South Africa: Commercialising Solid Waste Management

The collection of household refuse - or the lack thereof - is one of the most powerful visual benchmarks of inequality in South Africa. Municipal governments in South Africa have been turning increasingly to commercialisation (i.e., privatisation, outsourcing, corporatisation) as a way of addressing this refuse collection backlog. Why this has happened, and how successful it has been at addressing the problem, are the subjects of the two papers in this collection.