ABSTRACT

The crucial role of the informal economy in urban environmental management is yet to be acknowledged in policy-making. This paper explores the sustainability discourses that shape urban environmental policies, and how they relate to different conceptualisations of the informal economy. Focusing on Mexico City, this paper analyses the discourses of policy-makers and their reflection in the city’s waste management plan. Results show reformist and radical discourses of sustainability are correlated with preferences as to the integration or exclusion of the informal economy in environmental policy. In addressing Mexico City’s environmental challenges, policy-makers have embraced a reformist sustainability discourse that focuses on technological fixes to environmental degradation and promotes a techno-managerial mode of governing. This discourse is correlated with a view of the informal economy as a barrier to the sustainability transition, which leads to the exclusion of informal workers from the policy arena and renders invisible their working conditions and their contribution to urban life. The paper concludes that the reformist sustainability discourse obscures and reproduces environmental injustices – repoliticization of the sustainability discourses shaping urban environmental policies is necessary to achieve sustainability transitions that are also socially just.

摘要

非正式经济在城市环境管理中的关键作用尚待决策。本文探讨了塑造城市环境政策的可持续发展话语，以及它们如何与非正规经济的不同概念联系起来。本文以墨西哥城为重点，分析了决策者的话语及其在城市废物管理计划中的体现。结果表明，关于可持续性的改良主义和激进主义话语与在环境政策中整合或排除非正规经济的偏好相关。在应对墨西哥城的环境挑战时，政策制定者接受了一种改革派的可持续发展话语，该话语侧重于解决环境退化的技术问题，并促进了技术管理的治理模式。这种话语与将非正规经济视为阻碍可持续性转型的障碍有关，这导致非正规工人被排除在政策领域之外，并使他们的工作条件及其对城市生活的贡献变得无形。本文得出的结论是，改革派的可持续发展话语掩盖并再现了环境不公正现象–塑造城市环境政策的可持续发展话语的政治化对于实现也在社会上公正的可持续发展转变是必要的。