Sustainability policy paradox: coping with changing environmental priorities in municipal waste management

ABSTRACT

The impacts of climate change are apparent, but the US federal government continues to deny climate science, deregulate, and obstruct international environmental consensus. Municipal governments are thus, with increasing urgency, modifying infrastructure to achieve a broad range of environmental goals. Much of this action occurs within a sustainability framework. Commonly framed as a balance of economic, environmental, and social interests that ensures the viability of future generations, sustainability is conflictual in practice. As cities attempt bold environmental action, understanding how these conflicts play out is crucial. This study uses Deborah Stone's theory of policy paradox combined with insights from sustainability policy and discards studies literatures to analyze how policy makers respond to competing interests and values in the case of waste management in Washington DC. Though DC policy actors agree about the need for sustainability, stakeholders have clashed repeatedly over the city's reliance on waste-to-energy (WTE) incineration for disposal. I argue that WTE in DC can best be understood as a ‘sustainability policy paradox’: a policy paradox that results not only from predictable tensions between environmental and economic interests, but conflicts between environmental objectives that surface in the contemporary context of technocratic uncertainty, the neoliberal state, and climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Municipal sustainability policy
• policy paradox
• municipal waste management
• waste-to-energy (WTE)

Acknowledgements

Funding for this research was provided in part by the Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) at MIT. The author thanks research assistants Amy Plovnick and Fernando Madrazo Vega, and gratefully acknowledges the contributions of Judith Layzer and Eran Ben-Joseph.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lily Baum Pollans is Assistant Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College in New York City. As an urban planner and scholar, her interests lie in sustainability, infrastructure, and environmental justice. As a practitioner, she has worked in both municipal and institutional settings on public transportation, public space design, environmental justice, brownfield redevelopment, and zero waste. In her current research, Pollans looks at institutional and infrastructural transformation of solid waste systems in U.S. cities, and the considers the ability of municipalities to influence consumption. She has a Master's and PhD in city planning from MIT.

Notes

1. Please seeBen-Joseph et al. (2016) and Pollans et al. (2017) for a description of the larger project as well as additional findings.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided in part by the Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) at MIT.