problem into a resource and in which the informal sector plays a critical role in rendering waste into an economically valuable good.