Waste Valuation Performed by Socio-Technical Connections

Waste governance in Italy is characterized by a pluralisation of private and public actors, institutional levels of responsibility, organizational and technological ways of waste management. Ecological modernization seems to inspire a heterogeneous and changeable assemblage of actors pursuing the economic valorisation of waste through an integrated system of waste disposal plants and technologies. In this paper the sociological framework developed by Michel Callon is adopted to reconstruct and analyse the dynamics allowing two different governance networks to perform waste valorisation. Using the narrative approach, two episodes regarding a waste-to-energy plant and a practice of collecting and processing of waste glass in two localities in the South of Italy are presented. It is argued that the shift from the normative model of governance to the “governance in the making” is useful to grasp the internal functioning of the ecological modernization. The economic valorisation of waste is interpreted both as a process of co-construction that enacts and is enacted by an emergent group of actors that shape waste management and organization and as a specific perspective in terms of what effectiveness and value are.