NEW PARTNERSHIPS IN URBAN SOLID WASTE IN DEVELOPING WORLD 25
(Hardoy et al., 2001) – this is the exception rather than the rule. Most accounts of
urban environmental management attest to the marginality of the environmental
concern, particularly the concern of ecological sustainability (Mattingly, 1999: 113).
The neglect of the latter may perhaps be caused by the fact that policies with regard to
environmental aspects of sustainable development (the depletion or degradation of
resources or eco-systems) are usually outside the purview of local authorities.
However, the apparent lack of concern in many cities for the environmental hazards
their (poor) residents are facing is more a matter of choice. The detrimental effects of
a poor and unhealthy environment may constrain urban productivity and efficiency
but they are indirect and only partly negotiated through the market. Calculating envi-
ronmental costs or imposing environmental regulations will confront urban entrepre-
neurs with higher costs and suppress their productivity rather than enhance it, at least
in the short term. The pricing of environmental capital requires strong political
commitment, which is unlikely to occur in situations where the constituency is hardly
exercising any political pressure to do so. One cannot deny the tension that exists
between the drive towards liberalisation and deregulation to allow private operators to
take the lead in urban development, and the need for (government) control and regu-
lation of the private sector to effectively circumvent environmental degradation. The
inherent qualities of the environment, involving its public goods nature, externalities,
and common property problems, turn the market into a deficient institution for its
management. These are exactly the kind of contradictions that become manifest in the
analysis of the privatisation of urban solid waste collection.
2.3. DECENTRALISATION AND ITS LIMITS
The reason why attention has to be paid to the issue of decentralisation is not so much
that privatisation is one of its modalities, but rather that privatisation of public services
puts new, qualitatively different demands on local governments especially. In order to
match these new demands they need to be empowered, and this is what decentralisa-
tion is supposed to realise.
Decentralisation refers to the transfer of responsibility for planning, management and
resource agencies to lower echelons of government or to the private sector. Usually,
devolution is considered the ultimate or ‘real’ form of decentralisation, since power
(functions and financial means) is actually transferred to sub-national political enti-
ties, who in turn have real autonomy in many important respects (Rondinelli et al.,
1989; Dillinger, 1994). This is the way in which the concept ‘decentralisation’ will be
used in the subsequent analysis.
In earlier times, decentralisation was largely considered an instrument to improve the
efficiency of public administration. In the 1990s, however, the strive for decentralisa-
tion was largely motivated by changing views on state-society relations (Helmsing,
2000). As far as the developing world is concerned the crisis years had crippled many