MARKETS,PARTNERSHIPS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 11
conditions and standards. They save on costs, reduce political interference and red
tape, and lower levels of coercion (SWM studies in this category include those by
Bartone et al. (1991), Ali (1993), Fernandez (1993), Lee (1997), and Post (1999)).
In such institutional arrangements, the role of local government officials changes radi-
cally from that of implementing agency to that of standard setting and monitoring
agency. The extent to which government officials have the capacity to carry out their
new responsibilities is a major concern in studies of such public-private arrangements.
A second concern is to assess the organisational and financial aspects of such privati-
sation initiatives (cf. Peltenburg, de Wit and Davidson, 2000).
Governments generally privatise SWM activities to large-scale, formally registered
enterprises. Little attention is given to the potential of small-scale, private operators
and CBOs to remove solid waste from residential areas. Nor are small-scale waste
traders or recycling enterprises of whatever size drawn into privatisation initiatives,
despite their existing expertise in this area. Local authorities prefer to link up with
formal enterprises. There is an emphasis on strong contractual arrangements, for
which informal businesses and communities do not qualify. Although their potential
capacity in separation and collection of waste is increasingly acknowledged, few
governments have started to include them in their policies (Baud et al, 2001).
Private-private arrangements
Studies on SWM covering private-private arrangements focus mainly on waste trade,
reuse and recycling and waste recovery activities within the system. Studies deal not
only with (semi-) contractual arrangements between traders and enterprises, but have
shown a strong concern with labour contracts and working conditions, and the impact
of official rules and regulations on private or communal undertakings. Finally,
economic evaluations are combined with qualitative environmental assessments.
The first studies on the recovery, recycling or reuse of materials from city waste
emerged from the interest in the labour conditions and survival mechanisms of waste
collectors and traders (Birkbeck, 1978; Furedy, 1990; Kerkum, 1991; Sicular, 1992;
Huysman, 1994). During the 1990s, the fact that waste recovery not only provides
income to sizeable groups of the urban poor, but that its value as a commodity also
contributed to the ecological aspects of sustainable development of SWM systems
became more widely acknowledged (cf. Furedy, 1992; Baud, et al., 1996). Finally, the
economic and environmental impacts of international trade and use of waste materials
in production has been studied (van Beukering, 1994; van Beukering and Duraiappah,
1996). At the local level, co-operation between local authorities and groups of urban
poor involved in ‘informal’ economic activities is far from materialising. Local
authorities usually seek to actively exclude such activities from taking place, as they
conflict with their public health perspective on effective collection and disposal