Disaster Waste Management & Social-Ecological Systems Governance

Keywords: disaster waste management, governance, social-ecological systems, categorization, standardization
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 18

Abstract

‘Waste’ as a kind and cultural category can tell us about social-ecological systems’ (SES) governance if we are attentive to who is deemed relevant to participate in waste decision-making and what are considered relevant materials to manage as wastes. Essentially, waste can show us who ‘counts’ in existing systems of governance and reveal what interactions with the environment are considered legitimate and which are not.

However, it is difficult to explicitly see such work done by categories and kinds like waste in our lives as they are usually taken-for-granted, working in the background of our everyday lives. To expose this work we follow Leigh Star’s advice and look to moments of break-down where workarounds are required to navigate status-quo system’s operations. Workarounds illuminate the work done by categories to subsume that which does not actually fit within its bounds.

We use disaster waste management as our moment of break-down to explore the following questions: What does disaster waste reveal about the ‘work’ done by waste (as a socio-political and material category/kind) to create and maintain systems of SES governance? How does disaster waste (as a unique category of waste) add to existing discard studies’ theory? We expect that the difference in urgency and scale of disaster waste from everyday waste management will reveal new insights about SES governance. Here we report on the preliminary findings of in-depth qualitative case studies that trace specific waste materials through disaster management decision-making processes in three locations in the United States.