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
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