Introduction

This concluding chapter now returns to the goal of the book to frame the following synthesis of the main findings from across all the chapters, noting the similarities and dissimilarities between cities, societies and cultures confronted in the book. We conclude with an exploration of the implications drawn for future waste policy governance.

The aim of the book was to emphasise the ways in which the notion of waste, and the narratives and discourses associated with it, are socially constructed with corresponding implications for the governance of waste and the local wasting practices in cities. Below are some tentative responses to this aim in the form of four sets of critical findings.

Global narratives of waste translated into local practices

This book has shown that despite the existence of powerful global narratives of waste, their local translation into household solid waste governance and wasting practices varies over space and time. The existing governmental and institutional arrangements in which the household solid waste governance and practices are embedded play a fundamental role in the local translation of global ideas of waste, as shown in the analysis of waste policies in New Zealand and Ireland (see Chapters Four and Ten). Different waste narratives are also often translated from one jurisdiction to another as part of the processes of policy learning and transfer. Waste governance and waste narratives are part of broader meta-narratives (Lyotard, 1979) such as ideas of consumption, sustainable development, resource scarcity, good governance and competitiveness, all of which might even be more influential in shaping waste management practice than global waste narratives, given that waste policies are often embedded in broad institutional and policy contexts (see Chapter Four). Furthermore, despite waste narratives being relevant, the techno-institutional order in which waste governance occurs also matters. In Ireland, waste governance has to be framed in the context of a society in a rapid transit from an agrarian into an urbanised modern economy, where industrialisation and the production of waste went hand-in-hand. In Cairo, the Zabaleen's waste collectors narrative is an unfinished story (see Chapter Nine). It is framed in a context of radical policy action and contemporary major political events that might change the techno-institutional, as well as more directly the political, order in Egypt in which waste governance is embedded.