Enda Preceup / Enda America Latina
Research Component
Latin America Regional Synthesis
Marie Dominique de Suremain, 1999
2.Synthesis of Experiences Studied
3.Commentaries and reflections
This synthesis is based on Endaís researches, case studies, debates, and experiences, either direct or organization related, in the following countries : Colombia, Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica. We do not intend to draw definitive conclusions for the entire region but, rather, show the progress of relevant urban environmental proposals, their focus and outlines, in order to contribute to new reflections and recommendations for participative management in these areas.
Throughout this synthesis we will see that, based on the acquired experience regarding solid waste management or urban agriculture and public spaces, an emphasis is usually made on one predominant aspect of urban environmental development. These aspects may be grouped into the following broad categories :
Sanitation : considered as the sectorial emanation of a basic urban service. Here, what is important is to have a place that is clean and sanitized, without considering consumption cycles or the reinsertion of waste into new production cycles. The transportation of garbage and its burial, without processing, by layers at a controlled final disposal site, is the conventionally applied solution, and stands as an improvement over uncontrolled deposits in pools of water and wastelands.
Technical-economy : considered an opportunity for employment, income, or industrial development. Here, the activities of collection, transportation, final disposal, and their financing are the main concern. In recycling, treated garbage is marketable waste. The feasibility of solutions is measured by their income-yielding capacity, the existence of a market, and the price of materials. Recyclers are considered as belonging to the informal employment sector. The content of their activity is secondary and they can switch sectors if they see better opportunities. In fact, solutions are often aimed at finding contractual alternatives in other types of urban services such as cleaning, maquilas, and others.
Socio-cultural environment : considered as an attempt to create environmental alternatives, as a proposal for a fairer and more sustainable alternative city. Here, the idea is to change consumersí habits, to create a participative and environmental awareness among the population and the various actors. The educational and, perhaps, legal emphasis could also be included here, although they could also be placed under the category listed below.
Political environment : considered as a proposal for democratization, integrating social access with participation and with greater human dignity and citizenship for certain social actors or population sectors considered marginal. Alternatives to a city1 excluding the ìvoicelessî are searched. Here, the emphasis is on organizing these sectors. For instance, in Enda Projects, the street recyclers or community mothers extended their contribution to the urban space, hoping to make it greener, as a better environment for their day care centers.
Legal-administrative environment : this category may be considered as a special category or it may be considered as derived from the previous one. Here, the following issues are studied: decentralization; modernization of municipalities; customerís rights; the legal framework for rendering public utilities; financing and recovery of costs for providers of different categories and their legal nature; contracting conditions; and company and management development of public, private, or social organizations that operate as providers of services.
In the city vision supporting the majority of these experiences, several, if not all of these dimensions are present. But it is not easy to handle ìcomprehensivenessî while developing them. Usually the concept of comprehensiveness is approached conceptually, which is typical of development proposals with an environmental perspective. That is, the aim is comprehensiveness whereas relations, bridges, links, and threads are established between one or more dimensions. But in concrete experiences, these dimensions do not agree with each other. It is very difficult to keep a real, concrete, and lasting (sustainable) balance among these dimensions. Usually, for each initiative, a dimension is preferred ñ or saved ñ in each project. When a project has begunn, it attempts to maintain a comprehensive vision, and one dimension slowly begins to take precedence over the others, and these begin to recede. This results in pressures exerted upon the projects, and, thus, they are not able to show simultaneous accomplishments in all of their objectives. It is NOT that they failed to achieve some objectives but, rather, that, under certain circumstances, these objectives were incompatible. This comprehensive vision can then be considered as a demand, as an asset, as a characteristic of urban environmental projects, although these projects are not always totally completed.
Comprehensiveness does not occur because of the dimension of the problems being approached. It is also sought through the relationship between different issues, such as water and soil or recycling and energy conservation.
Current municipal environmental policies have advanced to some extent in the public intervention on water pollution as a result of liquid waste, in particular with controls and plans aimed at industries. Then there is the issue of solid waste, while air quality, the advancement of clean transportation, energy conservation and noise reduction are left for future planning.
We still have a limited vision of urban environmental issues on the part of low-income urban sectors and NGOs. Understanding the issue is still linked to recovering a right to housing, to conventional sanitary services, to a certain ìmodernityî, rather than to an alternative city proposal. The presence of crops on empty lots, of animals in low-income neighborhoods or in the middle of expressways, of unpaved streets, or of donkeys or bicycles picking up garbage, are considered more as ìbackwardnessî than as opportunities for conserving productive natural spaces in the middle of monstrous cities. We cannot imagine a city different from the northern model, despite the fact that the tropical, Andean Latin American city is an apparently unpredictable one. Its evolution is accelerated, shifting, syncretic, mestizo: a city-ìarchipelagoî with an original articulation of urban nuclei, with a particular mixture of modernity and rural tradition.
There is still much to be done so that recyclers are not stigmatized as ìindigentsî, so that their work is regarded an opportunity for the future, so that their lives are not threatened by ìsocial cleansingî operations. There is much to be done so that innovating communities are integrated with their proposals to public management, so that their work is remunerated and recognized, so that decentralization reaches low-income neighborhoods without marginality.
It is also important to remember that the general context of privatization of public utilities in the continent and, in particular, in countries where our experiences take place, generates multiple tensions between private interests and collective or public interests. As private stakeholders prevail, even in the management mechanisms of the public sector, we can observe a weakening of the arguments in favor of comprehensiveness, of the collective, of the non-monetary, of the long-term issues. This means new obstacles for achieving environmentally just and sustainable forms of urban life, even if apparently privatization is legitimized with the argument of efficiency. Citizens seem to fade away in order to become mere consumers.
Several case studies and documents were gathered: some experiences in hiring of small businesses for recovery of recyclable materials in Costa Rica, as well as the creation of a Chamber of waste recovery companies, which is an entity that associates them; some neighborhood experiences in sanitation and environmental management of the surroundings with the participation of the residents and street recyclers, in the city of Santo Domingo; some experiences in Colombia: some municipal, based on associations of private and public actors; other community experiences with an impact on local sites (assistant mayors offices); still others with associations of street recyclers. Studies on waste management on a city scale, which we have called ìtransversalî, in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, were also taken into account.
2.1 Costa Rica
The study carried out in Costa Rica was an extension of a job begun within the framework of Wasteís research plan.
It shows how a large number of recoverers and recyclers has risen in this small country, at a small scale. They operate independently from the public utilities services, in the streets, in public spaces, and in the final disposal sites. The municipalities have subcontracted some of them. As a result of the research process itself, approximately 70 groups or small businesses got organized under a National Chamber to defend their common interests.
This association has given them public recognition for the first time and they have been invited to participate in national campaigns. The initial interest is to have a space, to be recognized, to obtain better contracts with public and private organizations (purchasing industries), and to leave behind their present state of marginality. They have neither legal, sanitary, nor technical proposals nor opinions on tough issues such as privatization of public services or national environmental policies.
The case study is developed in a peripheral neighborhood in the city of Santo Domingo Tres Brazos in which there is no solid waste collection service. The project intends to introduce not only waste collection but, also, its selection in a collection center, with municipal and resident participation. We hope to associate recyclers by trade, enter into a relationship with them, and articulate the improvement of their working conditions as well as the improvement of the neighborhood and the fostering of community organizations.
The transversal study on the city shows recycling circuits, with a variety of private, social, and public actors that act on the same issue of urban waste, illustrating their various forms of intervention and interests. It also gives a detailed typology of the recyclers and recommendations for improving the insertion of recycling to the cityís waste management.
Enda has a variety of writings and research documents on community waste management in Colombia, as well as case studies on municipal, community, peopleís, and private initiatives at different levels.
One of the cases that we will consider is Preceupís current project of the creation of community gardens, with composting, cultivation of medicinal plants, pedagogical programs in child care centers led by community leaders with a long history of experience. This work incorporates a much broader community proposal, based on the care for children, youth, and the elderly and on social participation in urban and environmental management. The experience of training street recyclers, who are organized and independent, will also be considered on various issues.
Other experiences analyzed by Enda in MedellÌn, Manizales, San Gil, and other places, are the result of experiments of actorsí associations for the administration of alternative waste management systems, either at the source or at the final disposal site. These experiences involve the municipalities, the recyclersí organizations, industries, and private companies dedicated to the collection, final disposal or transformation of waste.
Studies were also made on the relations between private and public actors of waste management in MedellÌn and Manizales as well as on the formal and informal recycling circuits in Bogot·.
For the reflections we are going to present, we shall consider the debates which took place at the pilot committee in Bogot· (September 1997) and in Bamako (June 1998).
3. Commentaries and reflections:
3.1 Variety of Points of View and Strategies
An initial look leads us to highlight the variety of points of view, scales, coverage and intentions of these studies. Therefore, we are going to gather issues for reflection, outstanding difficulties, accomplishments, and conceptual advances provoked by reading these Latin American documents rather than do a comparative study in the strict sense of the word.
The Costa Rican documents are not based on an analysis of the sanitary situation or the countriesí utilities but, rather, on the situation of the small and micro-projects in this field. The studies are focused partly on the sanitary sector but, above all, on the economic and political sectors. They are implicit in the context of sanitary services, since the people are aware of acting where the government fails. They begin to deal with the topic of changes occuring in the socio-cultural pattern since they are invited to participate in a ‘Clean Cities’ campaign, thanks to a community educational program and to the collecting of wastes at the source. As a variety of actors associated, eventhough the activity they have in common is reduced, but differed in regards to their position in the recycling chain and in the management of waste. We can observe they have not yet begun to think of a different system in which their role would change. Contradictions in their interests have not yet surfaced. According to the proposals that may be executed in the future, some of them may be harmed while some may disappear. This shows how new the reflection that unites them is. The experience in Colombia in relation to this type of unions, such as the recycling congresses that have taken place every two years since 1991, makes one realize that the definition of common interests among members of different links of the chain, and among professionals in different materials and entities that have a contrasted economic development potential, is very difficult.
In Santo Domingo, neighborhoods are beginning to be related to a new city vision. The initial intervention took place in a spontaneous neighborhood environment, a sample of the crude reality of a neighborhood with no legal public utilities nor waste collection. Solutions at a city scale were not expected by the direct intervention. The vision begins to broaden as integration takes place between actors not belonging to the neighborhood (street recyclers) and the municipality (to acquire the land for gathering the waste). Later, upon doing the investigation on the city and events for reflection and exchange of ideas, the scale changes, visualizing a city situation and policy. Initially, the interventionís focus is on sectors, based on sanitary problems. Later, as the project advances, a more socio-cultural and political vision is introduced. Conditions for intervention at this scale are being prepared. However, it is not yet possible to execute any action at this level.
This process is similar to what was experienced in the previous case study. A more complex reality is being entered into, which cannot be easily modified because it is necessary to get to know a world hidden until now, that is full of distrust, is unwilling to give information that may cause it harm, while stumbling across inert realities, such as municipality inefficiency and politics. The importance of not implementing isolated solutions is noticed but, in wanting to incorporate something new in the urban system, the recyclersí system and the municipality, greater obstacles are found, which do not permit these innovations to be carried out as rapidly as initially planned.
In Colombia, the case of child care centers is based on a socio-cultural and political view. Their main activity is to care for pre-school children in approximately 17 community child care centers, provide school reinforcement and health education activities, as well as give attention to the elderly. They belong to institutions with a long history of service, several of them being present for over 15 years. Within this framework, a great interest in the environment has been created, an interest which had been previously worked on from a sanitary perspective (make water drinkable for children in the centers through socially-approved techniques) and from a political one (access of women to management of alternative methods). Preceup hopes to incorporate an environmental dimension to its community education model so as to teach children how to care for their environment through specific experiments. This leads them to negotiate land from local authorities and to agree with them on urban development alternatives (socio-cultural and political perspective). While developing leadership in the womenís social movement, they struggle against the privatization of social policies and directly participate in local politics and elections. As they keep away from the municipal system of solid waste management and concentrate on an educational experience aimed at preparing a new sensibility towards the future, only feasible short-term goals are set, such as the hope to locally process all the organic waste in a neighborhood, manage it well both technically and operationally, and incorporate their system to the governmentís environmental management.2
Other experiences gathered concentrate more on the participation of recycling groups in collection, transportation, final disposal and/or selection and transformation of solid waste. In some cases, they are subcontracted by the municipality to carry out some of the collection and cleaning functions. In other cases, they participate in separate (or non-separate) collection, waste selection and processing experiments. These associations are frequently the result of long social struggles on the part of these sectors in order to be recognized and to improve their income. The innovations consist of working at urban scales at the final disposal site, with post-collection selection, geared towards the profitable use of organic waste (composting) in one case and to inorganic waste (selection and industrialization) in another. These experiments experience many organizational, technical, and economic problems, due to difficulties in marketing and legal aspects, and because of the confrontation between the peopleís cultural and organizational logic and the business and municipal logic.
Their most recent lessons show the need to continue with significant investments in education for human development, in order to sustain the new ìpartnershipî relations between such different actors and to provide a basis for advanced proposals in economic, legal and administrative aspects.
And the search for orientations of these proposals must continue in the area of education of residents, so that waste is separated at the place of origin and collected separately rather than at the final disposal site in the area of heavy selection techniques. We also think that we must continue working on the creation of decentralized collection centers, not necessarily in each neighborhood but definitely not at a city scale. It is also necessary to insist on the processing of organic waste on a minor scale, an area to which municipalities dedicate little investigation.
Among the different case studies, we observe that the vocabulary used to refer to popular recycling centers still varies: scavengers, collectors, recyclers, intermediaries, small industries, neighborhood groups, and cooperatives are sometimes placed on the same plane, as in the case of Costa Ricaís Canardes Chamber (C·mara Canardes). It would be good to unify the vocabulary that would allow the comparison of systems and the understanding of the originality of each context: For example, it is important to understand whether or not they work on the street opening trash bags that wait to be picked up by the municipal or private company garbage truck; whether the official collectors also recycle and, if so, whether there are conflicts between them or not; whether the people in the neighborhood give away or sell their waste (perhaps they give some away and sell the rest); whether the intermediaries lend their tools to the street collectors; whether there are still scavengers in the landfill or if they all work on the street; whether there are companies with contracts for collection at the source; whether this waste is paid for or if it is donated to the recyclers; etc.
One can still observe that the solutions found are sometimes contrary: in some cases, the priority is considered to be that the resident make an additional effort of awareness, order, and selective preparation of waste materials; in other cases, the idea is that it is the recycler who knows and who should do the recycling and be paid for it.
In Colombia, the recyclersí organizations say that the resident does the basic separation between dry and damp materials and that the recycler selects, that is, according to the market of the moment, they recover the material that is usable.
In our case studies, we have not made progress in this debate. It would be interesting to go deeper into it, since it is the basis of the educational discourse and of the success or failure of the operational solutions that may be implemented.
The debate cannot remain as a specialized issue for the recyclersí organizations, which are relatively strong in some countries (Colombia) and very incipient in others (Dominican Republic). But there is an obstacle to socializing this debate. Social movements are in sectors. There is a lot of talk but few joint actions are made real; womenís organizations are dedicated to health, employment and social participation and they make few alliances with ecological, environmental or recyclersí movements. Municipalities have begun to speak with NGOs and people associations but they do not redesign their public utilities to include their participation and do not accept a neighborhood to create an alternative system with public funding. Entrepreneurs in Colombia meet with recyclersí associations, but they do not go any further than agreeing upon prices and giving them some donations, except in some very special cases. Of the three countries, it is possibly in Colombia where you find more examples of associations of actors from diverse links and work experiences - initially successful but with many problems on a mid-term basis - articulated among actors with diverging interests.
Among the different sectors of residents, contradictions may also surface: those who want the waste taken out to a transfer station and work in this system can oppose other residents who do not wish to see what they consider a garbage dump close to their homes. It is necessary to manage the disposal site very technically so that it does not become a focal point for contamination and handle the information very well so that the residents do not enter into conflict. This is not typical of Latin America. In Europe, social rejection of sanitary landfills has been one of the driving forces behind the encouragement of recycling. In the experiences carried out in our continent, the technical and imaginary difficulties that relate ìgarbageî with contamination and disease make of this an important problem.
Environmental groups are often ecological; few work on the urban environment. A conceptualization of the issue is only newly emerging. The social movements of the native environment are more sanitary than environmental. They are more interested in a clean city than in a recycling city with low environmental impact, as if what is ìsanitaryî was an environmental vision that is applied to the poor.
In municipal initiatives, there is still much distance between consulting and, in reality, calling on civil society and social movements to decide. There are some consultations, but little access to real decisions.
Thus, there are many difficulties for this comprehensiveness to become a reality. The results cannot be hoped for on a short-term basis. The idea is there, but a tremendous work consisting of raising awareness in the public sector, the residents, and the low-income sectors is required, so that some alliances may be maintained.
The management of sanitary services evolves from a public logic towards a private logic, in the name of efficacy and service to the customer, who fades away to become a consumer. In a parallel manner, recycling has always moved, based on private logic (within poverty or within the industrial logic, to save raw material) and not as a substantial element of environmental protection. Their new environmental discourses do not go together with the sectorís real conditions, which depend more on the fluctuations of international prices of raw materials than on public social investment or investment for environmental reasons.
The recyclers achieve a certain legitimacy due to the wasteís usefulness. There is little mediation of recycling at the source. But the complete extraction cycles of raw materials, costs and production alternatives, consumption, waste and recycling are still not studied. These studies should be done at a national level and be applied at a local level so that recycling and composting of specific products, for example, may be related with the useful life of a sanitary landfill. This type of argument supporting recycling companies has been dealt with in MedellÌn, but with privatization and the end of subsidies, these policies came to an end. Neighborhoods that completely manage their waste are not able to obtain discounts in the sanitation service charge, while the large companies have been able to get this discount, only as a privilege, which the municipality does not want to turn into a policy.
The NGOs that provide environmental education do not make much emphasis on these economic realities because there is little information available. Industrialists meet and negotiate with governments and municipalities with the main essential goal of obtaining less expensive raw materials as well as fiscal advantages. But it is difficult to know the marketing perspectives for specific materials. Each material has different fluctuations and different markets. Glass and metal are rather stable, while paper, cardboard and plastic are contingent and speculative markets. The plastic market depends on fluctuations in the oil industry.
The interest of industries in purchasing wastes, is not to reduce the volume of waste in general but, rather, to manufacture the greatest quantity of recyclable products, by even decreasing their lenght of ‘life’, which may go against a city that is environmentally healthy.
Also, they may be more inclined to import waste from northern countries where waste is not often recycled and of better quality than import waste from countries with less consumption.
Privatization has been considered not only on its negative side. It has opened a new space and some big hopes for community organizations. Nonetheless, we cannot ignore the fact that community groups are considered essentially for their capacity to subcontract cheaply and not often as opportunities for social participation.
When community groups are subject to bidding conditions designed for large companies, particularly international, competition is very unfair. In other cases, they are considered actors capable of developing educational activities (in all three countries) but rarely do the municipalities invest resources in hiring them to provide the communityís environmental education. Peopleís organizations and the entities that accompany them must spend their own resources or those from international cooperation so that these educational activities and awareness, which are the basis of any technical, economic or social change in the collection system, are carried out.
In fact, many initiatives have arisen where the municipality has been absent. When it becomes involved (if at all), it does not support previous community work but, rather, integrates the community with conventional systems.
In Colombiaís cases, where the municipality subcontracts community groups to collect waste, these proposals are not related to the peopleís recycling sector. In many instances, the residents that collect and, at times, recycle are in competition with or enter into conflicts with the street collectors.
The search for a form of relating these various peopleís sectors is also a goal as well as a concern without apparent solutions at hand.
One of the cases in Costa Rica and some experiences in Colombia show that the hiring of community groups and/or their arrangement is easier in small cities than in a neighborhood in a big city (which could have a greater population than an intermediate city). With systems that are not too technically and organizationally complicated, systems with city coverage are achieved and, so, are more coherent.
One cannot separate the experiences of public utilities community management from the continuation of the fight against corruption and for greater efficacy on the part of the municipality, as Virup said at the meeting in Bamako. In this sense, it is necessary to have States and municipalities that fulfill their social investment obligations, even if they can welcome community initiatives. The NGOs also have the dilemma of getting more specialized and technical, of doing concrete experiments, to show that the proposals are feasible and to form community leaders while maintaining a more political, critical and purposeful global vision. In Latin America, the NGOs tend to take active part socially and politically. They consider themselves as social actors without displacing the peopleís actors. They have proposals for social and political alternatives that they want to present publicly.
In their relationships with municipalities, after having been able to legitimize these new alliances, the NGOs and the peopleís groups have found many obstacles in the management of contracts or in the definition of promises, as it is pathetically illustrated by the Santo Domingo case. In Bogota, women have had similar difficulties in negotiating with the collection sites of unused lands to make them useful to the community as vegetable gardens.
The use of previously abandoned space, full of rubble and waste, has been accomplished in the best of cases, but the municipality rarely invests in remunerating the community work that has been invested, for example.
School vegetable gardens are not new, but in the Colombian experience, the novelty consists in integrating them to a pedagogical task, that is socially and environmentally encouraged and that concerns public management of the urban space. In this sense, a ìmicro comprehensivenessî is proposed, not on a city-scale, but in a concrete area that includes various neighborhoods. They make the link between the protection of children and the protection of their surroundings and future. The sprinkling systems are appropriate and adapted from agriculture to a school and community scale. They have also networked with other groups of a different nature and have learned from urban peasant farmers who maintain rural practices in the city. Thus, bonds of innovation are woven through the reconstitution or construction of the social fabric.
In their work, environmental issues are closer and obvious. Technical difficulties such as the odors of composting material or leaching give very complex problems concrete significance. Students may visit the municipality landfill and better understand the cityís problems. The macro-issues also become linked to the needs of daily life, such as health and the cultivation of medicinal plants.
Some traditional knowledge is rehabilitated, recontextualized, renewed, and enriched. Something that has its roots in the past and makes sense for the future is transmitted to the new generation.
The issues of habitat and the environment are related in Colombia and Santo Domingo: there appears to be a link between the fight against evictions (issue of the International Habitat Coalition, active in Santo Domingo and in Colombia) and the defense of areas that are strategic for the environment but are constantly evicted and harassed as undesirable. Recyclers must fight for their right to the city. They are systematically thrown out of their living and work places. They do not have access to roads, to free circulation, and their right to work is not respected. They are associated with the waste that they process and transform.
For the social urban movement, it is important to approach these issues, since it is an amplification of the visions centered on the right to housing.
On the one hand, the recyclers often claim that the NGOs worry about their housing situation, at times presenting this need as primary when they are threatened by evacuation without dignified relocation by the municipalities that desire to recover the land where they have settled. In this case, in the name of the recovery of public space, of public interest, of the cityís sanitation and cleanliness, a sector that contributes precisely to those objectives is eliminated. On the other hand, the link between housing and the environmental issue appears for the dwellers, through this approach to the collectors.
In the case of Santo Domingo, the fact that the buzos ñ ìdiversî - still exist in the sanitation landfill is surprising, especially when the modernization of the final disposal is generally accompanied by a prohibition of working on the site, thus throwing them out to the cityís streets. The fact that some recyclers work at night to avoid conflict and the danger of bulldozers that move the waste during the day is highlighted.
Although they are shunned from many public programs and are forced to work in almost clandestine conditions, they do not seem harassed by the police or threatened to death in Costa Rica and Santo Domingo, as is the case in Colombia.
3.6 Female Recyclers and Unemployed Youths
The milieu of street recyclers is male. It is a population that is associated with the street, with the urban center, with the dumps. Although women are always present, some of them being companions of other recyclers, others being independent; but the style of relating to one another is rude and violent and excludes women.
Women become more common when dealing with collectors by trade that become part of the street vendors population. Above all, they are the main participants in the neighborhood programs, which have the community organizations as their base and which they generally lead or head themselves. This poses questions on the types of solutions being implemented. When it comes to improving the situation of the mostly male recyclers, the emphasis is economic. They want to improve their income and working conditions. In neighborhood projects, they are more cultural, pedagogical, and the work is considered voluntary. It is difficult to introduce its remuneration. In fact, the difficulty of some heavy labor makes the need for remuneration to arise. In some cases, women begin to claim their remuneration for their community work, particularly when it is physical and compares to traditionally masculine labor. There have been debates with diverse solutions, in both the Santo Domingo and Bogot· projects.
Likewise, when organizations such as cooperatives evolve towards the rendering of services in cleanup and sanitation of streets and public restrooms, subcontracts in industries, maquilas, and selection of material, the personnel employed becomes more female. For the remuneration level, for their serious image in contracts in which personnel associated with other companies is introduced, in order to avoid the problems of idiosyncrasies different from those of the street recyclers, and for the kind of repetitive and tedious activity, more and more women are selected. The Colombian cases are very telling in this regard.
In Bamako it was asked why women - and children - had to be responsible for heavy, dangerous sanitation jobs in which health, in particular, was at stake when they are generally recognized as having a certain vulnerability.
The proximity of this issue of waste and sanitation with the traditional domestic duties of cleaning and housework for women, is part of the explanation. This division of work is an issue of concern. It was present in the community jobs regarding water and basic sanitation as well.
When women relate the issue to health, children, the healthy environment, and community participation, and they do not become solely responsible for heavy labor, the contradiction is not as apparent. They feel they have access to issues of interest and importance. The question regarding the load of the issueís responsibility remains open.
3.7 Legal Changes
This issue has been little explored in the case studies presented. It is necessary to undertake it in order to evaluate the possibilities for lasting changes: the legal ways in which communities render services is rapidly changing, due to decentralization as to privatization. It is necessary to introduce legal environmental training as well as in the management of public services in order to propose special clauses in bids, manageable contracts and possibilities for innovating and obtaining municipal support for community practices.
Imitation is criticized. It is better to conserve strong cultural roots and local policies and incorporate elements from other experiences which are learned through exchanges and are adapted.
Problems of conflicts in contexts of violent cities.
Relationships with other urban environmental issues.
4.2 To the Private and Industrial Sectors:
4.3 To the Municipalities:
4.4 To the Cooperation, UE and Others: