Stubborn ‘dirt’: Risks associated with the resilience of the informal electronic waste sector in Guiyu, China (Advert Reference: RDF21/EE/GES/FUWenying)

Informality is the salient feature of socio-economic organization in the Global South. For formally registered organizations, trust-based personal networks have become a pivotal strategy to hedge against institutional uncertainty. Communities operating outside the ‘bureaucratic gaze’, including the informal waste sector, are even more volatile and vulnerable to market change and the regulatory environment. However, Guiyu town in China, the world’s largest e-waste town, demonstrates the resilience of the informal e-waste sector even under formalisation pressure after 2013, manifested through strategic responses supported by collective clanship identity and regional industrial networks. Yet the increasing formalisation of waste governance tends to exclude the informal sector as situated outside the realm of waste solutions. Meanwhile, there are indications suggesting that formal recycling facilities, both in the Global North and Global South, are only capable of sorting materials and often outsource ‘dirty and difficult’ reprocessing to the informal sector. Hence, the collapse of the informal sector could lead to a potentially pronounced global crisis of mass electronics consumption.

Within this context, this project aims to interrogate how potential risks unfold along with the resilient responses in the informal e-waste sector in Guiyu town, to the changing global electronics market and waste regulatory environment. The group targeted in terms of resilience refers to the owners and operators of unregistered e-waste workshops, who are often self-employed in family units and rely on secondary waste processing for their livelihoods. The contested nature of the resilience of informal e-waste sector provides the point of departure for this project. On the one hand, the ‘snowflake’ nature of e-waste enables the brokered form of value chain governance and thus empowers the ‘middle man’ to compete with lead firms. One the other hand, resilience embodies the precarity and struggles faced within the informal communities. The term ‘produced precarity’ as compared to inherited vulnerability, captures well the dynamic notion of risks situated through dialectical interaction between localities and large-order forces.

Consequently, we do not only treat risks as those structural influences posed by formalising institutions, but also the uncertainties that unfold accompanying the resilience strategies to cope with the changing market and regulatory environment. Such risks might include the dissolution of social capital when reconfiguring spatial organisation, dispossession of means of production, discontinuity of wealth accumulation in the absence of state benefits, environmental risk following the reorganisation of waste value chains, etc. The underlying hypothesis is that resilience of the informal sector could result in the flexible functioning of regional waste value chain, but might as well generate new forms of precarity in grassroots communities. Following this, the project has three objectives:

1. to understand how the resilience of the informal e-waste sector has been constructed and sustained within regional waste value chains;
2. to evaluate and interpret the socio-economic and environmental risks for the informal e-waste sector during resilient responses;
3. to (re)conceptualise meanings of resilience as a dialectical and contested relationship among people, place and environment.

The principal supervisor for this project is Dr. Wenying Fu.

Eligibility and How to Apply:
Please note eligibility requirement:
• Academic excellence of the proposed student i.e. 2:1 (or equivalent GPA from non-UK universities [preference for 1st class honours]); or a Masters (preference for Merit or above); or APEL evidence of substantial practitioner achievement.
• Appropriate IELTS score, if required.
• Applicants cannot apply for this funding if currently engaged in Doctoral study at Northumbria or elsewhere.

For further details of how to apply, entry requirements and the application form, see
https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/research/postgraduate-research-degrees/how-to-apply/

Please note: Applications that do not include a research proposal of approximately 1,000 words (not a copy of the advert), or that do not include the advert reference (e.g. RDF21/EE/GES/FUWenying) will not be considered.
Deadline for applications: 29 January 2021
Start Date: 1 October 2021
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