ABSTRACT
In the face of growing quantities of waste in the world’s largest cities, most countries are forcing their citizen to segregate their waste. This chapter draws on a case study of a state-SGO collaborative approach to waste management in Shanghai to explore a new form of cooperative governance at the grassroots level. Seeking to address shortcomings in existing studies of environmental governance in authoritarian settings, the chapter focuses in particular on how such cooperative mechanisms, with the help of non-state actors (here, SGOs), enlist the self-governing capacities of city dwellers and, thus, shape a “green” citizenship aimed at diminishing the political space of resistance and emancipation. To carry out this analysis, the chapter draws both on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and governmentality, as the approaches are complementary, and each addresses the shortcomings of the other. While the latter offers insights into the “soft” mechanisms of power and shows that transferring operations from government to non-state actors does not signal a decline of state sovereignty per se; the first helps develop an outstanding understanding of how collective priorities—or the “green” consensus—emerge and how diverse actants need to come together to achieve them.
