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Solaja, Oludele Mayowa. (2026). “Waste Sovereignty and Plastic Colonialism: Environmental Power and Populism in the Global Political Economy of Waste.” Journal of Populism Studies (JPS). June 11, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/JPS000124
Abstract
Plastic pollution is one of the most pressing environmental problems of the twenty-first century, but the governance of global plastic waste is remarkably unequal. Significant volumes of plastic waste from developed countries are exported to developing countries in the Global South, where waste management infrastructure and regulatory capacity are often limited. While this movement of waste across borders is frequently discussed in terms of recycling efficiency or waste management capacity, these transactions are deeply embedded in unequal power relations within the global political economy. This article proposes a theoretical framework called Waste Sovereignty Theory (WST), which explains how international waste trade reproduces environmental power asymmetries between exporting and importing nations. Drawing on political ecology, environmental justice, postcolonial environmental governance, and emerging scholarship on environmental populism, the paper conceptualizes transboundary plastic waste flows as a form of plastic colonialism in which the ecological costs of production and consumption in wealthy countries are displaced onto less powerful states. The article introduces a Waste Sovereignty Theory Framework (WST Framework) that links four key dynamics—plastic production, transnational waste trade, governance inequality, and sovereignty claims—to explain contemporary struggles over environmental authority in the Global South. Using illustrative cases from Southeast Asia and Africa, the article demonstrates how states and communities respond through waste import bans, stricter regulatory regimes, waste repatriation policies, and the promotion of domestic recycling industries. These responses are interpreted not only as efforts to reclaim environmental governance but also as expressions of environmental populism, whereby affected populations challenge environmental burdens perceived as imposed by distant political, economic, and technocratic elites. Waste sovereignty thus emerges as both a claim to environmental justice and a form of political resistance against unequal structures of global environmental governance. The article argues that addressing the global plastic crisis requires more than technological improvements in waste management; it demands institutional reforms capable of confronting the structural inequalities embedded in contemporary systems of production, consumption, and environmental governance.
Keywords: Waste Sovereignty, Plastic Colonialism, Environmental Populism, Global Waste Trade, Environmental Governance, Political Ecology, Environmental Justice, Circular Economy, Global South
Introduction
Plastic waste constitutes one of the leading contemporary environmental problems in the 21st century. Over the last decades, production of plastics in the global South have rapidly increase from less than 1 million tons per year in the 1950s to more than 400 million tons in a year and rapidly growing international plastic waste trade networks (Geyer et al., 2017; Zhao et al., 2021; Clapp, 2022). Although plastic waste is created around the globe, its environmental burden has been distributed unevenly, that is, wealthy industrialized countries ship vast amounts of their waste to the Global South countries whose institutions and capabilities are often unable to manage this commodity (Brooks et al., 2018; Clapp, 2021). This paper considers that what often appears as technical problems with waste management or efficiency of recycling, are the consequences of underlying structural power relations within political economy that shaped global politics of waste management.
The political ecology literature frames such dynamics within a politics of unequal access to environmental resources. International industrial and consumer economies are producing vast flows of unwanted materials whose disposal is often externalized, whereby they can find an outlet within the weaker regulatory systems found in some Global South countries, leading to environmental contamination and informal dumping and recycling networks (Pellow, 2018; Liboiron, 2021). This is a pattern of waste colonialism where environmental harm produced by global industrial capitalism can be displaced from wealthy consumer economies to the periphery through the waste trade (Pellow, 2018; Liboiron, 2021). This in turn constitutes ecological distribution conflicts, whereby environmental burdens and their subsequent harm fall unevenly between social groups and geographic territories (Martinez-Alier, 2002).
Emergent trends in international waste markets highlight the politicization of these dynamics. The closure of the Chinese market to the majority of foreign waste exports under the National Sword policy in 2018 led to the redirection of massive flows of plastic waste to countries in Southeast Asia and Africa, overwhelming the existing domestic waste management systems of these recipient countries. Consequently, governments from the Global South such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and a host of African states have since imposed new regulations and repatriated illegal shipments of plastic waste, showing the burgeoning politics of the waste system.
Most academic literature on the global plastic crisis frames plastic waste as a technical problem of recycling efficiency or waste management systems, however there is an important politics of why environmental problems and the burden of waste are distributed unevenly. More focus has not been paid to the issue of environmental sovereignty – a State’s/Community’s authority over their environmental resource system, including regulation of trans-boundary flows and their control over development pathways, as a source of environmental power and control within global waste flows governed by the trade regime, global corporate supply chains, and disparities in regulation.
This article theorizes the politics of global waste governance by developing the Waste Sovereignty Theory (WST), which frames global waste systems as arenas of political struggle over authority where States and communities contest the uneven distribution of ecological burden. Waste Sovereignty Theory framework links four key mechanisms-production, trade networks, disparity in regulation, and sovereignty claims-to illuminate the operation of environmental power within current waste regimes. Waste sovereignty, within WST, signifies the authority of States, communities and social movements to assert control over the management of waste systems, including import flows, domestic recycling industry development and environmental common preservation.
In this article, waste sovereignty is defined as the capacity of states, communities, and social institutions to exercise political, ecological, and economic authority over the governance of waste within their territories. This includes the power to regulate transboundary waste flows, control domestic recycling infrastructures, determine environmental standards, and shape the economic systems through which waste materials are managed or transformed into resources. Within the Waste Sovereignty Theory Framework (WST Framework), waste sovereignty therefore represents a form of environmental authority through which political actors contest the unequal distribution of ecological burdens generated by global production and consumption systems.
The theory of Waste Sovereignty extends the field of environmental governance in three main ways; first, situating the plastic crisis within the politics of production, consumption and the externalization of environmental impact. Second, it develops the discourse of environmental justice by placing issues of ecological inequity alongside control over environmental governance systems. Third, it theorizes responses to plastic waste in the Global South as claims to sovereignty from the peripheries in the form of restrictions on imports, new legislation, domestic recycling industries development etc.
Therefore this paper answers the questions: how does global plastic waste trade create a power disparity and how can the Waste Sovereignty Theory frame the emergence of fights for environmental governance in the Global South? Showing the dynamics of the WST through cases from Southeast Asia and Africa, the paper argues that plastic waste has become a politically embedded global issue and its solutions need to transcend purely technical strategies of waste management and recycling, and include the politics of environmental power and sovereignty within the waste system.
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