ISWA World Congress '24

The three day conference titled “From Internet Governance to Digital Political Economy” was organised by the Internet Governance Project (IGP)in The Hague.

During the 2024 world congress of the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA), I presented my work titled “Meeting Waste Management Targets: Towards a Monitoring and Guidance Framework for EU Member States”, for which I submitted the following abstract:

EU Member States (MS) continue to have among the highest rates of municipal solid waste (MSW) per capita in the world. To improve, the European Environment Agency (EEA) has been mandated to assess the prospects of each MS to meet the EU targets for the recycling of MSW and packaging waste as well as landfill of each MSW, which it subsequently publishes as Early Warning reports. Our work enhances the assessment methodology with a robust indicator framework to monitor the progress of waste prevention and formulate policy recommendations for each MS.

We ground our approach in the Bellagio Declaration (EPA Network et al. 2020) and apply the Driving forces, Pressures, States, Impacts and Responses (DPSIR) systems model to identify and categorize indicators into three distinct clusters: policy instruments (responses), country context (driving forces), and MSW (pressures). Data on selected indicators was collected for all EU-27 MS between 2009 and 2020. Using the interactions between the environment and socio-economic activities as described by the DPSIR model, we derived an indicator graph from which the levers of the system to prevent and reduce waste can be identified. To evaluate a countries relative performance and highlight correlations among and across indicators and countries, we employ multivariate analysis. In our final steps, we assessed the relative productivity and efficiency of a country to reduce and divert MSW by conducting a frontier efficiency analysis, as it reveals the achievable progress through the adaptation of certain policy instruments.

Our indicator framework advances previous efforts, by taking an evidence-based, more holistic approach that captures and involves all relevant aspects and parties through the Bellagio principles. Furthermore, we uncover higher-order signals within the set of indicators by using a novel methodology based on state-of-the-art data analytics. The framework presents clear visuals that are easy to interpret for policymakers.

Slides are here.