Abstract
Municipal waste management has emerged in the last two decades as one of the most critical European environmental policy fields regulated into detail through the acquis. As Romania had the least “goodness-of-fit” with the goals set in the acquis at the moment of accession, it required the highest number of provisional arrangements, the most significant increase in investment, and the most effort to create from scratch a new county-based system for managing waste. As the transition period expired and the targets assumed in the Accession Treaty had to be met, Romania achieved minimal success in meeting these targets. I explain this result as the structural misalignment of incentives among actors at different levels (operator, local, county, and national) brought by the chosen solutions for the new county-level municipal waste management systems and the pervasive lack of administrative and policy-making capacity.
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Notes
- 1.
The objectives achieved through SOP Environment 2007–2013 were as follows: 20 compliant landfills, 58 transfer stations, 16 composting stations, 22 sorting stations, 7 mechanical-biological treatment stations (MBTs); 39 waste collection centers, and 120 municipal landfills in urban areas.
- 2.
Objectives, financed through Operational Program for Big Infrastructure 2014–2020, to be achieved are the following: 7 regional landfills, 16 new transfer stations and 7 extended ones, 20 new composting stations and an extended station, 17 new sorting stations and an extended station, 9 MBTs, 6 waste collection centers, and 32 municipal waste landfills in closed urban areas.
- 3.
This section was presented during training on Environmental Public Policies (March 11–15, 2019), held with representatives from the Intercommunity Development Associations (IDAs).
- 4.
Its name and composition have recently changed. As of October 2020, it is the Ministry of Environment, Waters and Forests.
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Special thanks to Lavinia Andrei, Natalia Cugleșa, and Florența-Elena Helepciuc for providing valuable suggestions on improving the draft version of this chapter.
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Todor, A. (2021). Municipal Waste Management. In: Todor, A., Helepciuc, F.E. (eds) Europeanization of Environmental Policies and their Limitations . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68586-7_2
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