Doctoral student Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (Columbia University), supervised by Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod, will investigate the effects of waste management schemes at the hands of formal and informal institutions of governance on people's senses of differentiation from, proximity to, and expectations of government. The premise of this study is that if one indication of good governance is the provision of basic services, insights for social science theory can be acquired by investigating how perceptions of government, and public senses of ethics, duties, and responsibility, are affected by waste management successes and failures.
The research will be carried out in the West Bank. The researcher will explore a selection of internationally-sponsored multimillion-dollar projects to develop West Bank sanitation. At times, when this "formal" environmentalist development is seen to fail, responsibility for sanitation is assumed by "informal" groups such as neighborhood councils and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This provides this opportunity for a comparative research design for analysis of how perceptions of government and civic engagement are affected by these contending sources and models of governance. This study will combine long-term participant observation, interviews and archival and documentary research on sanitation and its infrastructures.
Since the emergence of independent post-colonial states, the developing world has seen the proliferation of contexts where some governing structures fail to be "state-like," while other elements of society, such as NGOs, social movements and corporations, seem to operate according to state logics. This research is thus important because it will offer a new lens through which increasingly representative contexts characterized as failed states or stateless societies can be analyzed, both in the Middle East and beyond. This sort of fine-grained approach, combining anthropological methods with insights from science and technology studies, takes infrastructure to be a privileged discursive and material mediator among complex institutions and the people they serve and employ. It therefore allows us to reformulate social scientific understandings of the relationships among state structures, governance and civic engagement.
Funding this research also supports the education of a graduate student.
