Trashing the Dictator. Local Garbage Crisis and Environmental Protests During Political Transition in Tunisia

The Tunisian revolution has been connected to the social consequences of economic structural adjustments and, in particular, to cronyism and the repressive politics under Ben Ali’s regime. In addition, the revolts unveiled the environmental issue as source of contention. In 2011 trash workers started to occupy landfills, deteriorating the management of rubbish collection. Simultaneously, wealthy and lower-income residents started to protest against landfills built by the regime. In April 2011 the UGTT succeeded in obtaining a national agreement for temporary trash workers. However, the riots persisted over the transitional period and likely represented seeds for political change. Having being the waste treatment subject to authoritarian control, corruption, and territorial inequalities, these movements channeled the long-term dissent towards the dictatorship and its institutions. In the transitional unstable political setting, environmental demonstrations participated in the dialectical tension between the national and the local, and revealed a muddled local political pluralism. By a local and actor-oriented perspective, the paper will analyse the environmental protests occurred during the Tunisian transition. Extensive fieldwork from 2013 to 2015 focused on two cases. One is the crisis linked to Jebel Borj Chakir landfill, that receives wastes from Tunis and its neighborhoods. The second refers to the demonstrations spread from Djerba, a tourism-centered island in southern Tunisia, to the capital. On one side, the paper will study the role of NGOs, national and local institutions in shaping the mobilisation and the repertoire of protests. On the other side, it will analyse how ordinary citizens and workers became protesters and developed their perspectives. Local and civil society’s actors frequently dealt with the unprecedented opportunity to raise collective actions while capitalising on former personal networks among local elites, national and international organisations. Thus, the environmental protesters partially reiterated older channels of power diffusion while posing new challenges to ruling authorities.