COUNTRIES OUTSIDE THE ‘USUAL’ OECD
4.7 INCLUDING STAKEHOLDERS
4.7.1 The range of stakeholders and their roles
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Also, citizens can be informed about the producer’s involvement in an official recovery scheme, such as the
‘Green Dot’ scheme for packaging, which originated in Germany but is now active in 28 countries (Box 4.21).
BOX 4.21 RECOGNIZABLE SYMBOL OF AN EPR SCHEME
The ‘Green Dot’ logo on packaging means that the producer has paid a financial contribution to the national organization for packaging recovery that has been set up and authorized in accordance with the European Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive 94/62 and the respective national law. As of 2015, organizations in 28 countries are using the Green Dot as a financing symbol to facilitate organization of a system for collection, sorting and recovery of discarded (mainly household) packaging.137
Various information-based instruments have been used to, for example, give visibility to best- or worst- performing companies; such instruments are popularly known as ‘name and fame’, or ‘name and shame’, respectively.138
BOX 4.22 JAPAN’S ‘TOP RUNNER’ PROGRAMME
139This programme sets energy efficiency standards for products in 21 categories (for example, vending machines, air conditioners, TVs) in Japan. On a regular basis, officials test all the products available on the Japanese market in a given category, determine the most efficient model, and make that model’s level of efficiency the new baseline. Manufacturers have the obligation to make efforts to achieve the new baseline within four to eight years. Products that meet the energy efficiency standard receive a Top Runner label.
If a manufacturer does not meet the target or fails to make a good faith effort, this fact gets publicized.
Figure 4.5 Stakeholders and their roles in the waste management system
CHANGE AGENT
Governmental &
independent agencies
Households, tourists, industries and other waste generators Government &
governmental agencies
Public or private companies, CBOs and other service providers Service user
organisations Financing
agencies
Waste sector professional associations (self-regulation)
Civic society groups - non-governmental organizations and networks
Service user organizations
Media Regulator
Policy maker
Service
user Operator
Note: Any stakeholder can step up and be a change agent, taking the system to the next level. While this is not a governmental function, governments are likely to contribute to the initial funding of a ‘dedicated’ change agent in the system, to help make it happen. Typical examples of such an agent include WRAP in the UK and Zero Waste South Australia.140
Waste management starts with waste generators, which includes basically everyone, either as a person and consumer, a resident or a tourist, or as a business owner or an employee of a company or an organization.
Waste generators are also users of waste management services and thus have a dual role in the system, which pertains to two different stages in a product’s life cycle – the consumption stage and the end-of-use stage.
Hence these stages probably require different approaches to involve citizens and influence their behaviour.141 As a stakeholder, citizens may be represented by community-based organizations, advocacy NGOs and community leaders. Depending on the culture, community leaders may have an authoritative position and their stance may determine that of the community, which is important to bear in mind when designing governance instruments.
Another important category of stakeholders includes government and government agencies, as they create the political setting, initiate and guide the process of strategic planning, prepare a supporting legal framework within which waste is addressed, and define and select various other instruments that will be applied to support the implementation.
At least equally important for the waste management system’s performance, albeit possibly in a position of lesser power, are various service providers, from waste collection to transport to operators of facilities.
These can be municipal departments, publicly-owned companies, privately-owned companies (varying in size across a very wide range, from multinational corporations to self-employed individuals), community-based organizations, informal workers or their cooperatives, or any combination of these. Looking beyond providers of waste collection services, other actors include those engaging in the repair or reuse of products, the recycling of materials or the agricultural value chain, as well as other actors that recover resources from waste. In this category, international networks of practitioners in waste management, e.g. ISWA,142 have been instrumental in sharing knowledge and best practices and have contributed to the professionalization of waste management worldwide.
140 http://www.wrap.org.uk; http://www.zerowaste.sa.gov.au
141 In the consumption stage, where waste can be prevented through, for example, purchasing choices or repair and reuse, citizens are consumers and the instruments should be chosen accordingly; in the end-of-use stage, where for example fly-tipping and littering may be a problem, citizens are (unwilling) service users and different instruments are called for. Another example of citizens’ behaviour in the end-of-use stage concerns waste segregation for recycling. It is noteworthy that even though it may seem that the same instruments can be applied to encourage citizens to segregate their waste for recycling and to prevent waste in the first place through, for example, reuse, scientific evidence from industrialized countries suggests that people’s motivations to engage in one or the other differ; this implies that appropriate policy instruments will acknowledge this difference. Namely, people who engage in waste prevention tend to be more concerned about the environment and are prepared to adopt more frugal lifestyles; people who segregate their waste for recycling often do so because they consider it as the norm for socially expected or desirable behaviour. Moreover, they may not be willing to engage in prevention. The motivations in developing countries may be very different – people who engage in reuse tend to be the poorest ones; their motivations are borne out of economic necessity.
142 http://www.iswa.org/
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Finally, the role of a regulator is indispensable for an effective waste management system to monitor the quality and price of services as well as compliance with permits and legislation.143 The regulator function is backed by various other organizations that provide monitoring and analysis of the environmental performance of waste facilities, including laboratory and other supporting services.
In line with these four direct roles, an array of stakeholders has keen professional or advocacy interest in waste management. For example, they may do research and provide support to policy makers,144 or they may advocate a particular policy direction or support the position of informal service providers or underprivileged service users. These actors include advocacy and operational NGOs, the media, education and research institutions and engineering and other consultants. For example, international networks such as Zero Waste Alliance,145 GAIA,146 RED LACRE147 the Latin American Network of Recyclers, WIEGO148 and CWG149 advocate various ideas on sustainable or inclusive waste management and provide a platform for the exchange of experiences, including those of grass-roots practitioners. Funding agencies such the World Bank, IDB, KfW and others may also have a prominent role, as their interest and input often accelerate activities to improve services and upgrade facilities.
In addition to their roles in the system, stakeholders may be in positions with varying degrees of power to influence the system and varying degrees of interest in waste management topics. These two dimensions, influence and interest, provide a useful analytical framework for stakeholder analysis with the aim of identifying their positions in, for example, the process of strategic planning.150 Accordingly, different approaches are appropriate for their participation and inclusion:
• For stakeholders of high influence and high interest (often referred to as ‘key players’) it is advisable to ensure their close involvement throughout the decision-making process and subsequent implementation.
Examples include large cities (which may have more power than a ministry), federal states (which may have more power than the central government), and large industries.
• For stakeholders with high influence but low interest, it may be sufficient to keep them informed and acknowledge their views in order to avoid unnecessary disruption. These could include politicians, governmental agencies and financing agencies that have waste low on their agenda.
• Stakeholders in the unfavourable position of high interest but low influence require special attention, to make sure that their needs and interests are adequately addressed. Typically, these include citizens, particularly those in underprivileged neighbourhoods, as well as community-based organizations and informal service providers.
• Finally, stakeholders with low influence and low interest are unlikely to be involved and require no particular participation strategies.
Forming multi-stakeholder partnerships is a successful model to provide a structure for result-oriented problem solving. An example is the Partnership for Action on Computing Equipment (PACE),151 which was developed as a multi-stakeholder public-private partnership to provide a forum to tackle environmentally sound refurbishment, repair, material recovery, recycling and disposal of used and end-of-life computing equipment. Through the Partnership, a network of expertise from different perspectives has been created, where manufacturers, users, refurbishers, recyclers, academia, NGOs, etc. can work together in a strictly neutral structure; PACE has achieved results which have a very high degree of acceptance by all its stakeholder groups.
143 For a discussion of this, see Section 4.4 on implementation and enforcement.
144 Academia and other research institutions, including NGOs, expand the body of knowledge on specific aspects of waste and resource management. In response to legal requirements, researchers have been developing various technologies including engineered controls for environmental protection and technologies for resource recovery.
Researchers also investigate various waste management options by comparing their environmental benefits, for example, through LCA and MFA, and work on optimization of logistics networks for recyclables. In the domain of social sciences, governments have sought scientific explanations about human motivations for behavioural change so as to inform their design of corresponding instruments. The scientific community has frequently raised issues of resources use and provided the frameworks and metrics to address them.
145 http://zwia.org 146 http://www.no-burn.org 147 http://www.redrecicladores.net/es/
148 http://wiego.org 149 http://www.cwgnet.net
150 The interest-influence matrix is a popular and widely used method of stakeholder analysis. For a useful recent overview of other methods see Reed et al. (2009).
151 See Topic Sheet 8 on e-waste, found after Chapter 3.