Moscow’s Garbage Debate: A Narratives Policy Framework Perspective

Over the past years, the disposal of Moscow’s waste has become an increasingly urgent problem. Protests around landfills in the Moscow region have identified. Several new policies have been formulated to address the problem, and a waste management reform has started to be implemented in most Russian regions with Moscow taking the lead in the process. However, implementation of policies is dragging behind, and proposed policy solutions to the garbage problem have not resulted in clear results yet. As a consequence, waste management has become one of the most salient policy debates in Russia, and especially in Moscow. This article applies the Narratives Policy Framework (Jones, McBeth, & Shanahan, 2014) to examine the debate around Moscow’s waste management reform. In particular, we ask the question of what narratives and narrative strategies are used in the debate. Thereby, it focuses on how different actors use causal mechanisms and the expansion or containment of the scope of conflict use in their narratives. In addition to the Narrative Policy Framework, this article draws on the Ecological Modernisation Theory which is applicable to contemporary industrialised societies dealing with environmental crises (Mol & Sonnenfeld, 2000; Jänicke & Jacob, 2017). As part of it, recycling development can be recognized as constituting a case of ecological modernisation (Scheinberg, 2003). Empirically, the research draws on the content analysis of web-based sources as the main method. Therefore, we select digital media sources most used by the actors involved in the debate: the federal and Moscow governments, municipal administrations, businesses, regional operators, NGOs and mass media.