Urban political ecology of informal e-waste "scalvaging" in Guiyu, China : a relational approach

Abstract

Many scholars aver that we are now in an Anthropocene epoch given that human activities have been pivotal to the changes in Earth’s ecosystem after the Second World War. In particular, the high-speed technological advances in the electronics sector have revolutionized the world over the past half-century. Coming hand-in-hand with this industrial development has been the global proliferation of e-waste, the processing of which is dominated by the informal sector in Southern Countries. The informal e-waste scalvaging has a prominent territorial tendency and has brought about serious environmental pollutions and health risks in these countries. China had been the largest e-waste receiving country before the very recent tightening up of its waste import policies and has of late become the largest e-waste generator in the world itself. In this thesis, I investigate the political ecology of informal e-waste scalvaging by empirically focusing on the socio-natural transformation of the global e-waste scalvaging hub-Guiyu town in China. This study is based methodologically on ethnographic fieldwork, non-participant observations, in-depth interviews, secondary archival data, and theoretical reflections. The political ecology of the informal e-waste scalvaging in Guiyu is unraveled in three dimensions, i.e. the political economy of the informal e-waste economies, the environmental governance and eco-governmentality of e-waste, and the environmental justice of e-waste. Drawn from a strand of post-structural theories (namely, relational economic geography, Foucault’s work on governmentality, actor-network theory) to respectively explore these three dimensions, this study contributes to urban political ecology by offering a post-structural and relational account as a supplement to the dominant Marxist approach. The spatialities, materiality, and relationality of the informal e-waste economies have been foregrounded in the whole thesis. Guiyu is conceived as a relational socio-natural assemblage that is interwoven by heterogeneous, contingent, dynamic, and networked multi-scalar socio-natural relationships, instead of being essentially determined by capitalist structures. I contend that: (1) the multi-scalar political-economic relations of the informal e-waste scalvaging in Guiyu are entangled with the multi-faceted spatialities of globalization and the local territorial agglomerative dynamics. The spatialities of globalization are instantiated by the material circulations and geographical articulations among the global production networks and global destruction networks. The territorial agglomeration of e-waste scalvaging is largely driven by the territorial and socio-cultural embeddedness, instead of being completely determined by capitalist or legal structures as several informality theories suggest. Taken together, I advocate for a relational, dynamic and context-specific interpretation of the nature of the informal economy instead of pursuing holistic theorization. (2) The multi-scalar regulatory framework and the contested eco-governmentality have also shaped and been shaped by the relational geographies of e-waste and the socio-natural transformations of Guiyu. The global trajectories of e-waste flows and the evolution of China’s informal e-waste sector are embedded in particular global and national e-waste regulatory frameworks. The modes of governing e-waste in Guiyu demonstrate distinct characteristics of campaign-style environmental governance in China. Space has played a critical role in the power bargaining and power exercise among different levels of government, in respect of both coercive power and disciplinary power. The recourse to coercive power is a distinct feature of China’s authoritarian environmental governance. Yet, the exercise of disciplinary power through the mobilization of various techniques of governmentality (discourse, surveillance, statistics, whistleblower rewards, etc.) is preferred by the state in the spatial control of the socio-nature of Guiyu. (3) Lastly, a simplified understanding of environmental justice of e-waste based on spatial distribution ignores the complexity of justice. The global pollution networks of e-waste are assembled in the heterogeneous associations among multifarious human and non-human actors. E-waste is a fluid object. A myriad of nonhuman actors (e.g. precious metals) have participated in the making of the multiplicity of e-waste and the production of polluted e-waste landscapes. The multiplicity of the materiality of e-waste, as one form of nonhuman agency, has induced disparate conceptions of e-waste and controversial discourses of environment. Different social groups have associated and aligned themselves with different facets of the materiality of e-waste and have constructed competing discourses and realties of e-waste, environment, and justice. The international environmental NGOs and the media have aligned themselves with the waste/toxic/pollutant facet of e-waste and have enacted the reality of “North-to-South dumping” based on a distributional understanding of environmental justice. By contrast, Guiyu e-waste scalvagers have aligned with the potential economic value of the materiality of e-waste and have performed justice as subsistence ethics. In tracing these heterogeneous associations, the often-neglected and under-researched dimension-capability of justice- is hence foregrounded.