Discussing Waste Governance

The 2017 Opening the Bin workshop hosted at Lund University gave social science and humanities academics the opportunity to deliberate about waste, culture and society. While still an emerging area of study, waste research needs more of these connective settings to engage in conversations about the economy, livelihoods, life-styles, consumption patterns, natures, and infrastructures that are molded by how waste is approached. The need for more of these discussions was the catalyst behind organizing the most recent “Re-Opening the Bin” conference held in June of 2021. Social scientists and humanistic scholars interrogating waste were asked to submit their literature, which was then presented in an online conference format. The research covers waste from various lenses and disciplines like gender and cultural studies, geography, sociology, and urban studies to name a few. The goal of the conference was to bring together researchers and experiences from the Global South and the Global North to critically discuss waste and its meanings and trajectories in culture, economy and society. Waste governance was a major topic of discussion at the conference, and conveying the research on waste governance and the conference outcomes to the non-academic audiences remains a crucial part of generating meaningful change among all stakeholders – especially the general public. The critical takeaways from the conference were to connect and include the waste stakeholders in the decision making process, use input to actually adjust policy, and generate solutions that address issues before they arise instead of as they arise. Moving forward, using these key takeaways in waste governance is a strategy to elicit feasible and socially productive models for handling waste.

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