Introduction

This chapter deals with the Italian way of waste management from an empirical point of view, with the aim of showing how this policy is translated into sociotechnical practice. So, neither theoretical normative models nor a priori mechanisms of governance are verified here, but the network of formal and informal interaction is retraced, focusing on a localised and specific experience of waste management. In particular there is an attempt to analyse a specific part of Italian waste governance, consisting of a practice of glass sorting and collection, in a southern Italian city.

The practice is the starting point in retracing the complexity of such a sociotechnical phenomenon (Latour, 1992), enrolling a heterogeneous network of human and non-human entities. The analysis focuses on how municipal authorities cooperate with private waste collecting companies and on the interconnection of these actors with institutional agencies, national laws and regional rules. In this network the non-human side of governance is made up of coloured bottle banks for the urban sorted waste collection, storage areas, trucks and vans, technologies and plants as well as paper, plastic, glass, aluminium and other waste materials.

The empirical/descriptive perspective is adopted to avoid the reification of some myths of governance theorisation (as a taken-for-granted increase in democracy and participation) as the self-evident effectiveness of the market-oriented policy making inspired by new public management. At the same time this is a way of showing how Italian waste governance ‘in the making’ could be very different from the well known, but stereotyped, scenario characterised by a generalised institutional weakness.

To reconstruct how an embedded and empirical order (Rosenau and Cziempiel, 1992) of waste governance works in a city in southern Italy, a non-human protagonist of this field of policy, a glass bottle, is ethnographically followed from a household rubbish bin to a glass recycling centre. In what follows the main normative frames and dynamics of the Italian waste policy are quickly depicted. Then the theoretical and methodological framework about actor-network theory (ANT) and the shadowing technique, both adopted in the ethnography of the bottle, are presented. After that the presentation of the fieldwork details precedes an in-depth description of governance practices. The ethnographic account is structured in the form of a narrative developed through the chronological sequence of actions and actors observed, zooming in and out (Czarniawska, 2004: 121) of such a multiscaled governance.