Abstract
The Basel Convention is regaining attention for the potential entry into force of the heretofore stalled Ban Amendment. In this paper, we draw parallels between the current debate surrounding the Ban Amendment and contestations that occurred in the early years of the Basel Convention’s Technical Working Group (TWG) over defining ‘hazardousness.’ Like the present debate, TWG deliberations involved a contestation between two divergent discourses concerning how hazardous wastes should be regulated—as ideally managed versus actually managed in the global South. Scholars have shown how the TWG is a site for industry to press for a definition of hazardousness favorable to their economic interests. However, explorations of the specific processes by which this occurred—particularly, how a framework for defining hazardousness that privileges private technical expertise over concerns of precaution and equity was successfully institutionalized within the TWG—have yet to be completed. We show that it is important to reexamine this debate today in order to better understand current Basel Convention developments.
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Notes
UNEP.CHW.10/5.
Industrialized countries include those in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the European Union (EU) and Lichtenstein.
As identified by analysis of meeting archives, and also based on recommendations of previous interviewees.
Prior to this, both the OECD and the UNEP were already working on draft frameworks for regulating the transboundary movement of hazardous wastes, but the OECD halted work on its internal framework (which was based on the principle of PIC, or Prior Informed Consent) with the calls for a global convention.
In the Basel literature, the period between 1989 and the mid-1990s is characterized by a clear North–South divide. Our interview data suggest that, more recently, there have been disjunctures within both of these camps, particularly between the EU and other developed countries, and between countries with economies in transition and LDCs (Pellow 2007; Clapp 2001). In particular, there is an increased desire in rapidly industrializing countries to develop a more extensive recycling infrastructure and hence to encourage the importation of certain hazardous wastes.
More recent research (Marcoux and Urpelainen 2012) has suggested that the environmental injustice rhetoric was strategically employed by less-developed countries as a means for securing access to capacity development resources to improve the control (as opposed to the elimination) of hazardous waste imports. Indeed, this claim seems to be very relevant in the current time, particularly in light of less-developed countries’ recent endorsement of revising regulations to improve hazardous waste management capacity within their own countries (see Sect. 5). However, as we will see below, when efforts in the 1990s to control hazardous waste imports largely failed due to Basel Convention loopholes, the less-developed country delegates did vote to ban North/South hazardous waste transfers. Indeed, during the debate to define hazardousness in the 1990s (see Sect. 4), the less-developed country delegates argued that the classification of a waste as hazardousness or not should be based on the processing context, rather than the “inherent” qualities of the waste as it was being transported, which would lead to a higher number of wastes potentially being subject to the Basel ban.
For instance, at TWG 7, Greenpeace was the only NGO present; at TWG 8, there were three industry NGOs present; at TWG 9, 10 and 13, Greenpeace and seven industry NGOs were present; and at TWG 11, Greenpeace and eleven industry NGOs were present.
Interview with representatives of the Basel Secretariat and the US delegation.
TWG 9 (December 1995) (http://basel.int/meetings/twg/twg9-14/twg-9.pdf), emphasis added.
For a general discussion of the importance of the classification of metal scraps in deciding the definition of hazardousness, see Clapp (2001 pp. 86–89, 94–95).
This is one of the more economically important waste streams traded globally: Clapp (2001, 86–89); OEWG 1 (2003); OEWG 2 (2004).
Interview with Jim Puckett.
TWG 10 (April 1996) (http://basel.int/meetings/twg/twg9-14/twg-10.pdf).
TWG, 17 (October 2000) (http://basel.int/meetings/twg/twg17/predocs/twg17_15.pdf).
A 1998 Decision (IV/8) stipulated that membership in Annex VII (those countries forbidden from exporting hazardous waste into non-Annex VII under the Ban Amendment) could not be altered until entry into force of the Ban Amendment.
The outcome of this ‘think tank,’ a 2011 non-paper titled ‘Shifting Paradigms: From Waste to Resources,’ is an interesting avenue of study in itself; available: http://archive.basel.int/convention/shiftparad.html.
E.g., Japan argued in 2004 that: ‘…some parties, in view of the importance of a mutually supportive relationship between trade and the environment supported the listing of parties in Annex VII [countries permitted to import] based on the parties’ waste management capacity rather than OECD membership.’
UNEP-CHW-OEWG.8-INF-8.English.doc.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Sarah Babb and Juliet Schor for their insights and guidance on drafts of this paper. Special thanks to the Boston College Environmental Sociology Working Group for allowing us to present this paper, and for their useful comments. An earlier draft of this paper was presented in 2011 at a roundtable session of the Political Economy of the World-System section on “The Political Economy of Global Environmental Governance,” Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. We are also very grateful for the comments of two anonymous reviewers. We have no financial interest or benefit arising from the direct applications of this research to disclose.
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Lucier, C.A., Gareau, B.J. Obstacles to preserving precaution and equity in global hazardous waste regulation: an analysis of contested knowledge in the Basel Convention. Int Environ Agreements 16, 493–508 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-014-9261-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-014-9261-6