Electronic waste: present status and future perspectives of sustainable management practices in Malaysia

The ever-increasing and rapidly growing volume of waste electrical and electronic equipment has become a serious threat to the environment in many countries. The inevitability of e-waste management and the development of a holistic system to deal with it has become an indispensable socio-economic and environmental issue for the sustainable development of Malaysia. However, no comprehensive research has yet been carried out, and only a few works in a discreet manner have been begun. In view of the above, and as a small endeavor towards achieving the country’s Vision 2020, this study explores the present status and future perspectives of the management of waste electrical and electronic equipment in Malaysia. This article presents an overview of e-waste management practices around the world, including the generation of e-waste, the implementation of management strategies, and collection and recovery activities in Malaysia. It also presents the corresponding responses adopted so far with respect to legislation and other infrastructural development. Finally, through the use of structured and semi-structured interviews, it reveals the barriers and challenges, as well as future perspectives and sustainability issues related to the e-waste management system in this fast developing country.     

“The vice of distant knowledge”: Licensing and the geography of jurisdiction on the Scottish wartime Home Front

This article considers how licensing law conceives and practices jurisdiction. It examines the limits of attempts to define and exploit jurisdiction in the regulation of social problems connected to alcohol. Using the case study of a prohibition on the sale of spirits in the Scottish town of Motherwell during the First World War, it analyses how ‘vertical’ legal appeals through higher courts intersected with everyday ‘horizontal’ challenges to the jurisdiction of the local licensing magistrates as the ban pushed drinkers and the problems of drunkenness onto neighbouring authorities. Those higher court challenges importantly confirmed the localness of licensing, but they could not guarantee the effectiveness of the magistrates’ policy. By showing the potentially disruptive daily habits of ordinary citizens and urban infrastructure, the article promotes a social and material legal geography of licensing. In conclusion, it calls for a critical examination of the ‘local’ in local government, and the political geographies that result from appeals to space and scale in the division of governance functions.     

Navigating the tensions in collaborative watershed governance: Water governance and Indigenous communities in British Columbia,Canada

First Nations in British Columbia (BC), Canada, have historically been—and largely continue to be—excluded from colonial governments’ decision-making and management frameworks for fresh water. However, in light of recent legal and legislative changes, and also changes in water governance and policy, there is growing emphasis in scholarship and among legal, policy and advocacy communities on shifting water governance away from a centralized single authority towards an approach that is watershed-based, collaborative, and involves First Nations as central to decision-making processes. Drawing on community-based research, interviews with First Nations natural resource staff and community members, and document review, the paper analyzes the tensions in collaborative water governance, by identifying First Nations’ concerns within the current water governance system and exploring how a move towards collaborative watershed governance may serve to either address, or further entrench, these concerns. This paper concludes with recommendations for collaborative water governance frameworks which are specifically focused on British Columbia, but which have relevance to broader debates over Indigenous water governance.     

From “cartoneros” to “recolectores urbanos”. The changing rhetoric and urban waste management policies in neoliberal Buenos Aires

This study contributes to the existent literature on neoliberal urban governance examining the process-based character of this formation. I maintain that neoliberal governance is a fluid and evolving formation which is continuously being constructed and reconstructed beneath a rhetorical veneer of inevitable emergence and permanence. In this context, this work examines the interconnections between neoliberal urban ascendancy, changing rhetoric and urban waste management policies, and waste pickers (cartoneros), in a case study setting, Buenos Aires. Since 2002, the neoliberal urban governance in Buenos Aires (its institutions, programs and policies) has mobilized different rhetoric and policies to negotiate the waste pickers’ “disturbing” and “dirty” presence in the streets. In that process, the waste pickers, originally marginalized and stigmatized by the neoliberal discourse, have been regulated and disciplined into legal and “well behaved” workers. I would argue that, regulating this activity does not entail giving the waste pickers an opportunity to become central actors in the future of urban waste management in the city. Rather, it is compatible with the logic of the local neoliberal urban projects, focused on disciplining the city’s physical and social landscape as new opportunities for growth and development continue to emerge.     

Efficient management of e-wastes

Electricals and electronic equipments that have reached its utilization period are disposed by the consumer are considered as e-waste. The categories of e-waste range from household appliances to machines used in offices and consumer goods. The rise in problem is due to scarcity of proper place for disposing the e-wastes. Hence, the wastes are disposed in open landfills by the consumers which lead to direct reaction of the e-waste with the environment. The release of harmful toxins and chemicals by the e-wastes causes hazardous effects on living beings. Several processes are introduced in recycling and recovering the harmful metals present in the electronic equipments. The most important reasons for e-waste recycling are waste removal as well as recovery of valuable materials present in the waste. Developed countries such as USA and UK follow some strict rules and regulations about managing the increasing amount of e-wastes, whereas India still needs to have a rigid law for the e-waste management. Prior recycling and recovering the important metals from electronic wastes, it is crucial to ascertain the amount of the metal present in the e-waste. Plastics followed by metals are the main components found in electronic wastes. Hazardous metals such as copper, lead and cadmium are predominant in almost all kinds of e-wastes. Determination of the components present in the electronic wastes guides for the proper path to be followed for recovering the components from the wastes. The review deals with status of e-waste across the world and methods of recovery and management.     

新疆陆相沉积型铀矿、煤矿的勘查和采矿次序探讨

新疆为我国铀煤资源储藏大省,铀和煤埋藏条件相近。长期分行业管理、勘查和开采,既浪费资源,又造成环境污染,制肘了两个矿种的综合开采和利用。本文从分析铀、煤矿床的特点及空间分布和勘查现状入手,认为铀、煤勘查应共享资料,提高勘查效率;采矿顺序为地浸砂岩型铀矿床:先铀后煤;疏干型和含铀煤型矿床:先煤后铀的采矿顺序,以降低环境污染,提高矿产资源综合利用价值。     

Producing abjection: E-waste improvement schemes and informal recyclers of Bangalore

This article focuses upon informal e-waste recyclers who subsidise the environmental costs of Bangalore’s information technology boom. It illustrates how improvement schemes devised by development agencies, to make Bangalore’s e-waste disposal practices more sustainable, reproduced the effects of bourgeois environmentalism and effectively cast off informal recyclers from having a substantial role in the city’s emerging regime of e-waste management. Being cast out and rendered superfluous has been a deeply degrading experience for Bangalore’s informal recyclers. In order to foreground this experience I draw upon the notion of abjection and show how informal recyclers are constituted as abject residents who must be confined to collecting and processing waste from the most marginal frontiers of the city’s e-waste circuits.     

Dance and wellbeing in Vancouver’s ‘A Healthy City for All’

Through the lens of the dancing body, this paper examines practices of health and wellbeing produced in response to City of Vancouver urban governance policies. In particular, it calls attention to the legislative onslaught by city government in the years abutting the 2010 Winter Olympics to cultivate and manage healthy people, communities, and environments. In an effort to sell Vancouver’s ‘liveability’, I argue City of Vancouver endorsed a new legislative alliance that merged a conspicuously Anglo-American wellbeing lexicon, favouring individual responsibility and self-governance, with the performing arts industries. Drawing upon interviews and performance-based research, the paper illustrates how Karen Jamieson’s community dance project Connect, created for the In the Heart of the City festival, embodies Vancouver’s tri-level legislative ambitions to nurture A Healthy City For All. This materialised through the crafting of a dance-health body practice (healthy people), by choreographing a sense of belonging among ‘at risk’ communities (healthy communities), and in the uniting of the arts and health professions in the process of ‘cleaning up’ disenfranchised neighbourhoods (healthy environments). In bringing together scholarship on cultures of wellbeing and creative dance practice, the article contributes to understandings of how the health-seeking subject is embodied and performed. It also offers a productive critique of the exclusionary nature of urban health legislation, and of the contested role artists and arts festivals can play in nurturing urban wellbeing and normalising inequalities.     

A decision support system for assessing and managing environment risk cross borders

Risk assessment and management, are increasingly established as key procedures in dealing with the range of environmental issues at different scales and of different nature. Although at the EU and international policy level requirements for the use of risk assessment and management are being established through emerging policy and legislation, this demand has not been followed with common guidance on how to do so. This has proven to hinder the effective adoption of such processes, and posed a barrier more so in its implementation for large transboundary issues. In this paper is presented a Decision Support System (DSS) designed to provide a common framework and procedure for environmental risk assessment and management. The DSS is web-based and was developed to enable the formalized and more systematic utilization of risk assessment and management procedures in environmental decision making processes, in particular for users such as public authority officials charged with the responsibility of implementing risk management legal and policy obligations, yet which have limited know how in the field of risk. The DSS presented herein enables environmental administrators and decision makers to undertake generic risk assessment and management identifying areas where detailed risk assessment is required, proposing as well as appropriate risk management options. The web DSS was developed and piloted as part of the STRiM project funded by the European Union. Herein are shown results from the web application which has been trailed successfully in four pilot trials addressing risks of forest damage from storms, water pollution from olive mill waste discharges, wetland loss from water abstraction, and damage from flooding.     

Contested claims over space and identity between fishers and the oil industry in Mexico

This essay examines neoliberal forms of resource governance and emerging struggles over control of sea space between coastal fishers, the para-statal oil industry and government authorities in the State of Tabasco, Mexico. The analysis focuses on the changing mechanisms of resource governance and networking related to contested claims over rights to offshore space. The study is based on material collected during ethnographic field research in Tabasco in 2011–2014. By linking a post-Foucauldian approach to governmentality with a Deleuzian perspective on networks, our research examines resource governance as a socio-political arena, constructed in negotiation between multiple governmental, private and civil society actors, including heterogeneous groups from local populations. The study demonstrates how hybrid techniques of resource governance lead to fishers’ socio-spatial displacement, marginalization in the fields of political representation and subjection to ideas of aquaculture entrepreneurship. The ensemble of private regulation and governmental control provides a venue for drawing fishers into clientelist practices of governing while it diffuses questions of responsibility. These modes of governance fragment the fishers’ efforts to mobilize politically, making them rely on less visible networks of contestation shaped by heterogeneous fishing groups, with varying access to resources and political representation. Recent transformations in environmental legislation and the fishers’ mobile tactics of networking may offer opportunities for them to reclaim their resource rights.     

(Re)politicizing empowerment: Lessons from the South African wine industry

Despite being a poorly defined and vague concept, empowerment is currently of political and theoretical significance and nowhere more so than in South Africa, where it seen as central to post-apartheid transformation. This paper explores the ways in which empowerment has been understood, defined and deployed by post-apartheid governments in the context of a gradual shift from nation-building to neo-liberal governance. It examines the impact of legislation and government policy through a critical examination of empowerment initiatives in the wine industry. Drawing on research conducted in the Western Cape in 2004, the paper analyses how empowerment is interpreted and appropriated both within legislation and specifically within the wine industry. It explores what the wine industry reveals about the disempowering work of neo-liberalism, even as it is couched in the discourses of empowerment. Findings suggest that equating empowerment with economic empowerment threatens to reinforce structures of domination, rather than transforming them, while leaving power relations largely untouched. The case study reveals that until more radical understandings of power and empowerment are acknowledged and incorporated into government policies the failure to address broader issues of social and economic transformation will persist and policies aimed at the empowerment of marginalised individuals and communities will continue to have apparently pre-determined and depoliticised outcomes.     

Power and privilege in alternative civic practices: Examining imaginaries of change and embedded rationalities in community economies

Community economies can be considered as examples of the diverse economies growing outside common capitalist logics of private accumulation and profit, seeking to bypass or reconfigure dominant global trends of societal and economic organization. Yet, these communities seem to fit quite well under a neoliberal program in which responsibilities are shifting downwards, favoring multi-level governance over State intervention and accountability. This binary character makes imperative an open and critical discussion on the development of community initiatives, including on the motivations and visions of citizens practicing alternative ethical consumption. This article explores the neoliberal rationalities embraced by community members within the imaginaries of change they frame and examines how these rationalities contribute to (re)producing neoliberal conditions and forms of governance. Our analysis builds on semi-structured interviews conducted among the members of 11 initiatives in 5 EU countries and on participant observation. We argue here that communities articulate an “alternative imaginary” of change that appears imprinted by core neoliberal rationalities around questions of individual responsibility, the role of the State, and civic participation and equity. It is an imaginary related to the construction of CBEs to by-pass existing socio-political and economic configurations. This imaginary more often than not responds to neoliberal promises of individual freedom and autonomy and seems to undermine CBEs' more radical possibilities at the same time obscuring more diverse voices of transformation.     

Deservedness, development, and the state: Geographic categorization in the US Agency for International Development’s Foreign Assistance Framework

The institutions, practices, and discourses of US development policy and foreign assistance are undergoing profound changes. Central to these has been the creation of a new framework for foreign aid, built around a complex taxonomy of developing states and governance issue areas, with geographic and governance categories predicated on notions of state stability and fragility, strategic geopolitical position, and development progress. Given its long-standing position as the primary federal agency responsible for development and foreign aid, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has played an important role in these policy changes, even as its political status and standing have suffered in recent years. The new framework is beset by contradictions, stemming both from the problematic relationship between development, security, and liberalization in agency rhetoric and strategies, and from intensive restructuring processes affecting USAID’s internal character and external relations. This paper investigates the new framework for foreign aid, linking internal restructuring at USAID to broader trends in state development strategies. I argue that shifts in US development and aid policy - toward emphases on “transformational development” abroad and centralization over strategic decision making domestically, crystallized in the new framework - are based in contradictory understandings of aid deservedness that stem from the tensions between economic and geopolitical aims within the current security-focused US state project of neoliberalization. These contradictions and tensions are displaced onto USAID via the Foreign Assistance Framework.     

Fake it till you make it—the uncanny art of forging amber

Amber has fascinated people since the Stone Age and as one of the best means of preservation of fossil organisms, it tickles our senses. The animals that are sometimes trapped in amber, like frozen moments of long‐lost ecosystems, can be so incredibly well preserved that they look modern—which, in some cases, has proven to be just the case. Because fossil‐bearing amber not only has a significant scientific value but is also a desired commodity on the open market, fake amber has unfortunately been around for centuries.     

抚顺市煤矸石对生态环境的影响及综合利用

抚顺市煤田开采悠久，煤矸石的堆积量大，对生态环境的影响显著，并且占用大量土地，严重污染环境，以及出现边坡失稳现象。本文详细地分析了煤矸石对生态环境的影响，阐述了目前煤矸石资源化的综合利用情况，以及开发利用煤矸石具有环保和经济双重意义。     

Party politics,civil society and local democracy – Reflections from Johannesburg

Party politics are generally absent from urban governance or urban politics theories or debates, or present only anecdotally or as a ‘black box’, whilst they are more and more described, especially in Cities of the South, as central to urban societies, access to resources and social dynamics. This paper attempts, through the case of the role of the ANC in civil society in Johannesburg, to uncover the place and the role of political parties in urban governance. It first argues that the party local branch is often crucial as a platform of mobilization, expression and debates around local needs, being more structured and able to access channels of decision than other civil society organizations or local government participatory structures. However, its strong embededness in urban local societies also means a form of social control restricting the ability of civil society to revolt and challenge urban policies more radically.     

Unraveling the health-related challenges of women in the informal economy: accounts of women in cross-border trading in Accra, Ghana

The majority of urban informal sector workers lack basic health and social protection services and work in an unhealthy and unsafe environment. Women in cross-border trading are one such group. Even though they contribute significantly to and are an important component of many economies, they do so at their personal and economic risks. As these women travel, they experience health hazards which add to their existing occupational exposure. Using in-depth interviews and observation, this paper unravels the health-related risks that women in cross-border trading face. The most common physical health complaints were musculoskeletal problems such as body aches, back pains, waist pains and swollen feet as a result of long hours of travelling and poor road networks. In addition to the limited access to information on sexually transmitted diseases, women also go through psychosocial problems arising out of constant thinking and ‘worrying too much’ about their safety in the vehicles, the cash they carry along, the activities of gendarmes and armed robbers, untrustworthy clients as well as the safety of the children they leave behind. It is recommended that more attention should be paid to women’s work in the informal economy and cross-border trade in particular, so as to unravel the ways in which women’s work affects their physical and mental health. It is only through this that policies could be put in place to address the health-related challenges of women in the informal economy.     

Looking North and South: Ideals and realities of inclusive environmental governance

This paper addresses the dynamics of real processes of inclusive environmental governance by looking at the decision-maker/expert/lay person interplay. Specifically, we present a comparative ethnographic study that leads to a critical examination of Marteen Hajer’s concept of technological citizenship and its role in normative models of so-called inclusive environmental governance. First, we present the Bionatur project of MST (Movimento Sem Terra/Landless People’s Movement), the largest rural movement in Latin America. The project explicitly attempts to include lay/traditional knowledge into the processes of defining and protecting a regulatory space for “Creole seeds”. Second, we describe the formally open and inclusive environmental management of polluted sediments during harbour dredging in Norway. In both cases the actors are confronted with difficult problems bound by contradictory constraints of the institutional and cultural contexts. In complex relationships, trust, dependency, responsibility and opposition, encompass the decision-maker/expert/lay interplay. Embedded in these contexts, it is not always clear that non-experts want full autonomy and responsibility. In complex relationships, trust, dependency, responsibility and opposition, encompass the decision-maker/expert/lay person interplay. The results suggest that ideals, if instantiated, are reshaped within concrete contexts of action. Participatory ideals such as “technological citizenship”, inclusiveness, transparency and accountability need not be relativised, but they would better be expressed as regulative norms for practice rather than ideals from which an acontextual model or structure may be deduced.     

Adaptation to climate change in the insurance sector: examples from the UK,Germany and the Netherlands

Adaptation to climate change, particularly flood risks, may come to pose large challenges in the future and will require cooperation among a range of stakeholders. However, there presently exists little research especially on the integration of the private sector in adaptation. In particular, recently developed state programs for adaptation have so far been focused on the public sector. Insurance providers may have much to contribute as they offer other parts of society services to appropriately identify, assess and reduce the financial impacts of climate change-induced risks. This study aims to explore how the institutional distribution of responsibility for flood risk is being renegotiated within the UK, Germany and Netherlands. Examining how the insurance industry and the public sector can coordinate their actions to promote climate change adaptation, the study discusses how layered natural hazard insurance systems may result from attempts to deal with increasing risks due to increasing incidences of extreme events and climate change. It illustrates that concerns over the risks from extreme natural events have prompted re-assessments of the current systems, with insurance requiring long-term legislative frameworks that defines the objectives and responsibilities of insurers and the different political authorities.