Patrik Zapata

University of Gothenburg | GU · School of Public Administration

This paper examines how local governments can develop new practices in labour integration policy through cross-sector collaborations, and the role of territorial embeddedness in enabling them. The paper is informed by three initiatives for labour market integration of immigrants led by the city district of an urban suburb in the city of Göteborg, i...

The topic of this chapter is the practice known as Employment Promoting Procurement (EPP), which is increasingly being used by Swedish municipalities in their work to support the labour market integration of immigrants, and to which high expectations are attached. In the chapter, we critically explore translations of the EPP and discuss the conditi...

In this paper, we trace how ‘social procurement’ (SP) translates from policy to practice. Launched as a driver of social innovation and sustainability, SP offers a novel way of strengthening the implementation of active labor market policies locally. Policy tools are not neutral instruments, however; they shape the substance of policy in decisive w...

Waste pickers all over the world work innovatively to reduce the environmental footprint of cities as they struggle to meet their critical livelihood obligations. Informed by the case of waste picker organizations (WPOs) this article examines how grassroots initiatives and extreme-niche innovations are created and sustained by mobilizing resources,...

Waste picker organisations (WPOs) around the globe collect, transport and process waste to earn their living but represent a widely excluded, marginalised and impoverished segment of society. WPOs are highly innovative, created by grassroots out of “nothing” to deliver economic, social and environmental sustainability. Still, we do not know how suc...

This paper examines the everyday, collective, and identity resistance mobilized by the urban poor to (re)gain their right to the commons and contest urban exclusion. Informed by the community of waste pickers at La Chureca, the city dump of Managua, Nicaragua, the paper, builds on theories of discard studies, urban commons, and Bayat's everyday res...

This paper examines the strategies of resistance articulated by residents of informal settlements response to urban exclusion. Building upon resistance and urban social movements literature the paper is informed by the case of the Villa Rodrigo Bueno in Buenos Aires, a self-constructed villa miseria, and its residents' stories of resistance to atte...

"Este documento foca em como governos locais podem desenvolver formas de governança ambiental mais inclusivas, democráticas e sustentáveis, através do estabelecimento de parcerias e fortalecimento do papel de organizações de catadores e suas redes. O documento é informado por pesquisa-ação realizada na Argentina, Brasil, Canadá, Quênia, Nicarágua e...

"Este informe de política o policy brief se centra en cómo los gobiernos locales pueden desarrollar una gobernanza ambiental más inclusiva, democrática y sostenible al asociarse y fortalecer el papel de las organiza- ciones y redes de recicladores de base (WPO). Informado por la investigación-acción en Argentina, Brasil, Kenia, Nicaragua y Tanzania...

Research and policy argue for more compact cities to respond to sustainable development challenges. However, what actually needs to be made more compact and how, is under examined, particularly in global South cities where north notions of urban qualities are adopted without being questioned. Informed by a qualitative study in informal and compact...

In this article we build on the concept of incompleteness, as recently developed in both organisa-tional and urban studies, to improve our understanding of the collective actions of grassroots organisations in creating and governing critical infrastructures in the changing and resource-scarce contexts of urban informal settlements. Empirically, the...

Informed by different grassroots learning and educational practices engaged in waste management, and drawing from the concepts of insurgent citizenship and environmental stewardship, we examine the role of waste picker organizations and movements in creating new pathways towards more sustainable environmental waste governance. Two case studies (Arg...

This policy brief focuses on how local governments can develop more inclusive, democratic and sustainable waste governance by partnering with, and strengthening the role of, grassroots waste picker organizations and networks. Informed by action-research in Argentina, Brazil, Kenya, Nicaragua, and Tanzania, it shows how waste picker organisations ar...

Compact cities are promoted in policy as a response to current societal challenges, but it is unclear or ambiguous what qualities or benefits a compact city is supposed to deliver. The concept of the compact city is widely debated in the research literature, and there are numerous arguments both for and against compact cities. However, many studies...

This paper examines the multiple strategies articulated by grassroots recycler networks to bring about socioenvironmental change. The paper shows how these networks are an emblematic case of grassroots governmentality, whereby urban poor communities contribute to building more inclusive environmental regimes by developing technologies of power more...

Citizen-led repair initiatives that collectively create urban commons, questioning the configuration of production, consumption, and discarding within neoliberal capitalism, have emerged in recent years. This paper builds on recent discussions of the openness of the commons by examining the role of repair in commoning. It is informed by the case of...

The report provides updated research outcomes of the project Recycling Networks & Waste Governance, presented during the II. International Conference on Recycling Networks and Waste Governance held in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar from 29th of April to 4th of May, 2019.

The project examines how grassroots organizations and networks providing urban critical services in informal settlements contribute to improve the quality of life of urban dwellers and to more inclusive forms of urban governance, constructing the city from below. The project is informed by the study of Kisumu’s informal settlements’ Resident Associ...

Explains the shortcomings of current waste prevention policies. Suggests to adopt an ethical rather than technical stance to waste prevention

Participants of two research projects (Recycling Networks: Grassroots resilience tackling climate, environmental and poverty challenges (funded by the Swedish Research Council) and Mapping Waste Governance (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) collaborate in offering a critical inter- and transdisciplinary perspe...

This report summarises the most important lessons learned from the research project 'From waste management to waste prevention'. In the research project, researchers from Lund University and the University of Gothenburg, but also Umeå University and the Royal Institute of Technology, have studied waste prevention. The aim of the project has been...

Informed by institutional entrepreneurship theory and based on the case of waste prevention projects in the City of Göteborg, this paper examines the role of cities in shaping new environmental policies. Structured by the research question, ‘How do cities shape novel environmental policies and practices?’, the paper illustrates how cities become ag...

Following on the reiterated claim that accounting inscriptions make action at a distance possible, we draw on post-mathematical topology to explain that this distance work is dependent on inscriptions acting on distances. By adopting a relational understanding of space, we show that accounting inscriptions by themselves create the distances across...

Waste management makes life in cities possible. Paradoxically, well-functioning waste infrastructures can contribute to obscure the link between production, consumption and nature. One way to render waste infrastructures, and their environmental consequences, visible is through guided tours. School children around the world visit waste infrastructu...

To examine how citizen-driven initiatives for sustainability strive to bring about change and spread their practices, efforts to link social movement, grassroots innovation and green-consumption movements theory are built upon. Göteborg’s citizen-driven waste-prevention initiatives, such as food waste recovery, creating common reuse spaces in housi...

This paper examines how policies and plans are translated into informal settlements' practice. It builds on literature on policy implementation practice and organization studies, and more particularly, it applies the concepts of reframing, anchoring and muddling through. The paper is informed by the case of Kisumu City in Kenya and its Kisumu Integ...

Compact cities are promoted widely in policy as a response to current societal challenges, but it is unclear or ambiguous what qualities or benefits a compact city is supposed to deliver. In research, the compact city concept is widely debated in the literature, and there are many arguments both for and against compact cities. However, many studies...

Many cities in the global South suffer from vast inadequacies and deficiencies in their solid waste management. In the city of Kisumu in Kenya, waste management is fragmented and insufficient with most household waste remaining uncollected. Solid waste enters and leaves public space through an intricate web of connected, mostly informal, actions. T...

Purpose - In the aftermath of the Great Recession, over 500,000 families have been evicted from their homes since Spain's property market crashed in 2008. The response of Spanish local communities has been the emergence of a networked social movement, Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), endeavouring to build a more sustainable future thr...

This paper contributes to the understanding of processes by which small-scale entrepreneurs who provide household waste collection in informal settlements succeed in formalized co-production of such services. The paper draws on the social and solidarity economy and social and environmental entrepreneurship theoretical frameworks, which offer comple...

Implementation gaps between policy goals and outcomes are of increasing concern in practice and research. We explore the translation chains through which urban policies become mobile and are translated into practice. Informed by the city management and policy mobility literature, we conduct a case study of La Chureca, the rubbish dump and slum of M...

This article examines the relationship between radical change in an institutional context and organisational innovation. It is based on an exploratory case study of three Icelandic local governments conducted in autumn 2010 and summer 2011. While many crises, when scrutinised closely, appear to be more like threats of crisis, Iceland’s economic cri...

Honoured with the "Laemos 2014 best paper award"

This article explains how infrastructures with a sustainability record may evolve over time into a lock-in that slows the emergence of more sustainable urban infrastructures. A study of waste incineration in the Göteborg Metropolitan Area, Sweden, serves as an illustrative case. Taking leads from Unruh (2000; 2002), four rationales of lock-in are i...

The chapter explores the translation of global narratives of waste management formulated by UN-Habitat into local waste practices in the Managua in Nicaragua. In the chapter, excerpts of two documents produced by UN-Habitat related to a sustainable waste management are analysed. Inspired by deconstruction methods, the author traces how, why and by...

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 glob...

SUMMARY This article seeks to understand how development aid is translated into city management practice in the global South and the implications of this for the power dynamics between municipal governments and international aid agencies. The study examines La Chureca, the rubbish dump and slum of Managua, Nicaragua, and its regeneration programme,...

This paper explores the organizing of household solid waste management collection and disposal practices in informal settlements. It is based on a case study of an NGO project that supports Manos Unidas (Joined Hands), an informal waste picker cooperative in Managua, Nicaragua. Using horse carts, these waste pickers collect household solid waste fr...

This article examines the relationship between radical change in an institutional context and organisational innovation. It is based on an exploratory case study of three Icelandic local governments conducted in autumn 2010 and summer 2011. While many crises, when scrutinised closely, appear to be more like threats of crisis, Iceland's economic cri...

This article aims to contribute to the literature on city organizing, an important yet under-researched area in the intersection of organization theory and urban studies. The concepts of the city and change, translation and action nets are fundamental to this analysis. The study takes as its object the collective process of organizing the change of...

Scandals provide an opportunity to generate more knowledge about the process in which organizational le- gitimacy can be restored. This article is based on a study of all scandals in the Swedish public sector from 1995-1997 and four case studies in four organizations conducted 2003. In scandals in the Swedish public sector, players in leading posit...