Modes of governing Canadian waste management: a case study of Metro Vancouver’s energy-from-waste controversy

Abstract

As landfilling costs increase and controversies emerge over new waste processing facilities, managing growing quantities of municipal solid waste is a pressing environmental and political concern for Canadian municipalities, who bear the primary responsibility for coordinating waste management (WM). In 2015, Metro Vancouver's plans to expand their capacity to manage their waste through energy-from-waste technology was put on hold indefinitely despite shrinking landfill space and persistent public opposition to new landfills. Using Bulkeley et al.'s (2005) 'modes of governing framework', we analyze Metro Vancouver's failed attempt to expand their energy-fromwaste capacity to better understand the challenges associated with how waste is governed in Canada. We argue that a history of downloading responsibility for WM to municipalities, regional districts, and private industry has fragmented WM governance, posing a challenge for developing new waste infrastructure. We find that this localization of responsibility is incompatible with contemporary WM challenges. The scalar mismatch between waste's material impacts and the scale at which waste is managed has resulted in co-dependence and conflict between putatively independent municipalities, regional districts, and private companies. As a result, both higher-level WM coordination is inhibited while the autonomy of individual municipalities is simultaneously undermined.

Assessing the Degree of Sustainability Integration in Canadian Public Sector Procurement

“…We elected such weighting based on the conventional threshold for materiality (based on the interpretation of accounting and auditing guidelines issued by authoritative bodies such as the Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada or the United States Securities and Exchange Commission), as anything lower than 10% would have limited impact on the selected bidder. We opted to include language discussing accountability, given the many unrealized commitments in sustainability, examples of which include recycling plants with residual rates (% of material not recycled) ranging from 20−40% [28] and frequent mislabeling of foods as organic or sustainable [29][30][31]. Without such language, we determined that integration within the RFP could still result in minimal implementation efforts.…”

Local governance of greenhouse gas emissions from air travel

“…While the modes of governing as outlined above are engaged in ways to promote certain developments, Zvolska, Lehner, Voytenko Palgan, Mont, and Plepys (2017) highlight the possibilities for local governments to act both as promoters and inhibitors through these different modes of governing. We attend to this aspect by looking at goal conflicts between different policy areas and how they manifest through the different modes of governing as applied to conflicting goals (Lougheed, Metuzals, & Hird, 2017).…”

A systems‐engineering approach to nation‐scale problems: Municipal solid waste management in Saudi Arabia

“…Previous work in this area has focused on the application of specific technologies such as waste-to-energy on a particular waste stream 7,[15][16][17][18][19] or the environmental effects of landfill. 8 However, these papers have not investigated the full range of options for processing the waste stream or developed any methods to simulate them.…”