Waste is political: local governance failures and urban-environmental injustices in the case of Izmir Türkiye

OpenAlex İngilizce

The article investigates urban-environmental injustices through the empirical lens of the Harmandalı case in İzmir, Türkiye. It concentrates on the failures in waste governance, demonstrating how infrastructural and governance failures converge to produce compounding inequalities. Drawing on in-depth interviews with non-randomly selected key municipal officials, city planners, environmental engineers, local residents, academics, and civil society actors, alongside documentary and GIS-based spatial analyses, the study examines how the failures in waste governance crystallizes tripartite framework of urban-environmental injustices: distributive, procedural and recognition justice. The findings reveal that peripheral neighbourhoods bear disproportionate environmental burdens, highlighting stark distributional injustices. Governance failures – including fragmented institutional coordination, political conflicts, and symbolic participatory mechanisms – generate procedural injustices, locking the city into dependence on the Harmandalı facility. Furthermore, the marginalised socio-political visibility and weak organizational capacities of the affected communities exemplify recognition injustice, limiting their capacity to assert rights and shape urban-environmental decision-making. The article contributes to critical urban studies and urban-environmental justice scholarship by emphasizing that waste governance is not merely a technical or ecological challenge but a central arena of urban politics. By advancing a tripartite analytical framework and grounding it in the case of İzmir, the article foregrounds how urban-environmental injustices are both produced and reproduced through intersecting social, spatial, and political processes. The research provides an empirically grounded lens to explore the deep causes of urban-environmental injustices, offering insights for policy, activism, and comparative urban governance studies.