Middle class waste, working class hands: The politics of cleaning and greening the Garden city Manisha Anantharaman, Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management, UC Berkeley. For South Asia by the Bay 2015 Extended Abstract In the city of Bangalore in South India, garbage is not a trashy topic. Rather, it had come to dominate the collective consciousness of many middle class Bangaloreans in 2012 and 2013, when the city went through what the English language media called a ‘garbage crisis’: the closure of two landfills outside the city in June 2012 meant that Bangalore had nowhere to send its waste for two weeks. In response to this crisis, and under direction from the High Court of Karnataka, the city municipality has since embarked on the ambitious task of overhauling Bangalore’s entire solid waste management system. In contrast to other cities in India and globally that are choosing to respond to growing mounds of urban refuse with capital and technology-intensive solutions like Waste to Energy plants, Bangalore is attempting to set up a decentralized ‘zero’ waste management system that emphasizes source segregation, recycling, and composting. These decentralized waste management systems are also producing new work opportunities for some members of Bangalore’s informal waste sector. Why is Bangalore choosing ‘Reduce-Reuse-Recycle’ over the smokestacks of incineration? In this paper, I argue that a growing green movement among certain sections of the middle classes in Bangalore, which emphasizes individual responsibility, ecological citizenship, and planetary stewardship, is pushing the Bangalore municipality to implement a zero-waste management regime that also includes informal sector participation. Influenced by global discourses on recycling and sustainability, and desirous of living city environments that are both ‘clean and green’, many middle class neighborhoods have implemented recycling and composting schemes, changing waste disposal practices within homes and instituting new supply chains of waste collection and processing. Emboldened both by local success and by repeated crises in Bangalore’s preexisting solid waste management systems, these middle class actors are trying to replicate and scale these socio-technical innovations, and transform how the entire city manages its municipal waste. During this process, middle class green movements have built alliances with working class groups, connections that are necessitated both by their ideological and moral commitments to ‘zero-waste management’ and by the labor-intensive nature of the ‘eco-friendly’ solutions being proposed to handle the waste challenge. These alliances and connections, which I call ‘pragmatic partnerships’ have in turn opened up new spaces of economic inclusion for informal sector waste workers and enabled them to gain recognition from the municipal government for the services they provide to the city. In this paper, I extend Amita Baviskar concept of bourgeois environmentalism (Baviskar 2011) to argue that under some conditions, middle class civic actors seeking environmental preservation shift their political strategies from attempting to exclude poor groups from the city to instead forming pragmatic partnerships with certain constituencies of the urban poor, specifically waste workers from the informal sector. Middle class actors and waste workers interact in what Lawson and Elwood describe as “contact zones” (Lawson and Elwood 2014), where pre-existing notions of waste work and waste workers are contested and occasionally transformed. Interactions in “contact-zones” result in the creation of cross-class collaborations that I term ‘pragmatic partnerships’ because they are borne out of the recognition that the middle classes need working class labor to realize their visions of clean and green cities. Middle class civic and environmental activists thus form partnerships with waste pickers and other informal sector waste workers, who in turn advocate for their inclusion in zero waste management systems by strategically expressing their rights for inclusion in terms of their utility and value as green workers. As a consequence of these pragmatic partnerships, informal sector waste workers are able to access new work opportunities and gain legal recognition for their services from the state. This rare coalition between middle class environmental and civic activists and segments of the urban poor promises to bring tangible improvements to the livelihoods of around 8,000 waste pickers in Bangalore. Through this case, I argue that environmental discourses can disrupt how some sections of Bangalore’s middle classes relate to their own identities, to city spaces, and to certain sections of the urban poor. While a waste management regime that prioritizes decentralization, recycling and composting provides new opportunities for economic inclusion, it also reproduces, and potentially exacerbates culturally-embedded hierarchies and patterns of exclusion. As Ray and Qayuum (2011) describe, cultures of servitude that normalize forms of domination and inequality are fundamental to the identity lifestyle politics of the middle classes. Because the middle classes cannot and will not engage in waste work themselves, they come to engage and negotiate with working class waste workers, who are in turn articulating their right to the city in terms of their utility as green workers. Cultures of servitude are replicated and reproduced as cultures of service in waste management systems. Waste pickers that have the skills to, for example, distinguish 10 different types of plastics, are in some of these new arrangements, demoted to the role of an unquestioning wage laborer who does what he or she is told. Their character, work ethics and employability are constantly questioned by middle class residents and activists alike, and the waste picker is thought to be inadequate as an employee who needs to better himself/herself to work in these modern and green waste management systems. Thus, a logic of client-server relations govern these new regimes, where informal sector waste workers have to go through the middle classes to access waste, while previously they were able to pick waste off the street without having to go through intermediaries. This growing enclosure of waste from an urban commons that sustains thousands (Gidwani 2013) to a commodity that is tightly regulated according to certain norms transforms the ‘bundles of powers1’ that waste pickers need to access it, and makes them beholden to a set of middle class actors. Thus, the freedom and entrepreneurialism that attracts many individuals to waste picking is potentially compromised as they enter new employer-employee relationships that are embedded within a pre-existing set of hierarchical social relations. The commoditization of waste, and its incorporation into new networks of governance and exchange also bring up complicated questions about who has the right to access the monetary value in waste. Achieving a waste management regime that will not reproduce culturally-embedded patterns of hierarchy and exclusion will The concept of ‘bundles of powers’ was introduced by Ribot and Peluso (2003) in Theory of Access. They define access as the ability to derive benefit from things, even without necessarily having the rights of property over them. 1 require more than opportunities for economic inclusion. Rather, it is the democratic politics of urban waste governance that remains unresolved today, and that is critical to the establishment of a sustainable, just, and economically-viable waste management regime in Indian cities. References Baviskar, A. 2011. Cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws: Bourgeois environmentalism and the battle for Delhi’s streets. In A. Baviskar, & R. Ray (Eds.), Elite and everyman: The cultural politics of the Indian middle classes Routledge New Delhi 391-418 Gidwani, V. 2013 Six These on Waste, Value and the Commons. Social and Cultural Geography. 14(7), 773-783 Lawson, V. and Elwood, S. (2014), Encountering Poverty: Space, Class, and Poverty Politics. Antipode, 46: 209–228. doi: 10.1111/anti.12030 Ray, R., & Qayum, S. 2011. The middle classes at home. In R. Ray, & A. 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