Mediating Response-ability in Planning: The Elusiveness of the Cambodia Waste Management Report

Abstract

This article examines how the notion of ‘shared responsibility’ is enacted in Cambodia’s waste management planning report, Phnom Penh Waste Management Strategy and Action Plan 2018–2035. Reframing the concept of ‘responsibility’ as ‘responseability’, I aim to foreground the relational aspects of responsibility, particularly human and more-than-human relations, to which the anthropology of planning has paid relatively little attention. I demonstrate how the report envisions various stakeholders’ abilities to respond to the current waste management challenges by examining three modes of mediation: legality, visibility and infrastructural microbiopolitics. Methodologically, I demonstrate that the bureaucratic report can serve as a helpful tool for waste scholars to uncover how different realities of waste are enacted and made manageable ‘on paper’. I argue that planning not only produces an ‘elusive promise’ but also engenders ‘elusive responses’: waste planning always involves managing complex relations in addition to mere waste materials.

Keywords:

• Response-ability
• Shared Responsibility
• Waste Management Planning
• Cambodia
• Bureaucratic Document

Acknowledgements

This paper is developed from a paper presentation at the 2021 ASA ‘Responsibility’ Conference. I thank the panel organisers Kathrin Eitel and Laura Otto and all the participants for their constructive feedback. I also thank Assa Doron for astute comments on an earlier draft of this paper and Sarou Long for inspiration. I am particularly grateful to two anonymous reviewers for insightful and meticulous comments and suggestions. Thanks also to the TAPJA Editorial Office for editorial assistance and copyediting.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).