FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The project on which this book is based, results from the interest within the group of
staff and junior researchers at the University of Amsterdam on how urban environ-
mental management could be made more sustainable. Earlier studies in India and Peru
had given us knowledge on how widespread small enterprises recycling waste mate-
rials for profit and people picking waste were in many cities in the South. It also led
to a realisation of how important the contribution of such activities was to reducing
waste flows, despite the fact that such activities occurred in semi-illegal contexts and
received no recognition from governments or middle-class residents.
The debate on how to combine ecological sustainability with socio-economic
improvements in the lives of many urban citizens, led to the formulation of the project
that lies behind this book. It aimed at improving our understanding of the factors that
underlie the dynamics of the provision of a particular urban environmental service
(solid waste management), and also at providing policymakers and city managers with
ideas about how they can tackle the problems of improving the quality of the urban
environment they are dealing with daily.
This project could not have been carried out without the help of a great many people.
Our grateful thanks goes first of all to the EU INCO-DC Programme, which provided
a generous grant for the research project on Enabling Strategies for Urban Environ-
mental Management in Mega-cities (ERBIC18CT970152). The Consortium formed
for the project consisted of researchers from the Amsterdam Global Issues and Devel-
opment Studies Institute (AGIDS), Department of Human Geography, University of
Amsterdam as coordinator under my guidance, the International Institute of Environ-
ment and Development (IIED) in London, under the guidance of Dr. D. Satterthwaite,
the Centre for Economic and Social Studies in Hyderabad, India under guidance of Dr.
S.Galab, and the School of Environmental Studies, Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya,
under guidance of Prof. Dr. Th. Davies.
The teams put together from each contributing institute consisted of dedicated
researchers, from different disciplinary backgrounds who were willing to listen to
each others’ language and start to identify a common language. Furthermore, the
project could benefit from the synergy arising from joining expertise on various
aspects of the solid waste sector. We had experts on the privatisation of solid waste
collection, on the organisation of the recycling business, on the role of local commu-
nities and their organisations in waste management, on the use of organic waste matter
in (peri-)urban agriculture, and on the environmental hazards connected to waste.