4 - Co-creating E-Waste Hub Futures

Summary

This chapter opens with a community meeting in the West Line about the e-waste issue as an example of how multiple social locations and perspectives of different community actors can be selectively narrowed in public forums and community interfaces with outside actors. In this case, the meeting foregrounded e-waste’s pollution harms and dumping narratives while eclipsing its economic/livelihood dimension. This episode leads us to a review of the complexity, challenges, and importance of representative community engagement in development projects, and how shortcuts to “participatory” development can overlook social heterogeneity, bolstering the visibility and power of certain segments within a diverse and at times contentious community. We describe the social and political divisions within the West Line villages, and our effort to generate a broadly endorsed development proposal with this community through a novel Delphi-like method. We describe the iterative procedure we adopted and how it enabled convergence on a development trajectory that proved broadly consensual, namely a social and environmental upgrading of the e-waste industry that would preserve livelihoods while reducing its harms. We reflect on the irony of the apparent success of this outside intervention in broadening and facilitating a community participation process.