Manisha Anantharaman | Sciences Po, Paris (original) (raw)

Books by Manisha Anantharaman

Routledge Pathways to Sustainability Series , 2019

The circular economy is a policy approach and business strategy that aims to improve resource pro... more The circular economy is a policy approach and business strategy that aims to improve resource productivity, promote sustainable consumption and production and reduce environmental impacts. This book examines the relevance of the circular economy in the context of developing countries, something which to date is little understood.

This volume highlights examples of circular economy practices in developing country contexts in relation to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), informal sector recycling and national policy approaches. It examines a broad range of case studies, including Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, South Africa, and Thailand, and illustrates how the circular economy can be used as a new lens and possible solution to cross-cutting development issues of pollution and waste, employment, health, urbanisation and green industrialisation. In addition to more technical and policy oriented contributions, the book also critically discusses existing narratives and pathways of the circular economy in the global North and South, and how these differ or possibly even conflict with each other. Finally, the book critically examines under what conditions the circular economy will be able to reduce global inequalities and promote human development in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Presenting a unique social sciences perspective on the circular economy discourse, this book is relevant to students and scholars studying sustainability in economics, business studies, environmental politics and development studies.

MIT Press, 2024

In Recycling Class, Manisha Anantharaman examines the ideas, flows, and relationships around unma... more In Recycling Class, Manisha Anantharaman examines the ideas, flows, and relationships around unmanaged discards in Bengaluru, India, itself a massive environmental problem of planetary proportions, to help us understand what types of coalitions deliver social justice within sustainability initiatives. Recycling Class links middle-class, sustainable consumption with the environmental labor of the working poor to offer a relational analysis of urban sustainability politics and practice. Through ethnographic, community-based research, Anantharaman shows how diverse social groups adopt, contest, and modify neoliberal sustainability’s emphasis on market-based solutions, behavior change, and the aesthetic conflation of “clean” with “green.”

Tracing garbage politics in Bengaluru for over a decade, Anantharaman argues that middle class “communal sustainability” efforts create new avenues for waste picker organizations to make claims for infrastructural inclusion. Coproduced “DIY infrastructures” serve as sites of citizenship and political negotiation, challenging the technocratic and growth-based logics of dominant sustainability policies. Yet, these configurations reproduce class, caste, and gender-based divisions of labor, demonstrating that inclusion without social reform can reproduce unjust distributions of risk and responsibility. Revealing the “win-win” fallacy of sustainability and foregrounding the agency of communities excluded from environmental policy, Recycling Class will appeal to scholars and activists alike who want to create a future with more transformative sustainability.

Journal Articles by Manisha Anantharaman

Urban Studies , 2023

Answering the call in this special issue to spatialise degrowth studies beyond the Global North,... more Answering the call in this special issue to spatialise degrowth studies beyond the Global North, this paper examines practices of ‘park-making’ in Chennai and Metro Manila as a potential degrowth pathway. Parks in the coastal mega cities of Metro Manila and Chennai can be seen as relics of a colonial era, and spaces coherent with capitalist, growth-oriented and consumerist logics. At the same time, however, they become spaces that prefigure alternative ways of organising social life in the city based upon values of conviviality, care and sharing. Using qualitative methods of analysis, this paper examines what practices people engage with to satisfy their everyday needs in parks, but also the dynamics of exclusion and contestation that play out in these spaces. In doing so, we evaluate when and under what conditions park-making supports practices of de-growth and commoning beyond consumerist culture. Both commoning and uncommoning practices are detailed, revealing the role of provisioning systems that lead to the satisfaction of needs for some at the expense of others. Further, writing from cities that are highly unequal, and where the basic needs of many are yet to be met, we assert that understanding how degrowth manifests in these contexts can only be revealed through a situated urban political ecology approach. Spatialising degrowth in cities of the Global South should start with a focus on everyday practices, study power relationally and explore the scope for a radical incrementalism.

Consumption and Society, 2022

While green public spaces have been studied in relation to biodiversity and climate change, and i... more While green public spaces have been studied in relation to biodiversity and climate change, and in relation to health and social inclusion, there is a need to further understand how they relate to a broader understanding of human wellbeing. Evidence suggests that public spaces play an important role with a view to happiness and mental health, but further evidence is needed on how people actually use such spaces and how human needs are met – and how this might compare across different contexts. This necessitates to linking conceptually, empirically and practically the consumption of such spaces, the notion of the good life, and the management of such spaces. Towards this aim, this article explores quality of life in relation to green public spaces in four cities of South and Southeast Asia: Chennai, Metro Manila, Shanghai and Singapore. Based on empirical research in these cities, we engage in a comparative analysis to discuss how and in what way ‘going to the park’ as a form of cons...

Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 2022

Supply chain volatility and the economic pressures brought about by Covid-19 has led European nat... more Supply chain volatility and the economic pressures brought about by Covid-19 has led European nations, the United States and China to adopt circularity as a domestic economic strategy. Their objectives are strengthening supply chains and resource security while boosting trade competitiveness. In this Perspective, we argue that if nations continue down the road of a unilateral and fragmented approach to the circular economy, not only will they fail to address domestic environmental problems, they will also create a phenomenon we term the 'circularity divide', thereby exacerbating global inequities.

Consumption and Society, 2022

What are the cultural politics of what becomes recognised as sustainable consumption and conseque... more What are the cultural politics of what becomes recognised as sustainable consumption and consequently good environmental citizenship? And how does this contour who is able to participate in urban environmental politics? In this article, I draw on Bourdieusian theories of distinction to explore the links between (sustainable) consumption, moral authority and participation in environmental politics in Bangalore, India. I re-theorise the term performative environmentalism to argue that when the new middle classes successfully claim cultural authority over sustainable consumption, it obscures the daily environmental practices of the poor in a manner that further disenfranchises their already tenuous right to the city and its environments. This analysis connects the study of consumption practices to scholarship on just sustainabilities by exploring the relational poverty and class politics of sustainable consumption. By focusing on how sustainability and poverty discourses articulate wit...

Social & Cultural Geography, 2022

As India, a country with a complex relationship with cleanliness, modernizes rapidly, urban infra... more As India, a country with a complex relationship with cleanliness, modernizes rapidly, urban infrastructures are increasing even faster than the growing population. This paper explores the relationships between access to infrastructures, social mobility and resource consumption in everyday lives through the case of cleanliness in Mysore, Southern India. We draw on interviews with 28 Mysoreans about cleanliness perceptions and practices. Analysing cleanliness across class, caste and gender reveals that in the globalizing cleanliness cultures of Mysore those who are precarious and have less access to hygiene infrastructures, tend to have to clean more but don’t resist expectations. We argue that, as cleanliness contours citizenship claims, the ‘great unwashed’ are excluded from participating in society. We question whether infrastructures and policies purported to increase the quality of life and provide basic human rights through increasing cleanliness, actually inadvertently contribute to deepening social stratification.

One Earth, 2020

Informal workers produce economic, social, and environmental value for cities. Too often, policy ... more Informal workers produce economic, social, and environmental value for cities. Too often, policy elites, including those promoting sustainable cities, overlook this value, proposing formalization and relying on deficit-based framings of informal work. In this perspective piece, we bring critical research and community produced knowledge about informal work to sustainability scholarship. We challenge the dominant, deficit-based frame of informal work, which can dispossess workers, reduce their collective power, and undercut the social and environmental value their work generates. Instead, thinking historically, relationally, and spatially clarifies the essential role of informal work for urban economies and highlights their potential for promoting sustainable cities. It also reveals how growth-oriented economies reproduce environmental destruction , income inequality, and poverty, the very conditions impelling many to informal work. Rather than formal-ization, we propose reparation, an ethic and practice promoting ecological regeneration, while redressing historic wrongs and redistributing resources and social power to workers and grassroots social movements.

Oxford Handbook in Comparative Environmental Politics , 2021

Circular economy is a global sustainability strategy pursued by national governments and multinat... more Circular economy is a global sustainability strategy pursued by national governments and multinational corporations looking to reconcile ecological concerns with economic growth imperatives. It also finds expression in informal work and community-based initiatives in cities across Europe and Asia. As sites that bring together state and corporate-led initiatives with everyday circular practices and arrangements, the city is fertile ground to examine the environmental politics of the circular economy. Drawing on my fieldwork examining informal recycling work in Indian cities, I argue that in an eagerness to realize the "win-win" sustainability solutions that circular economy promises to businesses and the state, the actual socio-spatial work practices such as waste picking, sorting, and repair, which comprise resource circularity are ignored. Attempts at establishing circular cities are undermined by competing urban sustainability agendas, the lack of recognition of informal expertise, and the fundamental contradiction between accumulative and redistributive goals. Reclaiming the circular economy from green growth will require transformational politics and grassroots involvement, and resisting growth in favor of equity and ecological reparation.

The Journal of Public Space, 2020

The significance of green public spaces is well documented in relation to social inclusiveness, h... more The significance of green public spaces is well documented in relation to social inclusiveness, human health, and biodiversity, yet how green public spaces achieve what Gough (2017) has termed ‘sustainable wellbeing’ is less understood. This contribution presents preliminary results from a study of green public spaces in four mega-cities of South and Southeast Asia: Chennai (the Republic of India), Metro Manila (the Republic of the Philippines), Singapore, and Shanghai (the People’s Republic of China), cities that have climates ranging from tropical, to subtropical and temperate. The conceptual framework brings together social practice theories with human development theories, methodological implications for the study of park usage, and Protected Needs. This study sets out to understand how parks satisfy human needs by uncovering practices in relation to activities and material arrangements. Central to the research design and sampling strategy is a desire to understand park-related practices in all of their diversity, and accounting for how different activities are carried out by diverse groups of people. The paper presents exemplary results showing that parks provide a space in which a multitude of needs are satisfied, and that parks cannot be substituted by other settings such as commercialized spaces. The paper will conclude by discussing tensions between types of park usage, and in relation to commercial encroachments on public space.

Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 2020

Green public spaces support human health and harbor biodiversity, but does visiting the park impr... more Green public spaces support human health and harbor biodiversity, but does visiting the park improve human wellbeing? We draw on interviews with 40 respondents in 3 Chennai parks to examine how green public spaces serve as inclusive areas for synergistic need satisfaction. Through qualitative interviews, we studied wellbeing by uncovering social practices and relating them to a list of nine Protected Needs, and by discussing need satisfaction with people directly. We find that green public spaces are unique satisfiers of multiple needs for diverse social groups through the performance of social practices, which involve underlying material arrangements, meanings, and competencies. In the cities of South Asia, where space is limited and selectively allocated to serve elite consumption, we argue that a practices-to-needs approach renders more complex the importance of green public spaces as a common good, compared to commercial and privatized spaces. We contribute to wellbeing and sustainable consumption studies by expanding the forms of consumption examined within consumption corridors, with “going to the park” subject to upper and lower spatial limits in urban settings. Spatial planning in consumption corridors therefore requires maximizing aggregated need satisfaction for more people, while minimizing need destruction in the interests of the few.

Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences , 2018

Sustainability scholarship is increasingly focused on individual behavior change and sustainable ... more Sustainability scholarship is increasingly focused on individual behavior change and sustainable consumption as crucial components of engendering more sustainable societies. Practices like bicycling to work, recycling and reusing goods, and eating organic food are heralded as both integral to and generative of larger societal transformations. Scholars have begun to identify the individual and societal conditions that can help enable such practices while also examining social, cultural, and systemic dynamics driving over-consumption, particularly in the developed world. Additionally, questions of social and cultural identity have been interrogated, as the cultural politics of sustainable consumption emerges as a key sub-field in its own right. While more recent work has begun to focus on linking individual environmentalisms with the collective processes of changing social systems, sustainable consumption as an analytical concept has largely lacked any deep engagement with questions of power or politics. Questions of power, legitimacy, authority, and consequently justice remain largely unexamined in this field of research. In this paper, I draw on research examining sustainable consumption in India to present an argument for a new direction in sustainable consumption research that prioritizes a critical perspective and is grounded in critical social theory. I argue that sustainable consumption researchers need to look at relational and structural power within sustainable consumption efforts to see how these efforts challenge or reinforce existing patterns of oppression and marginalization and outline a Bcritical sustainable consumption^ disposition to permeate sustainable consumption study and practice.

International Development Policy, 2017

Increasingly, sanitation issues are becoming a central part of global environmental governance an... more Increasingly, sanitation issues are becoming a central part of global environmental governance and the discourse on sustainability. The city of Bangalore, India, is one of many cities worldwide that is trying to come to terms with its solid waste management (SWM) problems. In 2000, the Government of India issued SWM handling rules, which is a non-binding handbook (MSW Rules 2000) that seeks to guide state and city municipalities and stakeholders in their efforts to deliver better services. A serious SWM crisis prompted Bangalore to be the first city in India to mandate segregation of waste at source. However, implementing these mandates has been a slow process, for reasons we explore in this paper. Building on transition management scholarship, the paper examines the role of interpersonal competency and framing in facilitating partnerships between diverse actors. We do this by i) clarifying the motives of actors and their aims and frames; ii) understanding roles, needs and skills; and iii) selecting, from communication research, communication methods that could possibly secure an enduring shift to more sustainable SWM policies. Our analysis shows that i) the drivers and objectives of some of the actors involved are not coherent with the main vision of the government, and ii) some actors in the city’s SWM field stand to lose financially because of the new mandates, and hence strongly oppose the change. Role transformations would need diverse stakeholders in Bangalore’s SWM system to come together for a cleaner city. This paper focuses on framing and facilitation strategies in the transitional arena for better participatory governance and stakeholder engagement.

Journal of Cleaner Production , 2013

Globalization and economic liberalization are enabling individuals in emerging economies like Ind... more Globalization and economic liberalization are enabling individuals in emerging economies like India to access lifestyles similar to the resource-intense West. This spread of consumerism poses substantial ecological challenges, and calls for studies that investigate the environmental values, ethics, and politics of India's new consumers. In this paper, I explore emerging pro-environmental behaviors in the city of Bangalore, India, among the new middle classes-its most significant consumer class. Using the case of home waste management, I show how household behavior change is made possible by neighborhood-based coordination, involving multiple actors such as environmentally-conscious residents, domestic help, and hired waste workers. Drawing on ecological citizenship theory, I discuss how waste management through recycling and composting is being implemented in Bangalore through networks of socioeconomically privileged new middle class individuals. Their privileged social, political, and economic positions enable them to collectively enact changes in their cultural and structural contexts to facilitate pro-environmental initiatives. At the same time, the role of other actors like domestic servants and waste workers is also critical to the process. I show how ecological citizenship theory can be used to analyze and highlight voluntary involvement by socioeconomically privileged individuals but fails to recognize the contributions of actors, who through their livelihood practices, play a pivotal role in producing the systems that enable pro-environmental behaviors among the elite. I conclude by suggesting that a critical analysis of the processes and political arrangements that produce pro-environmental behaviors is vital to sustainable consumption and production research in emerging economies like India.

Journal of Consumer Policy , 2017

This paper combines the concept of leapfrogging with systems-thinking approaches to outline the p... more This paper combines the concept of leapfrogging with systems-thinking approaches to outline the potentials for and barriers to enabling systemic shifts to strong sustainable consumption in the emerging economies of China and India. New urban consumers in China and India have the potential to “lifestyle leapfrog” the high impact lifestyle models of the industrialized countries while simultaneously improving their quality of life. This paper argues that by implementing systemic approaches in the consumption domains of mobility and housing, the historical trajectory of high environmental footprints of mobility and housing can be avoided. The analysis based on systems-thinking principles identifies existing barriers and possible solutions. The importance of policies for strong sustainable consumption is highlighted to induce positive feedbacks in the areas of markets and society facilitating both efficient technology uptake and behavioural changes.

Journal of Consumer Culture , 2016

This article applies social practice theory to study the emergence of sustainable consumption pra... more This article applies social practice theory to study the emergence of sustainable consumption practices like bicycling among the new middle classes of Bangalore, India. I argue that expansions of bicycling practices are dependent on the construction of defensive distinctions, which I define as distinctions that draw equally on lifestyle-based and ethics-based discourses to normalize bicycling among Bangalore's middle classes. With their environmental discourses and signage, middle-class cyclists make claims to being ethical actors and ecological citizens concerned about global environments. Their high-end bicycles and special gear enable them to maintain their social status in personal and professional circles, despite adopting what is an essentialized and stigmatized mobility practice in a social context where personal automobiles are a dominant symbol of respectability and propertied citizenship. These defensive distinctions are anchored in communities that facilitate social learning, skill-building, and the creation of collective identities. I highlight the importance of considering the role of ethical discourses in consolidating ''low-status'' social practices among ''high-status'' class fractions and discuss the implications of promoting sustainable consumption through the othering of the poor. By applying a social practice analytic to study middle-class bicycling practices, this article makes a significant contribution to the growing literature that investigates the applicability of practice-based approaches to environmental behaviors and sustainable consumption in a novel context.

Book chapters by Manisha Anantharaman

Power and Politics in Sustainable Consumption Research and Practice, 2019

Since the 2000s, scholars and practitioners have located ‘community’ as a site of volunteer-based... more Since the 2000s, scholars and practitioners have located ‘community’ as a site of volunteer-based collective action capable of supporting and promoting sustainable consumption. More recently, a growing literature has articulated a constructive critique of such initiatives. Specifically, this literature has noted that community-based voluntary civic engagement does not necessarily advance inclusion and democracy and describes issues of representation emerging as unintended outcomes of this form of collective action. In this paper, we explore the issue of representation in community-based sustainable consumption projects through case studies from England, Canada and India. We draw on the case studies to examine who is represented in community-based sustainable consumption projects and how membership composition is associated with group goals, decision-making procedures, and distributive outcomes. We find that questions of who gets to take part (and who is excluded), and whom these projects represent are rarely raised, and that this silence produces both a democratic deficit and a particularly exclusive and middle-class form of green politics. With a view to being constructively critical, we explore how these issues of representation might be overcome, and what scope there is for addressing such issues through community-based initiatives, to realize visions of sustainable consumption that are inclusive.

Book Reviews by Manisha Anantharaman

Consumption and Society , 2024

Consumption and Society , 2024

Routledge Pathways to Sustainability Series , 2019

The circular economy is a policy approach and business strategy that aims to improve resource pro... more The circular economy is a policy approach and business strategy that aims to improve resource productivity, promote sustainable consumption and production and reduce environmental impacts. This book examines the relevance of the circular economy in the context of developing countries, something which to date is little understood.

This volume highlights examples of circular economy practices in developing country contexts in relation to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), informal sector recycling and national policy approaches. It examines a broad range of case studies, including Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, South Africa, and Thailand, and illustrates how the circular economy can be used as a new lens and possible solution to cross-cutting development issues of pollution and waste, employment, health, urbanisation and green industrialisation. In addition to more technical and policy oriented contributions, the book also critically discusses existing narratives and pathways of the circular economy in the global North and South, and how these differ or possibly even conflict with each other. Finally, the book critically examines under what conditions the circular economy will be able to reduce global inequalities and promote human development in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Presenting a unique social sciences perspective on the circular economy discourse, this book is relevant to students and scholars studying sustainability in economics, business studies, environmental politics and development studies.

MIT Press, 2024

In Recycling Class, Manisha Anantharaman examines the ideas, flows, and relationships around unma... more In Recycling Class, Manisha Anantharaman examines the ideas, flows, and relationships around unmanaged discards in Bengaluru, India, itself a massive environmental problem of planetary proportions, to help us understand what types of coalitions deliver social justice within sustainability initiatives. Recycling Class links middle-class, sustainable consumption with the environmental labor of the working poor to offer a relational analysis of urban sustainability politics and practice. Through ethnographic, community-based research, Anantharaman shows how diverse social groups adopt, contest, and modify neoliberal sustainability’s emphasis on market-based solutions, behavior change, and the aesthetic conflation of “clean” with “green.”

Tracing garbage politics in Bengaluru for over a decade, Anantharaman argues that middle class “communal sustainability” efforts create new avenues for waste picker organizations to make claims for infrastructural inclusion. Coproduced “DIY infrastructures” serve as sites of citizenship and political negotiation, challenging the technocratic and growth-based logics of dominant sustainability policies. Yet, these configurations reproduce class, caste, and gender-based divisions of labor, demonstrating that inclusion without social reform can reproduce unjust distributions of risk and responsibility. Revealing the “win-win” fallacy of sustainability and foregrounding the agency of communities excluded from environmental policy, Recycling Class will appeal to scholars and activists alike who want to create a future with more transformative sustainability.

Urban Studies , 2023

Answering the call in this special issue to spatialise degrowth studies beyond the Global North,... more Answering the call in this special issue to spatialise degrowth studies beyond the Global North, this paper examines practices of ‘park-making’ in Chennai and Metro Manila as a potential degrowth pathway. Parks in the coastal mega cities of Metro Manila and Chennai can be seen as relics of a colonial era, and spaces coherent with capitalist, growth-oriented and consumerist logics. At the same time, however, they become spaces that prefigure alternative ways of organising social life in the city based upon values of conviviality, care and sharing. Using qualitative methods of analysis, this paper examines what practices people engage with to satisfy their everyday needs in parks, but also the dynamics of exclusion and contestation that play out in these spaces. In doing so, we evaluate when and under what conditions park-making supports practices of de-growth and commoning beyond consumerist culture. Both commoning and uncommoning practices are detailed, revealing the role of provisioning systems that lead to the satisfaction of needs for some at the expense of others. Further, writing from cities that are highly unequal, and where the basic needs of many are yet to be met, we assert that understanding how degrowth manifests in these contexts can only be revealed through a situated urban political ecology approach. Spatialising degrowth in cities of the Global South should start with a focus on everyday practices, study power relationally and explore the scope for a radical incrementalism.

Consumption and Society, 2022

While green public spaces have been studied in relation to biodiversity and climate change, and i... more While green public spaces have been studied in relation to biodiversity and climate change, and in relation to health and social inclusion, there is a need to further understand how they relate to a broader understanding of human wellbeing. Evidence suggests that public spaces play an important role with a view to happiness and mental health, but further evidence is needed on how people actually use such spaces and how human needs are met – and how this might compare across different contexts. This necessitates to linking conceptually, empirically and practically the consumption of such spaces, the notion of the good life, and the management of such spaces. Towards this aim, this article explores quality of life in relation to green public spaces in four cities of South and Southeast Asia: Chennai, Metro Manila, Shanghai and Singapore. Based on empirical research in these cities, we engage in a comparative analysis to discuss how and in what way ‘going to the park’ as a form of cons...

Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 2022

Supply chain volatility and the economic pressures brought about by Covid-19 has led European nat... more Supply chain volatility and the economic pressures brought about by Covid-19 has led European nations, the United States and China to adopt circularity as a domestic economic strategy. Their objectives are strengthening supply chains and resource security while boosting trade competitiveness. In this Perspective, we argue that if nations continue down the road of a unilateral and fragmented approach to the circular economy, not only will they fail to address domestic environmental problems, they will also create a phenomenon we term the 'circularity divide', thereby exacerbating global inequities.

Consumption and Society, 2022

What are the cultural politics of what becomes recognised as sustainable consumption and conseque... more What are the cultural politics of what becomes recognised as sustainable consumption and consequently good environmental citizenship? And how does this contour who is able to participate in urban environmental politics? In this article, I draw on Bourdieusian theories of distinction to explore the links between (sustainable) consumption, moral authority and participation in environmental politics in Bangalore, India. I re-theorise the term performative environmentalism to argue that when the new middle classes successfully claim cultural authority over sustainable consumption, it obscures the daily environmental practices of the poor in a manner that further disenfranchises their already tenuous right to the city and its environments. This analysis connects the study of consumption practices to scholarship on just sustainabilities by exploring the relational poverty and class politics of sustainable consumption. By focusing on how sustainability and poverty discourses articulate wit...

Social & Cultural Geography, 2022

As India, a country with a complex relationship with cleanliness, modernizes rapidly, urban infra... more As India, a country with a complex relationship with cleanliness, modernizes rapidly, urban infrastructures are increasing even faster than the growing population. This paper explores the relationships between access to infrastructures, social mobility and resource consumption in everyday lives through the case of cleanliness in Mysore, Southern India. We draw on interviews with 28 Mysoreans about cleanliness perceptions and practices. Analysing cleanliness across class, caste and gender reveals that in the globalizing cleanliness cultures of Mysore those who are precarious and have less access to hygiene infrastructures, tend to have to clean more but don’t resist expectations. We argue that, as cleanliness contours citizenship claims, the ‘great unwashed’ are excluded from participating in society. We question whether infrastructures and policies purported to increase the quality of life and provide basic human rights through increasing cleanliness, actually inadvertently contribute to deepening social stratification.

One Earth, 2020

Informal workers produce economic, social, and environmental value for cities. Too often, policy ... more Informal workers produce economic, social, and environmental value for cities. Too often, policy elites, including those promoting sustainable cities, overlook this value, proposing formalization and relying on deficit-based framings of informal work. In this perspective piece, we bring critical research and community produced knowledge about informal work to sustainability scholarship. We challenge the dominant, deficit-based frame of informal work, which can dispossess workers, reduce their collective power, and undercut the social and environmental value their work generates. Instead, thinking historically, relationally, and spatially clarifies the essential role of informal work for urban economies and highlights their potential for promoting sustainable cities. It also reveals how growth-oriented economies reproduce environmental destruction , income inequality, and poverty, the very conditions impelling many to informal work. Rather than formal-ization, we propose reparation, an ethic and practice promoting ecological regeneration, while redressing historic wrongs and redistributing resources and social power to workers and grassroots social movements.

Oxford Handbook in Comparative Environmental Politics , 2021

Circular economy is a global sustainability strategy pursued by national governments and multinat... more Circular economy is a global sustainability strategy pursued by national governments and multinational corporations looking to reconcile ecological concerns with economic growth imperatives. It also finds expression in informal work and community-based initiatives in cities across Europe and Asia. As sites that bring together state and corporate-led initiatives with everyday circular practices and arrangements, the city is fertile ground to examine the environmental politics of the circular economy. Drawing on my fieldwork examining informal recycling work in Indian cities, I argue that in an eagerness to realize the "win-win" sustainability solutions that circular economy promises to businesses and the state, the actual socio-spatial work practices such as waste picking, sorting, and repair, which comprise resource circularity are ignored. Attempts at establishing circular cities are undermined by competing urban sustainability agendas, the lack of recognition of informal expertise, and the fundamental contradiction between accumulative and redistributive goals. Reclaiming the circular economy from green growth will require transformational politics and grassroots involvement, and resisting growth in favor of equity and ecological reparation.

The Journal of Public Space, 2020

The significance of green public spaces is well documented in relation to social inclusiveness, h... more The significance of green public spaces is well documented in relation to social inclusiveness, human health, and biodiversity, yet how green public spaces achieve what Gough (2017) has termed ‘sustainable wellbeing’ is less understood. This contribution presents preliminary results from a study of green public spaces in four mega-cities of South and Southeast Asia: Chennai (the Republic of India), Metro Manila (the Republic of the Philippines), Singapore, and Shanghai (the People’s Republic of China), cities that have climates ranging from tropical, to subtropical and temperate. The conceptual framework brings together social practice theories with human development theories, methodological implications for the study of park usage, and Protected Needs. This study sets out to understand how parks satisfy human needs by uncovering practices in relation to activities and material arrangements. Central to the research design and sampling strategy is a desire to understand park-related practices in all of their diversity, and accounting for how different activities are carried out by diverse groups of people. The paper presents exemplary results showing that parks provide a space in which a multitude of needs are satisfied, and that parks cannot be substituted by other settings such as commercialized spaces. The paper will conclude by discussing tensions between types of park usage, and in relation to commercial encroachments on public space.

Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 2020

Green public spaces support human health and harbor biodiversity, but does visiting the park impr... more Green public spaces support human health and harbor biodiversity, but does visiting the park improve human wellbeing? We draw on interviews with 40 respondents in 3 Chennai parks to examine how green public spaces serve as inclusive areas for synergistic need satisfaction. Through qualitative interviews, we studied wellbeing by uncovering social practices and relating them to a list of nine Protected Needs, and by discussing need satisfaction with people directly. We find that green public spaces are unique satisfiers of multiple needs for diverse social groups through the performance of social practices, which involve underlying material arrangements, meanings, and competencies. In the cities of South Asia, where space is limited and selectively allocated to serve elite consumption, we argue that a practices-to-needs approach renders more complex the importance of green public spaces as a common good, compared to commercial and privatized spaces. We contribute to wellbeing and sustainable consumption studies by expanding the forms of consumption examined within consumption corridors, with “going to the park” subject to upper and lower spatial limits in urban settings. Spatial planning in consumption corridors therefore requires maximizing aggregated need satisfaction for more people, while minimizing need destruction in the interests of the few.

Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences , 2018

Sustainability scholarship is increasingly focused on individual behavior change and sustainable ... more Sustainability scholarship is increasingly focused on individual behavior change and sustainable consumption as crucial components of engendering more sustainable societies. Practices like bicycling to work, recycling and reusing goods, and eating organic food are heralded as both integral to and generative of larger societal transformations. Scholars have begun to identify the individual and societal conditions that can help enable such practices while also examining social, cultural, and systemic dynamics driving over-consumption, particularly in the developed world. Additionally, questions of social and cultural identity have been interrogated, as the cultural politics of sustainable consumption emerges as a key sub-field in its own right. While more recent work has begun to focus on linking individual environmentalisms with the collective processes of changing social systems, sustainable consumption as an analytical concept has largely lacked any deep engagement with questions of power or politics. Questions of power, legitimacy, authority, and consequently justice remain largely unexamined in this field of research. In this paper, I draw on research examining sustainable consumption in India to present an argument for a new direction in sustainable consumption research that prioritizes a critical perspective and is grounded in critical social theory. I argue that sustainable consumption researchers need to look at relational and structural power within sustainable consumption efforts to see how these efforts challenge or reinforce existing patterns of oppression and marginalization and outline a Bcritical sustainable consumption^ disposition to permeate sustainable consumption study and practice.

International Development Policy, 2017

Increasingly, sanitation issues are becoming a central part of global environmental governance an... more Increasingly, sanitation issues are becoming a central part of global environmental governance and the discourse on sustainability. The city of Bangalore, India, is one of many cities worldwide that is trying to come to terms with its solid waste management (SWM) problems. In 2000, the Government of India issued SWM handling rules, which is a non-binding handbook (MSW Rules 2000) that seeks to guide state and city municipalities and stakeholders in their efforts to deliver better services. A serious SWM crisis prompted Bangalore to be the first city in India to mandate segregation of waste at source. However, implementing these mandates has been a slow process, for reasons we explore in this paper. Building on transition management scholarship, the paper examines the role of interpersonal competency and framing in facilitating partnerships between diverse actors. We do this by i) clarifying the motives of actors and their aims and frames; ii) understanding roles, needs and skills; and iii) selecting, from communication research, communication methods that could possibly secure an enduring shift to more sustainable SWM policies. Our analysis shows that i) the drivers and objectives of some of the actors involved are not coherent with the main vision of the government, and ii) some actors in the city’s SWM field stand to lose financially because of the new mandates, and hence strongly oppose the change. Role transformations would need diverse stakeholders in Bangalore’s SWM system to come together for a cleaner city. This paper focuses on framing and facilitation strategies in the transitional arena for better participatory governance and stakeholder engagement.

Journal of Cleaner Production , 2013

Globalization and economic liberalization are enabling individuals in emerging economies like Ind... more Globalization and economic liberalization are enabling individuals in emerging economies like India to access lifestyles similar to the resource-intense West. This spread of consumerism poses substantial ecological challenges, and calls for studies that investigate the environmental values, ethics, and politics of India's new consumers. In this paper, I explore emerging pro-environmental behaviors in the city of Bangalore, India, among the new middle classes-its most significant consumer class. Using the case of home waste management, I show how household behavior change is made possible by neighborhood-based coordination, involving multiple actors such as environmentally-conscious residents, domestic help, and hired waste workers. Drawing on ecological citizenship theory, I discuss how waste management through recycling and composting is being implemented in Bangalore through networks of socioeconomically privileged new middle class individuals. Their privileged social, political, and economic positions enable them to collectively enact changes in their cultural and structural contexts to facilitate pro-environmental initiatives. At the same time, the role of other actors like domestic servants and waste workers is also critical to the process. I show how ecological citizenship theory can be used to analyze and highlight voluntary involvement by socioeconomically privileged individuals but fails to recognize the contributions of actors, who through their livelihood practices, play a pivotal role in producing the systems that enable pro-environmental behaviors among the elite. I conclude by suggesting that a critical analysis of the processes and political arrangements that produce pro-environmental behaviors is vital to sustainable consumption and production research in emerging economies like India.

Journal of Consumer Policy , 2017

This paper combines the concept of leapfrogging with systems-thinking approaches to outline the p... more This paper combines the concept of leapfrogging with systems-thinking approaches to outline the potentials for and barriers to enabling systemic shifts to strong sustainable consumption in the emerging economies of China and India. New urban consumers in China and India have the potential to “lifestyle leapfrog” the high impact lifestyle models of the industrialized countries while simultaneously improving their quality of life. This paper argues that by implementing systemic approaches in the consumption domains of mobility and housing, the historical trajectory of high environmental footprints of mobility and housing can be avoided. The analysis based on systems-thinking principles identifies existing barriers and possible solutions. The importance of policies for strong sustainable consumption is highlighted to induce positive feedbacks in the areas of markets and society facilitating both efficient technology uptake and behavioural changes.

Journal of Consumer Culture , 2016

This article applies social practice theory to study the emergence of sustainable consumption pra... more This article applies social practice theory to study the emergence of sustainable consumption practices like bicycling among the new middle classes of Bangalore, India. I argue that expansions of bicycling practices are dependent on the construction of defensive distinctions, which I define as distinctions that draw equally on lifestyle-based and ethics-based discourses to normalize bicycling among Bangalore's middle classes. With their environmental discourses and signage, middle-class cyclists make claims to being ethical actors and ecological citizens concerned about global environments. Their high-end bicycles and special gear enable them to maintain their social status in personal and professional circles, despite adopting what is an essentialized and stigmatized mobility practice in a social context where personal automobiles are a dominant symbol of respectability and propertied citizenship. These defensive distinctions are anchored in communities that facilitate social learning, skill-building, and the creation of collective identities. I highlight the importance of considering the role of ethical discourses in consolidating ''low-status'' social practices among ''high-status'' class fractions and discuss the implications of promoting sustainable consumption through the othering of the poor. By applying a social practice analytic to study middle-class bicycling practices, this article makes a significant contribution to the growing literature that investigates the applicability of practice-based approaches to environmental behaviors and sustainable consumption in a novel context.

Power and Politics in Sustainable Consumption Research and Practice, 2019

Since the 2000s, scholars and practitioners have located ‘community’ as a site of volunteer-based... more Since the 2000s, scholars and practitioners have located ‘community’ as a site of volunteer-based collective action capable of supporting and promoting sustainable consumption. More recently, a growing literature has articulated a constructive critique of such initiatives. Specifically, this literature has noted that community-based voluntary civic engagement does not necessarily advance inclusion and democracy and describes issues of representation emerging as unintended outcomes of this form of collective action. In this paper, we explore the issue of representation in community-based sustainable consumption projects through case studies from England, Canada and India. We draw on the case studies to examine who is represented in community-based sustainable consumption projects and how membership composition is associated with group goals, decision-making procedures, and distributive outcomes. We find that questions of who gets to take part (and who is excluded), and whom these projects represent are rarely raised, and that this silence produces both a democratic deficit and a particularly exclusive and middle-class form of green politics. With a view to being constructively critical, we explore how these issues of representation might be overcome, and what scope there is for addressing such issues through community-based initiatives, to realize visions of sustainable consumption that are inclusive.