Introduction

The multiplicity of global actors leads to a variety of ideas on what sustainable waste management is and should be. Global organisations bring with them their definitions, problematisations, policies, plans, technologies and management models on how to handle waste locally. The local practice is therefore affected considerably by global organisations, especially in the global South where global actors are often represented via development programmes in which global ideas are promoted and proposed.

Managua, Nicaragua, is a local representation of such a multiplicity of global actors. In Managua, six out of seven development projects carried out by the local government in 2010 and 2011 (co-funded by international aid development organisations) were related to waste management (Zapata Campos and Zapata, 2012a), and a diversity of ideas are told and acted out in Managua. One of the global actors that states its ideas on sustainable waste management is UN-Habitat (2010a). In Managua UN-Habitat are running a project dealing with the improvement of solid waste management in the city.

The glocalisation of development aid cannot be reduced to the simple compliance, assimilation and appropriation of programmes transferred from North to South. Instead, development aid projects are also locally contested and eventually localised (see, for example, Rossi, 2006; Sulle, 2010; Zapata Campos and Zapata, 2012b), often overtly or silently. However interesting, that is not the theme of this chapter. Instead, the subject of analysis in this chapter is the global ideas on waste management formulated by UN-Habitat and the local waste management practices they promote. The chapter aims to explore some of the many views on waste management as an issue of global and local governance of sustainability based on the question: what are the global ideas, and which views on sustainable waste management do they entail?

After a note on methodology, the chapter presents the ideas on waste and waste management that are promoted by UN-Habitat globally and locally. Second, the global and local levels are compared and the extent to which they do or do not accord with each other is discussed and, based on a close reading of the local texts, the chapter discusses what views and ideas on sustainable waste management are presented and practised in Managua, and their implications for the view on how waste is organised.