No Time to Waste: How States Sanitize the Global Politics of Garbage
Abstract (summary)
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) annual Conference of Parties (COP) meetings have grown exponentially in recent years to become not only sites of formal negotiations, but also mega-events in their own right. Rotating yearly among world regions, these spectacular sites of global environmental governance offer an opportunity for the host nation to perform their particular notion of green leadership for the world. Because of the cohesion of messaging in authoritarian states, this performed greening and cleaning offers insight into the overt and subtle forms of power that structure these states’ rule. Hosting these spectacles draws international prestige as well as scrutiny. In preparation, states must clean and green the host city as well as their image. Waste therefore represents a unique problem for authoritarian host states. Garbage out of place can cause cities to grind to a halt and unite people across class to organize this basic infrastructural failure. How do authoritarian regimes mitigate the political threat of mobilizing environmental issues like waste? Based on ethnographic participant observation, interviews, and discourse analysis, this project examines the discursive and material politics of waste in three countries in the Middle East and North Africa that have hosted the UNFCCC COP meetings: Morocco, Egypt, and the UAE. This dissertation argues authoritarian regimes manage the multiple risks of waste through sanitization, which frames waste as a technical object outside the realm of contestable politics. To counter the potential of waste to disrupt space, offend the senses, or relationally challenge the status quo, states infrastructurally, aesthetically and discursively sanitize. However, these processes of sanitization are not totalizing. Despite the political constraints on domestic environmental actors, COPs may also serve as catalysts for domestic and transnational environmental mobilization if scholars are attuned to the local specificities that dictate the ways in which such organizing is distinct from dominant modes of environmentalism elsewhere.
Indexing (details)
Middle Eastern studies;
Environmental studies;
Climate change
0555: Middle Eastern Studies
0477: Environmental Studies
0404: Climate Change
