Who Gets to Be Responsible for Waste?

In contemporary waste governance, responsibility is often treated as something self-evident.

When waste accumulates in streets, rivers, and landfills, responsibility appears to offer a clear answer. Citizens should recycle more. Households should separate their waste. Consumers should make better choices. Governments should educate the public. Environmental problems, in turn, appear solvable through the responsible conduct of individuals.

But what if responsibility is not nearly as self-evident as it appears?

What if the question is not simply how responsibility should be exercised, but who gets to define what responsibility means in the first place?

These questions sit at the centre of my article "Reshuffling Responsibilities", recently published in Worldwide Waste Journal.

Drawing on ethnographic research in Cambodia, I argue that responsibility is frequently enacted through what I call moral fixes—attempts to address complex environmental problems by defining how citizens ought to behave. Such interventions often emerge through well-intentioned waste reduction and recycling programmes, yet they also carry particular assumptions about citizenship, governance, and environmental care. In the process, other ways of relating to waste frequently disappear from view.

What interested me was how these seemingly straightforward ideas of environmental responsibility are embedded within much longer political histories. Responsibility does not simply emerge in the present as a response to an environmental crisis, nor is it only imposed through top-down forms of governance. Rather, contemporary waste politics in Cambodia are entangled with colonial histories, development agendas, and imported visions of what a modern and responsible society should look like. The language of crisis and environmental responsibility often displaces locally grounded forms of caring for and living with waste, replacing them with universalized models of how responsibility ought to be enacted.

At the same time, responsibility is not only something imposed upon people.

Among waste pickers and recyclers in Phnom Penh, I encountered forms of environmental care that challenge dominant understandings of who counts as a responsible urban citizen in the first place. Through everyday acts of collecting, sorting, repairing, and recirculating discarded materials, waste pickers participate in shaping the city itself. Their relationship to waste is not simply economic. It is also an expression of urban belonging and a way of claiming presence within a city that often renders them invisible.

These practices led me to think about what I describe as sovereignty-through-waste.

Rather than appearing as passive recipients of environmental policies, waste pickers actively negotiate, contest, and reshape the terms through which waste becomes politically meaningful. Their practices reveal forms of responsibility that emerge not from externally defined moral obligations but from situated relations of care, livelihood, and belonging.

The article also turns toward places that frequently remain outside dominant waste imaginaries: urban wastelands, abandoned spaces, and landscapes that appear to have escaped the reach of both climate capitalism and contemporary waste reduction programmes. Such spaces are often understood as failures, leftovers, or zones of neglect. Yet they can also function as important correctives to anthropocentric forms of politics.

Seen from these margins, responsibility appears less as an obligation imposed upon individuals and more as an ongoing process of positioning oneself in relation to the surrounding world. It emerges through practices of caring, belonging, and negotiating shared environments. In this sense, responsibility is not simply about managing waste more efficiently. It is also about recognising alternative political possibilities that become visible precisely in places that dominant narratives tend to overlook.

Ultimately, Reshuffling Responsibilities asks what becomes visible when responsibility is no longer understood as a fixed moral duty, but as something continuously enacted, contested, and reshaped through everyday relations with people, materials, and environments. It is an invitation to rethink responsibility not from the centre, but from the margins.

📖 The full article can be accessed here: https://www.whp-journals.co.uk/WW/article/view/1058