Partnerships for development: municipal solid waste management in Kasese, Uganda.
Municipal solid waste management systems of many developing countries are commonly constrained by factors such as limited financial resources and poor governance, making it a difficult proposition to break with complex, entrenched and unsustainable technologies and systems. This article highlights strategic partnerships as a way to affect a distributed agency among several sets of stakeholders to break so-called path dependencies, which occur when such unsustainable pathways arise, stabilize and become self-reinforcing over time. Experiences from a North-South collaborative effort provide some lessons in such partnership building: In Uganda and Denmark, respectively, the World Wildlife Fund and the network organization access2innovation have mobilized stakeholders around improving the municipal solid waste management system in Kasese District. Through a municipal solid waste management system characterization and mapping exercise, some emergent lessons and guiding principles in partnership building point to both pitfalls and opportunities for designing sustainable pathways. First, socio-technical lock-in effects in the municipal solid waste management system can stand in the way of partnerships based on introducing biogas or incineration technologies. However, opportunities in the municipal solid waste management system can exist within other areas, and synergies can be sought with interlinking systems, such as those represented with sanitation.
Department of Development and Planning, Aalborg University, Aalborg and Copenhagen, Denmark damc@plan.aau.dk.
David
D
Christensen
Department of Development and Planning, Aalborg University, Aalborg and Copenhagen, Denmark.
David
D
Drysdale
Department of Development and Planning, Aalborg University, Aalborg and Copenhagen, Denmark.
Kenneth
K
Hansen
Department of Development and Planning, Aalborg University, Aalborg and Copenhagen, Denmark.
Josefine
J
Vanhille
Department of Development and Planning, Aalborg University, Aalborg and Copenhagen, Denmark.
Andreas
A
Wolf
D002947:Cities; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000379:methods*; D003718:Denmark; D007391:International Cooperation; D010934:Planning Techniques; D012037:Refuse Disposal / Q000191:economics* / Q000379:methods*; D014454:Uganda
Developing countries; Uganda; innovation; partnerships; path dependencies