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.

We review the emergence of the West Line hub that has processed most of Israel’s e-waste for over two decades against the background of the global phenomena of e-waste policies and hubs often characterised as simply dumping grounds at the receiving end of flows of contaminating processes and materials to less regulated settings (the Pollution Haven Hypothesis, PHH). Its emergence was facilitated by factors common to the occupied West Bank as a whole (de-development, lower labor costs, dominance of the informal sector, a porous border and spatial fragmentation), and others especially important in the West Line area. These include the disruption of work opportunities in Israel alongside a rise in the amounts and value of e-waste; proximity to Israeli urban centers and distance from Palestinian ones; the historical presence of a scrap trade; a population comprised of a handful of extended families facilitating trust-based economies, on the one hand, while overcoming stigma and opposition on the other; and availability of areas of governance vacuum allowing dumping and burning. The PHH’s crudely global account of e-waste hub emergence must be refined to include the context-specific presence and operation of hubs as forceful economic agents, not simply passive recipients of waste dumping.