Informal Waste Recycling Economies in the Global South and the Chimera of Green Capitalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper contends that green growth/economy strategies directed at the global South through ideas such as the circular economy (CE) can maintain and reproduce predatory practices that aggressively exploit racialised groups, while simultaneously cannibalising their environments. These green strategies facilitate transfers of wealth from the global South to the North through new socio‐spatial frontiers for wealth creation, global South cities, and their expanding, dispossessed, unhoused, and racialised army of informal labour. Green growth/economy strategies—mechanisms that attempt to “green” capitalism—are portrayed as a chimera that can reproduce racial forms of exploitation and accumulation in discursive and material ways. Green campaigns that attempt to reconstruct notions of waste and value, and re‐imagine informal waste work as good and safe, neglect an accounting of race and the historical, political, and economic factors that make possible waste recycling as a viable economic strategy for sustainable development in the global South.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".