ABSTRACT

Roma communities in the CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) region work in the informal economy through scavenging municipal waste. This conceptual paper has the aim of examining the extent for integration of scavenging into environmental policy through the development of a research paradigm applied to Roma and similarly marginalized non-Roma individuals. Evidence from studies of informal waste collection outside Europe suggests that in some cases it has been integrated into municipal waste management policy. In the CEE region, environmental policy insufficiently acknowledges the existence of informal scavenging whereby waste material categorization and disposal is not monitored to infer a research gap which is addressed in the research paradigm. This paper also adds to ongoing debate on entrepreneurship theory by developing a typology incorporating categories of ethnic (Roma) and informal (non-ethnic) entrepreneurship and thus serves to inform policy development for more socio-economically effective municipal waste collection and disposal in the CEE region.

摘要

中东欧（中欧和东欧）地区的罗姆人社区通过清除市政废物在非正规经济中开展工作。本概念文件的目的是通过开发适用于罗姆人和类似边缘化非罗姆人的研究范式，研究将清除工作纳入环境政策的程度。欧洲以外的非正式废物收集研究的证据表明，在某些情况下，该废物已被纳入市政废物管理政策。在中欧和东欧地区，环境政策不足以承认存在非正式清扫手段，因此不对废料的分类和处置进行监控以推断出研究范式中存在的研究空白。民族（罗姆人）和非正规（非族裔）企业家精神，因此有助于为中东欧地区在社会经济上更有效地收集和处置市政废物的政策制定提供信息。