Global synthesis of preceup’s research component
Introduction *
Global Agenda for Urban Environment *
Urban environment management areas *
Global View *
Policy issues *
Technical options *
Policies governing informal sector *
Legal and regulatory provisions *
Planning issues *
Decentralisation and micro-planning *
Integration with other sectors *
Finance for Management of Urban Environment *
Cost-sharing *
Marketability *
Organisational issues *
Efficiency in operations *
Unionisation and Co-operativisation *
Partnership issues *
Private Sector *
Social Privatisation *
Role of NGOs *
Networking *
Community education *
Conclusions and recommendations *
Conclusions *
Recommendations *
The objectives of economic development as they exists today seems to be conflicting with environmental considerations, resulting in the absence of effective environmental management in the cities. Cities are full of contradictions for human development, presenting centres of "growth and wealth" on the one hand and "need and poverty" on the other. Poverty to a large extent is linked with the degraded environment and the rapid population growth. But there is a tendency to overemphasise the second factor, thereby undermining the consequences of degraded environment on perpetuating poverty, although the impact of local environments are both visible and dangerous.
Environmental degradation has long term effects on resources and human potentials, thereby threatening the overall eco-system. On the information front, there is an absence of the most essential information for decision making and for execution of appropriate development programmes which would incorporate environment-security-poverty system. This would also have implications for the opportunity for participation of the poor in the general socio-political and economic system. It may be necessary to undertake a careful analysis of the living conditions of the poor and their perceptions on the daily environment, coupled with their creative responses, thereby contributing to our understanding of the major source of progress.
Cities today are duel systems providing many spaces for self-management and planning at settlement level on the one hand, and on the other, restraining popular initiatives through state interventions. In view of such restraints, and the inadequacies of bureaucratic planning and technocratic management models, the prospects of strengthening popular autonomy and self expression will have to be effectively re-enforced and integrated for economic independence and political democracy.
Global Agenda for Urban Environment
Global Agenda for Urban Environment of the United Nations Conference of Human Settlements (UNCHS), have underlined the principles governing the process of Urban Environment Planning and Management (EPM). International support programs of United Nations agencies, other multilateral organisations, bilateral institutions, NGOs and of other international organisations illustrate strategies for co-operating with and supporting cities in implementing their urban environment agenda based on the Global Agenda.
These principles have been grouped under five main headings:
One may notice that these principles can be fully operationalised only when grass-roots initiatives are allowed to operate freely as these will have consequences for socio-cultural and political energies that get released at the settlement level. The examination of these in further detail brings forth certain key components that are to be promoted by the state authorities.
The key components include:
However, many questions will have to be answered before the state authorities decide to promote these key components.
Although, one can list a number of environmental areas that need immediate attention, the concerns of Preceup, as reflected in terms of research and action exercises in the Third World countries during the last few years, cover two major areas. These major areas of urban environment, that is, solid waste, and sanitation, which affect the lifestyle of the masses, are influenced directly by the manner in which these areas are addressed (see Chart). A number of documents were produced as a part of Preceup exercise. These include fiches, case studies, city studies, project reports, regional studies etc.
Urban environment management areas
|
Areas |
Source |
Impacts |
Management Processes |
Technologies |
Actors |
|
Solid waste |
Industries, markets, domestic waste, institutional |
Land quality, health, economic environment, |
Cost-sharing, community management, partnership, administrative control, penal actions, decentralised responsibility, advocacy, membership, unionisation, co-operativisation, privatization, community participation |
Land fill, incinerators, bio-gas, composting, reuse, recycling, vermiculture, pelletisation, pyrolisation |
Industries, administration, NGOs, CBOs, informal sector, families and communities |
|
Sanitation |
Domestic, institutional |
Health and environment |
Cost-sharing, partnership, administrative control, penal actions, decentralised responsibility, co-operativisation, advocacy, privatization, community participation |
Underground sewer system, open drainage system, bio-gas, composting, septic tanks, aereated lagoons |
Administration, NGOs, CBOs, families and communities |
Global View
Management of Urban Environment has now become a global issue. Various technological options have been tried by different actors to find viable alternatives. These experiments have significantly established the fact that management of urban environment is not just a technical issue, nor a purely financial outlook. Basically, it has socio-political and cultural implications, which need solutions through imaginative policies, administrative re-orientation, institutional and organizational provisions and informed population. It is therefore imperative to review the global experiences in management of urban environment from various dimensions. This global report tries to synthesize experiences drawn from the regional documents of Latin America, Africa and Asia so as to present the issues related to management of urban environment with corresponding recommendations emerging from the global experiences. Four major issues come into pre-dominance which can be grouped under policy issues, planning issues, organizational issues and partnership issues.
The policy issues revolve round identification of appropriate technical options, policies governing informal sector with a special consideration for poverty groups, issues relating to legalizing and licensing of workers in environment related marginalised activities such as rag-picking.
It is observed that a number of technologies seem to be competing for market and the policy makers come under pressure to opt for certain technologies, irrespective of their relevance at the local level. All these years, various technical options have been experimented at a very high cost and the experience shows that these had to be replaced even before the costs could be recovered. A continuous shift in technical options, when these do not produce appropriate results puts a heavy financial burden on Third World countries. Many a times these have been political decisions or compulsions forcing the countries to borrow heavily from multilateral funding agencies. Further, in most policies influencing technology choice, one can observe primarily the technical rationality without consideration to stakeholders or democratization of the process of decision-making and hence those who are directly affected have very little scope to contribute to these options.
Some of the basic factors that need to be looked into in the choice of technology, therefore, include the following:
Appropriateness to environmental issues
The Asian regional paper mentions that land fill being the most common method of disposal of waste, certain policy issues governing the location of the land fill, and the size of the land fill, need to be addressed. Selection of site for land fill method of disposal should take into account the following:
Also, other considerations, such as whether land fill site can be located within agriculture zone and what are the implications of such a land fill site for the productivity of agriculture land or the nuisance of rodents and pests for the crops, are important. This issue becomes more complex if hazardous waste is allowed to be disposed off on such sites. The Sri Lankan experience highlights the need for careful study of the impact of landfill on agriculture land quality in the surrounding areas.
Appropriateness to local conditions (socio-cultural and political)
One can find a technical and conceptual innovation in Colombian experiences. School vegetable gardens are not new, but the novelty consists in integrating them to a pedagogical task, that is socially and environmentally encouraged and that encourages public management of the urban space. Preceup incorporated an environmental dimension to 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).
As the experiment keeps away from the municipal system of solid waste management and concentrates on an educational experience aimed at preparing a new sensibility towards the future, only feasible short-term goals are set.
In this sense, a micro comprehensiveness is proposed, not on a city-scale, but in well-identified areas within the neighborhoods. This approach allows for some traditional knowledge to be rehabilitated, recontextualised, renewed, and enriched. Something that has its roots in the past and makes sense for the future is transmitted to the new generation.
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. This would reduce the possibility of feeling of rootlessness and the struggles for identity and provide for a socio-cultural situation which would not lead to a direct hostility and confrontation. The violence in the cities can be seen in this context particularly when the socio-cultural and political identity of the poor is threatened by the technological choices and resultant practices.
Sustainability
Sustainability of land fill method for large cities is now being questioned as more and more cities are exhausting their sites. Suggestions of compressing or incinerating, particularly with the type of waste that the cities generate, to reduce the volume for disposal is not cost-efficient. Under the circumstances, sorting at source to the extent possible and involving communities at neighborhood level on the lines of the experiment of composting damp material in Colombia may offer some lead. The end product, that is the compost, was put to use by the community at the neighborhood level, thereby answering many questions relating to marketing, cost recovery etc. Also one finds in this experiment, the families do the basic separation between dry and damp materials and the recycler recovers the dry material that is usable.
Policies governing informal sector
Formal sector has conventionally responded to commercial opportunities with the prime motivation of profit-making. At times, there is a distant relationship between the producers and the consumers. The capital-intensive character of formal sector lends itself to higher level of dependency on government policy and therefore there are greater possibilities of being regulated. Relatively, the formal sector demonstrates a closed, non-flexibility system and as a result grows much slower. It tends to explore markets within and outside the immediate situation.
The informal sector, which essentially responds to local needs and demands, is much more flexible and offers a more open system. In the informal sector, by and large, there is a direct relationship between the producers and the consumers and requires low-capital, high labor technology which allows it to grow much faster. This peculiar nature of the informal sector makes monitoring and regulation much more difficult. In the context of urban environment, informal activities are seen in dealing with re-usable and recyclable waste, food chain, provision of shelter, water supply, etc.
Among the different case studies, it is observed that the vocabulary used to refer to popular recycling centers still varies: scavengers, collectors, recyclers, rag-pickers, intermediaries, small industries, neighborhood groups, and cooperatives are sometimes placed on the same plane, as in the case of Costa Rica. It would be good to unify the vocabulary that would allow the comparison of systems and the understanding of the originality of each context.
Poverty groups
An extensive waste recovery and recycling is mostly managed through poverty groups in the slums and around garbage dumps. Millions of urban-dwellers rely on waste for their livelihood as collectors, unorganised labour in recycling units and as petty hawkers in the market network. In most cities, informal activities are responsible for more waste recovery and recycling than any of the formally-sanctioned activities like compost making in a municipal plant.
In the city of Mumbai, it is estimated that almost 100,000 people are involved in the recovery and recycling of large quantities of waste. The city authorities find it difficult even to manage the disposal of the remaining solid waste. This highlights the positive contribution of the poor to one of the major urban environmental issues namely disposal and management of solid waste, in spite of the fact that labour is over exploited and working conditions tough.
Furthermore, the activities may be highly organized, in spite of being in informal sector. For instance, industries needing wastes as raw materials may initiate and control systems of collection, transportation, and partial processing. The first such system for modern industry in India was the organization of rag pickers to supply rags to the paper mills of Calcutta in the mid 19th century.
When citizens perceive wastes as recyclable materials, attitudes toward scavengers could change. In Manila, Philippines, a pilot recycling programme was established and supported by a wide-spread public information campaign. The programme trained workers (called ECO-AIDES) and provided them with clean attractive uniforms emblazoned with the message; "pera sa basura" (money from refuse). To some extent, the social stigma toward house-to house scavengers appears to have lessened.
Conflicts
The systems of waste management defer and therefore they need to be viewed in their context so as to understand the potentials of conflict that may arise from these systems. For example, it is important to understand whether or not ragpickers 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; whether the people in the neighborhood give away or sell their waste; whether the intermediaries lend their tools to the street collectors; whether there are still scavengers in the landfill; whether there are companies with contracts for collection at the source, etc.
Such issues can lead to conflicts amongst poor themselves or between the poor and the administration, contractors, private companies, municipal staff or the law and order machinery.
In Colombian cases, where the municipality subcontracts community groups to collect waste, these proposals do not cover entire recycling process. In many instances, the groups that collect waste and, at times recycle it are in competition with or enter into conflicts with the municipal street collectors. In African cities, a number of groups have engaged themselves in waste collection to earn their living. However, these groups are not either officially recognized or supervised by local authorities thus presenting potentialities of conflicts particularly when the business interests are disturbed.
These experiments experience many organizational, technical, and economic problems, due to difficulties in marketing and legal aspects, and because of the confrontation between the people’s cultural and organizational logic and the business and municipal logic. Also, the situation does not indicate if such practices would be relevant for national or regional concerns or whether it would contribute significantly to the quality of life at local level.
The issues of habitat and the environment are related in Colombia and Santo Domingo projects: there appears to be a link between the fight against evictions and the recyclers right to work in the city. The recyclers are systematically thrown out of their living and work places. They do not have access to roads, to free movement, 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 eviction 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 city’s sanitation and cleanliness, a population segment that contributes precisely to those objectives is driven away.
In Santo Domingo, some recyclers work at night at the landfill site to avoid conflict and the bulldozers. 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.
Gender sensitisation
There are specific relationships between women’s work and wastes that have been investigated by sociologists. Amongst the urban poor, women (with the help of children) are usually the main providers or organizers of daily household needs; they collect fuel as well as prepare food and fetch water. They often take responsibility for repairing shelter interiors. Thus, when household survival strategies depend to some extent upon waste collecting and reuse, women’s work is closely linked to the nature and availability of wastes. When wastes are diverted to new uses, or competition for wastes increases, women have to spend more time and energy. In periods of economic recession, women are likely to increase waste reuse as financial resources shrink.
A higher status and a better income for waste pickers could lead to a flow of new waste pickers, mostly men and members of relatively high status groups. The milieu of 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 are pre-dominant when dealing with collectors. In Colombian experiments, it is seen that they are the main participants in the neighborhood programs which have community organisations 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, there are more cultural, and pedagogical dimensions, and the work is considered voluntary. But, a case for remuneration is made out when there is heavy labor component. In some cases, women began to claim remuneration for their community work, particularly when the work involved physical labor. There have been debates with diverse solutions, in both the Santo Domingo and Bogota projects.
Likewise, when organisations such as cooperatives involve themselves in the rendering of services such as cleaning and sanitation of streets and public restrooms, subcontracts in industries, maquilas, and selection of material, then more women get employed. Factors such as the remuneration level, the formal status of the women in contracts, the problems of idiosyncrasies and repetitive and tedious activity, have resulted in more and more women getting selected. The Colombian cases are very telling in this regard.
In Bamako, women and children were responsible for sanitation jobs in which their health and vulnerability was at stake. This is because of the proximity of this issue of waste and sanitation with the traditional domestic duties of cleaning and housework for women.
Such division of work is an issue of concern. It was also seen in the community jobs relating to water and basic sanitation. However, when women relate the issue to health, children, the healthy environment, and community participation, and they are not solely responsible for heavy labor, they feel they have access to issues of interest and importance.
Research in other fields has shown that all too often, men push women out of employment or income opportunities if conditions improve. A gender differentiation and attention for women in this occupational group is therefore necessary. When the government wants to improve the position of waste pickers, it is very important that it recognizes that women form a special group of workers, also in the recovery and recycling sector. Acknowledging this differentiation in practice can have important implications for analyzing existing conditions as well as for formulating suitable policies.
Legal and regulatory provisions
Efforts are made to control growth of informal sector through regulatory and licensing mechanisms but these efforts have met with little success. Various efforts to organize and regularize rag-pickers by administration have been opposed by certain NGOs working with such groups. On the other hand, there have also been requests to the administration from some of the NGOs to recognize these rag-pickers through protective and promotive policies of licensing and easy accessibility to credit.
Essentially, these efforts were seen as mechanisms of formalization and hence were resisted as the beneficiaries had seen the value of the informal sector for its specific relevance to poverty groups. Thus, the dilemma as to how much of formalization can be introduced in an informal sector continues.
However, it is necessary that, some steps are taken to protect these groups, who are essentially the most deprived and exploited in the system, and help them organize themselves to protect their minimum rights and survival requirements. Efforts to organize and unionize have shown certain positive results and at the same time exposed the vulnerability of such groups in the present market mechanisms.
To the extent that the informal sector is non-regulated, from the environmental point of view, these vulnerable groups became both the beneficiaries and the victims. Recognizing the fact that all is not well with the either the formal or the informal sector, regulatory mechanisms for informal sectors will have to be a product of self-directed discipline and negotiations. Such popular regulatory mechanisms should take into account certain minimum standards.
The legal aspects of involvement of communities in solid waste management have been little explored in the Latin American case studies. It is necessary to undertake such studies to evaluate the possibilities of the manner in which communities render services. Due to increasing decentralization and privatization., it is necessary to introduce training on legal issues in environment in order to propose special clauses in bids, manageable contracts and possibilities for innovating and obtaining municipal support for community practices.
In the Asian case studies, it is seen that arrangements do not exist in most cities and towns for proper management of solid wastes arising from shopping areas, hotels, debris from construction activities, etc. Suitable provisions, therefore, can be incorporated in the solid waste management bye-laws to require the owners of shops, hotels and other commercial establishments to keep the daily wastes generated by them within their own premises until their collection. The collection charges to be prescribed in the relevant bye-laws could be paid by the concerned owners of the commercial establishments to the urban local body concerned in the form of solid waste management tax or cess on the property tax.
Any intervention, therefore, in this specific area, and possibly in others cannot be absolutely technocratic, but will have to have a major human considerations. Three kinds of failures on the part of the authority that contribute to environmental problems include lack of appreciation of actions of the people based on inadequate information, existence of faulty incentives from institutional arrangements and inappropriate choice of activity thereby further marginalising the poverty groups. This calls for a definite policy statement with respect to such vulnerable groups. A policy on legal and regulatory provisions for solid waste management, should incorporate the responsibilities of those generating the waste, financial obligations, and mechanisms for regulating.
Decentralization and micro-planning
Urban local self government or the city authorities, are used to working in a highly centralized system of administration. Planning process under such a system gets totally alienated from the field realities and accountability gets defined by a fragmentation of various services.
The city development plans and the delivery of services from macro-perspective creates major gaps between expectations and achievements. Most of the local self governments starved of resources have found it difficult to bridge this gap. Lack of political will for participatory management leads to an incomplete decentralization process.
The local environment protection process and most especially public health improvement are some of the priorities listed in the official texts of African municipalities. However, the framework within which these tasks must be accomplished is rarely explicitly defined. The human and financial resources are rarely transferred; municipalities often need assistance from better-equipped Ministerial services. While facing these responsibilities for waste management issues, mayors feel isolated on the technological and financial levels. This situation has repercussions on field achievements. When handling a project, mayors often feel that they are competing with private or community initiatives instead of profiting from the complementary potential of these initiatives, and eventually supporting or coordinating them.
An awareness of these phenomena, has encouraged administrators to take initiative to rectify this situation by involving the communities. According to the degree of difficulties municipalities face, and their lack of financial means, mobilizing population through a self-promoting process for waste management projects, seems to be the only solution left. The movement towards the creation of community groups is a management style that permits to preserve traditional community values and to promote a better waste management system.
The current period of decentralization that some African countries are going through and the complexity of urban waste management, relying on a large number of actors, appears as a period during which each actor, whether institutional (at a national or local scale) or private (individuals or community organisations), seek their reference points from pre-existing actors or newly arrived actors, in a fast changing field. This decentralization process in various African countries offers an opportunity to grassroots organisations and NGOs, via Community Committees and Local Committees for Development, to influence the formulation of policies and strategies on human settlements.
Decentralization promoted partnership between actors, either from the public or community sectors, or from economic sectors; community organisations felt free to express themselves and judged the coordination work. They analyzed their problems, identified their needs and proposed solutions to their partners, which allowed for a dialogue between community organisations and those in charge of supporting grassroots organisations (State, Financial Backers, Non Governmental Organisations).
This opportunity for dialogues gave a room to the usually silent or marginalised groups (women, children, illiterate people), and allowed for the removal of cultural blocks towards development. In Senegal, the project shows how this consultative process brought women to the leadership of the project. In Mali, women participated in the conception, the operation and followed the ‘Sikki Diya’ sunk draining trap project through. Another example of decentralization is in Kenya, where the ‘Green Town Movement’ waste collecting project of Malindi, was involved in environmental education programs, training populations to plant flowers, etc. Thus, actions at a local level are made easier and adapted to local needs, and contribute to partnership between actors.
In most of the African cases, community actors often expressed themselves through Community Committees having members from all community groups with some members even representing the administration or municipality. These Committees are therefore a place of free expression and it would be relevant to transform them into platforms of coordination between the various actors of development.
Most of the African countries studied however suffered from a lack of well defined institutional policies on community organisations. The multiple actors participating in the projects act without planning and coordination. National waste management policies are virtually non-existent. In the absence of well-defined functions, many activities which ought to be put into practice by community groups are left with and carried out by State bodies or semi-public organisations. Community groups also suffered from a lack of organization and management skills. These groups are often too small to adopt a professional type of management, and thus remain small in size. They often limit their activities to garbage collection. In the absence of vertical integration of waste management components such as composting or recycling, these groups remain isolated rather than becoming independent enterprises. Their social capital stays poor which denies them credibility and access to bank credit.
In municipal initiatives, there is still a gap between consulting and calling on civil society and social movements to decide. There are some consultations, but little access to real decisions. The emphasis has to be on raising awareness in the public sector, the residents, and the low-income sectors, for a long-term alliance.
Integration with other sectors
Urban planning should require that all urban development projects and new townships/ housing estates should have adequate provision for solid waste management, linked with long-term land use policies for setting up waste management and recycling centers and sanitary landfill sites at proper locations on different sides of the cities/towns.
The Costa Rican experiment focuses partly on the sanitary sector but more on the economic and political implications. The people in the project take initiatives as they find that the local governments are not in a position to manage the problems. A variety of actors who have very little in common are associated in waste management. They differ in their perspectives on recycling and waste management and confirm to the existing patterns rather than looking for alternatives. Although, contradictions of vested interests have not yet surfaced, these cannot be ruled out in future.
The experience in Colombia also makes one realize that the definition of common interests among different players in waste management, and among professionals dealing with different materials and segments of population, is difficult as they see different economic potentials in waste management cycle.
In Santo Domingo, neighborhoods are beginning to develop a vision of new cities. 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 began to broaden as integration took place between actors not belonging to the neighborhood (street recyclers) and the municipality (to acquire the land for gathering the waste). The project intervention in the form of initial survey and community education through reflection and exchange of ideas, resulted in visualizing a city situation and policy. Initially, the intervention focus was on sectors based on sanitation problems. But as the project advanced, a more socio-cultural and political vision was introduced. Communities were prepared to make necessary adjustments at the local level to provide space for the sanitation facilities. However, it has not been possible to execute the plan as yet.
Thus, one realizes the importance of integrated approach instead of implementing isolated solutions. But, hindrances such as lack of confidence, unwillingness to part with information on the part of municipal authorities, reinforce the distrust and do not permit community initiated innovations to be carried out as rapidly as initially planned. These experiments show the need to continue with significant investments in education for human development, in order to sustain the new partnership relations between such different actors and to provide a basis for advanced proposals in economic, legal and administrative aspects.
Finance for Management of Urban Environment
In the Indian subcontinent (excluding Nepal and Bhutan), municipal corporations allocate money for waste management activities. Usually, urban local bodies are expected to raise revenue, mainly in the form of property and other taxes, from local population for routine operations of waste disposal. There is no special tax, but hotels, and commercial establishments may be required to pay for collection, either to the municipality or to a private agency. Co-operative housing societies in India charge households special fees since the municipal services are not provided within the private premises. In Africa, the general practice is to undertake waste management through tax provisions in the municipal budget. However, inadequate funds with municipal authorities, makes it difficult to evolve a comprehensive system of waste management and sanitation services.
In the 1970s, the Indian government gave grants to identified cities for the purchase of mechanical compost plants and other infrastructure items. Since then, there have been special-purpose grants from time to time. For instance, solid waste management is often a component of grants for environmental improvement of urban slums,. Sometimes, neighborhoods or private sector contribute voluntarily to local infrastructure in the form of street bins.
However, a wide-spread problem is the low rate of collection of taxes and special fees. The property tax base for municipal services has had implications for equitable coverage: illegal settlers, such as squatters, are not deemed eligible for collection services in most cities. In many cities, only 50 per cent of the population is registered on the property tax assessments and, of course, some of the taxpayers are delinquent. Taxpayers have resisted suggestions for a direct tax for waste services or an increase in the property taxes.
Funds for capital investment are inadequate. Cities often have difficulty raising loans for infrastructure needs and must rely on multi-lateral agencies, or national agencies. There is thus the need for municipalities to stop the negative effects due to structural adjustment. Municipalities have to face their deficiencies, due to a lack of financial means, to ensure a proper sanitation coverage to their populations and allow private actors to participate in the city’s urban management process.
Decentralised modes of payment for services have developed in an ad hoc fashion. In a few cities in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, a portion of municipal salaries designated for conservancy workers in an area is paid by the community directly to the workers; an institutionalization of earlier informal arrangements. There are cases where residents have financed construction of communal bins.
In recent years, an important trend affecting financial and other aspects of solid waste services is privatization, which takes several forms, including contracting out, franchises, and partnership arrangement. In some cases, private arrangements for collection are in existence for a long time, since the authorities have been unable to provide services to peripheral areas, or have not had sufficient vehicles. In Mumbai, more than 50 per cent of vehicles for waste transportation are hired from private contractors. Municipalities have also sought to contract out to save expenditure on capital equipment and to improve efficiency.
Buy-back guarantees, and environmental protection through recycling of waste can go a long way towards established commitment to community support,. There is also the possibility of direct partnership between business enterprises and communities towards waste management.
It is difficult to know the marketing perspectives for specific waste 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.
Therefore, one of the important planning considerations is identifying markets for the products obtained from recycling or other waste disposal methods like composting, bio-gas etc. This essentially means identifying partners and defining responsibilities in partnership. Quite often, one finds technologies which rely heavily on market for their viability and effective rate of return. On the other hand, the neighborhood approach, as in Colombia, where the end product is put to use by the community itself, has successfully eliminated the problem of marketing.
The entire process of improving the solid waste management practices in the urban areas would need close monitoring and supervision on the part of the higher level officers in the municipalities, besides imparting of training to the frontline officials. Better supervision and control has been achieved in municipal corporations like Cochin by providing pagers to the supervisory Health Inspectors, which enables the individual householders to lodge complaints of insanitary conditions in their neighborhood with the Health Inspectors at any time. In Surat, we find a two-tier system of redressal.
In Singapore, a strong political will coupled with strict administrative discipline and regulatory mechanisms have oriented communities towards definite response patterns. This has made Singapore a very clean city under an alert management.
These systems seems to be working effectively, highlighting thereby the need to initiate procedures and discipline within the organization.
Unionization and Co-operativisation
There has to be an emphasis on self-reliant community development. Rag-pickers or scavengers involved in road-side waste collection should be enabled to form genuinely participatory market co-operatives to allow them to gain access to financial and other services and to resolve problems arising from their work. The co-operatives would seek to obtain better conditions of trade with the middlemen and recycling factories. The key to this approach is to build up co-operation among the various constituents having a role in waste generation, disposal and reuse.
The Ministry of Environment in Indonesia is developing strategies aimed at supporting scavenging. Together with the Informal Sector Project, the Ministry, is planning a pilot effort to form a local co-operative of scavengers at one municipal landfill. The co-operative is viewed as one means of strengthening the individual scavenger’s bargaining position in obtaining fair market value for recovered materials, easing access to credit, and providing education on basic rights and resources available for greater self-reliance.
Co-operativisation includes the integration of groups of waste pickers into small scale, community based solid waste management schemes such as door-to-door waste collecting which deserves much more attention and experimental space than has been given to date. Training women in marketing and bulk selling, together with more public awareness about the role of waste pickers would allow them to operate their co-operatives and other forms of organization. A more responsive government initiative is necessary to make this effective at city level.
Actors taking part in urban management can be grassroots associations, NGOs and from the private sector. This cooperation between private and public actors, gives the opportunity to each partner to participate and improve upon his environment.
Private Sector
Traditionally, the management of waste or sanitary services were essentially seen a part of the responsibility of local administration to create a sound and healthy environment for the citizens as a matter of citizenship right. However, the concept of privatization has shifted the focus from citizenship rights to consumer services. Waste management activities including recycling are now seen more as opportunities for commercial exploitation than for environmental protection. The new environmental concerns do not get reflected in such shift to privatization which depends more on subsidies and market opportunities than on commitment to social investment or investment for environmental reasons.
Neighborhoods in Latin America, 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. Industrialists meet and negotiate with governments and municipalities with the intention of obtaining less expensive raw materials as well as fiscal advantages. The interest of industries is not to reduce the volume of waste in general but rather decrease the durability of the products manufactured. Manufacturing such products generating large quantity of recyclable waste and purchasing such waste for recycling goes against the concept of a environmentally healthy city. Also, they may be more inclined to import waste from developed countries where waste is of a better quality and not often recycled.
Social Privatization
Privatization has been considered not only on its negative side. It has opened a new space and some hope for community organisations. Nonetheless, we cannot ignore the fact that community groups are considered essentially for their capacity to sub-contract cheaply and not often as opportunities for social participation. The prime motivation in social privatization is not based on profiteering or commercial exploitation but the emphasis is on right to participation, social integration, community cohesion and environment improvements.
When community groups are subject to bidding conditions designed for large companies, particularly international, competition is very unfair, as seen in the Latin American countries. Generally they are considered as actors capable of developing educational activities but rarely do the municipalities invest resources in hiring them to provide the community’s environmental education. People’s organisations and the entities that accompany them must spend their own resources or those from international cooperation so that these educational activities and awareness programs, which are the basis of any technical, economic or social change in the waste management system, are carried out efficiently. In fact, many initiatives have emerged from the neighborhoods. When the municipality get involved (if at all), it does not support such innovative initiatives but rather integrates the community with conventional systems.
One of the cases in Costa Rica and some experiences in Colombia show that the hiring of community groups is easier in small cities than in a neighborhood of a big city. It is possible to have coherent systems with city coverage in areas with non-complicated technical and organizational systems.
Community managed projects gives the opportunity for the inhabitants to take charge of themselves through the mobilization of local human and financial resources, reduces opportunism and allows a collaboration based on technical and educational matters. At the same time, it is also necessary that local governments fulfill their social investment obligations, even when they welcome community initiatives.
Citizen’s environmental organisations are on the increase in the Asian region. In India, especially since the plague cases in 1994, NGOs have been turning their attention to solid waste management. The current watch dog function performed by these NGOs should be adequately appreciated by the governments and local authorities. The technical inputs made available through such NGOs makes an additional resource available to the authorities.. Similarly, some of the NGOs are encouraging self-planning at the community level and evolving appropriate support mechanisms for technical and administrative back-up. Orangi Pilot Project has succeeded in creating an arrangement between qualified professionals and research institutions on the one hand, and the informal sector and low income communities on the other to enable effective interaction.
However, in Latin America, environmental groups are often ecological; few work on the urban environment. A conceptualization of the issue is just emerging. The social movements are more sanitary than environmental. The groups are more interested in a clean city than in the waste management process including recycling to reduce the environmental impact.
In general, the role of NGOs and local communities can be extremely helpful in checking on performance, and in experimenting with waste reduction through neighborhood composting and the promotion of recycling. NGOs bring specific skills in technical, communication, or training fields, and, eventually, bring intermediary financing. In Mali and Senegal, NGOs played an interface role between the various urban actors. In the Malindi project and in Mali, it was noticed that municipal authorities were willing to propose a legal, administrative and sometimes technical backup and showed they had the potential to turn an experience into a political model. Local groups are also organizing communities to improve street cleanliness and to facilitate more efficient waste collection (for example, the Civic Exnora street groups in India). Concern about the siting of, and conditions at garbage dumps is developing in some large cities, such as Mumbai, Bangalore and Calcutta. Facilities such as clinics to ensure regular medical check-ups, clean water, washing places and safe storage places for collected materials can be provided through NGOs working with waste pickers.
All community projects initiated by NGOs aim to improve inhabitants’ quality of life and help bring actors into contact with local authorities through grassroots organisations operating the projects. The community organisations help increase public awareness and are responsible for the operation and management of activities.
The NGOs also have the dilemma of getting more specialized and technical to show that the proposals are feasible and to mobilize 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 other actors. They have proposals for social and political alternatives that they want to present publicly.
But many a times, after forging partnerships with municipalities, the NGOs and the people’s groups have found 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 local authorities for reclaimed dumping sites 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 some cases, but the municipality was reluctant to pay the remuneration of community workers. Even in Senegal, where the municipality was supposed to facilitate the governmental policies, its tasks, responsibilities and obligations were not well defined.
NGOs should examine their manpower and capabilities for required technical back up to CBOs based on the dimensions of affordability, sustainability and replicability. In Mali and Senegal, it is seen that the Municipality and community organisations have worked in partnership in improving urban environment. They both participated in defining the objectives of the project with concerned NGOs. NGOs have only responded to the need of the populations. They acted as mediators and were very involved in activities undertaken by the community organisations. Proper appreciation and incorporation of front-line technologies existing at the local level will thus have to be matched with the technological alternatives provided by NGOs. Initiatives don’t stem from policies, but from the will of the populations to assume responsibilities for themselves.
There is a scope for exchange of information and collaboration among city departments and NGOs on the subject of community awareness and participation in solid waste management. NGOs should be given access to critical information so as to reduce their pressure of intelligence gathering and promote their role more in terms of education and awareness building at the community level to maximise community participation. Financial support from the Government and partnership with NGOs will provide for more effective execution of the educational role. While there are limitations to city-twinning arrangements, the exchange of ideas among similar cities and towns is developing. CITYNET is supporting such exchanges in Asia. The types of networks working on urban environmental issues can be grouped into : Regional networks, European networks working in third world countries, National NGO networks working in cities and Research and training institutions.
Public knowledge, awareness, and the willingness to devote time and energy to cleanliness and waste reduction, vary along the full range of motivation, both within societies and across societies. In the countries with low levels of literacy and poverty, habits of frugality and recovery/recycling are strong. Public awareness of modern solid waste management is very low and there are many problems of collection and disposal in these countries. Anti-littler campaigns, a popular approach to public education, do not have lasting effect unless they are part of a more comprehensive strategy. Simple litter campaigns are, in effect, "end of the pipe" approaches, since they do not address issues of waste generation and disposal.
Environment education, being a fairly recent development, provides ample scope and challenge to NGOs to evolve training materials directed to community level intervention. Potentials of media like posters, folk songs, street plays and use of cultural and religious occasions need to be exploited. NGOs should explore the possibilities of net-working of CBOs around specific environmental issues thereby smoothening the interface between the authorities and CBOs. Some country campaigns are arranged as annual cleanliness weeks and information dissemination. Information leaflets are also distributed before major festivals to inform the public about special arrangements during such occasions. The most outstanding example is during the Haj at Mecca.
The German-aided solid waste project in Kathmandu included public education that was developed by social workers familiar with the local cultures. Most public awareness efforts are directed to children, since they are responsive and easily accessible, and it is believed that they can influence adult attitudes. In Karachi an NGO (Gul Bahoo) has devised school recycling projects. In a few schools, dry and wet waste is being separated and the NGO comes once a week to collect the waste in exchange for toys.
International workshops, bilateral action research projects, and the work of individual scholars and some entrepreneurs are beginning to fill the gaps in public education programs. For instance, expertise and funds from the Netherlands, the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), the United Nations Center for Human Settlements, and foreign advisors (from Canada, the Netherlands, and Switzerland) have supported a small core of local experts and concerned citizens in Bangalore since 1989.
Solid waste Management need no longer be a daunting either at the macro level of the family or the macro level of the nation - all it takes is awareness and an attitude to reduce waste at its source. Recycling/Reuse/Reduce, the three R’s, of waste management would go a long way in dealing with Solid Waste in developing as well as industrialized nations thereby bringing with it a whole new attitude to waste. This attitude needs to be cultivated at all levels starting with children who can be convinced into tackling solid waste in their families and schools.
In all Third World cities, the ingenuity and creativity of millions of people have woven extremely intricate systems of social relations and regulations and led to the invention of technologies adapted to their environment and their economic and social positions. These popular ecologists have invented income-generating mechanisms and activities which, at the same time, enable them to introduce environmental systems without doing ecological damage to the urban niches in which they have settled, thereby maintaining a dynamic balance between development and the environment.
The environmental culture and awareness is already born and new models of society which are socially equitable, economically viable, politically democratic and ecologically sustainable need to be explored. Sustainable Development needs to be the goal. Only a change in attitude and a commitment to the course that make that happen.
The analysis of the regional experiences shows that: