Allan Schnaiberg,
Adam S. Weinberg, and David Pellow
Abstract
Much contemporary environmental policymaking shifts
our political focus away from our ecological goals, stressing
instead the need to create “economically efficient”
means to accomplish these goals. Social scientists have paid limited
attention to the social distributive outcomes of such policymaking.
Yet these outcomes of heightening attention to economic efficiences
affect the scale and intensity of political constituencies for
environmental protection. In this paper, we trace this process
of “markets over politics” and its impacts in the United
States, Chicago, and its northern suburb of Evanston in the 1990s.
Both cities constructed and implemented curbside recycling programs
during this period. But their rationale, goals, and means of recycling
were dramatically different.
Although both communities recruited unskilled labor
for the actual sorting jobs, the Chicago facility initially offered
a repressive and regressive mode of labor control, essentially
reducing low-income workers to a day-labor contingent worker status.
Recyclable diversion rates were extremely low for the wide diversity
of materials collected. In contrast, Evanston offered both life-skills
training to its workers and assistance in getting employment at
the end of their recycling jobs. Their recyclable diversion rates
were quite high, for the restricted materials they selected. Paradoxically,
the political administration of Chicago eventually intervened
to improve both work conditions and recyclable diversion rates.
But the budgetary politics in Evanston led to its abandoning its
unique recycling program, and contracting out the work to the
private sector.
We also explore the factors that led each community’s
decision-makers to select and to modify their technologies of
curbside recycling: capital-intensive in Chicago, and labor-intensive
in Evanston, and their quite different managerial agendas. These
differences and dynamics suggest the value of studying how political
involvement in the environ-mental policymaking process can alter
the balance between politics and markets in environmental protection.
Allan Schnaiberg, Department
of Sociology, Northwestern University
Adam S. Weinberg, Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, Colgate University
David Pellow, Department of Sociology and Ethnic
Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder
Click on
the working paper title at the top of this
page to download a free pdf of the paper.*
If You Need to Order a Hard Copy: Hard copies
of IPR working papers cost $5.00 each (international orders are $10 each). We only accept checks drawn on U.S. bank and payable in U.S. funds. Checks or money orders should be made
payable to Northwestern University and sent to the following address:
Publications Department - WP Orders
Institute for Policy Research
2040 Sheridan Rd., Evanston, IL 60208-4100.
For information, call 847-491-8712 or email ipr@northwestern.edu.
Please note that we do not accept credit cards.
*Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 (or higher) is needed to read the Acrobat pdf.
If you need to install Acrobat Reader, click the button below. Once the file
has downloaded onto your desktop, run it to install the reader on your hard
drive.
