Environmental Justice and Municipal Waste Policy Failure: How Institutional Blind Spots Reproduce Urban Inequality

Despite ambitious national targets to reduce landfilling and expand recycling, municipal solid waste policy in many countries consistently falls short of its stated goals. Existing explanations for this failure tend to focus on technical inefficiencies, regulatory instability, or coordination problems between levels of government. This paper argues that such accounts overlook a central driver of policy failure: structural socio-spatial inequality between municipalities and the ways it is reproduced through policy design and decision-making. This paper examines waste policy failure in Israel through an environmental justice lens, highlighting the underexplored role of social and spatial inequality in shaping the implementation of environmental policy. The study employs a mixed-methods research design combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. Quantitatively, it analyses municipal-level data on recycling and waste-treatment rates across local authorities. The findings reveal clear and persistent disparities: Arab municipalities, as well as peripheral and socio-economically disadvantaged localities, consistently exhibit lower levels of appropriate waste treatment and recycling. These patterns indicate that policy outcomes are not evenly distributed, even though the policy framework is formally universal. To better understand the mechanisms underlying these disparities, the study draws on qualitative analysis, including in-depth interviews with senior officials in the Ministry of Environmental Protection and a critical examination of national waste-policy documents and strategic plans. This analysis shows that decision-makers rarely conceptualise inequality between municipalities as a central factor explaining policy failure. Instead, structural gaps in municipal capacity are often framed as isolated local problems or treated as secondary, “add-on” issues rather than as core challenges for effective policy implementation. Consequently, national waste policy is implicitly designed for an assumed “average municipality,” despite the wide variation in fiscal, administrative, and infrastructural capacities across local authorities. Targeted programms aimed at reducing disparities do exist, but they tend to focus on closing minimal service gaps rather than enabling weaker municipalities to implement advanced waste-management policies. Moreover, such programms are often partial or inconsistently applied. As a result, a policy that appears universal in principle effectively reproduces and deepens existing inequalities. The findings point to a threefold impact of this inequality. At the local level, residents of disadvantaged municipalities face greater environmental harms and reduced service quality. At the regional level, waste-related environmental impacts transcend municipal boundaries. At the national level, persistent underperformance in weaker municipalities undermines overall policy effectiveness and prevents the achievement of national targets. The paper concludes that integrating social and institutional inequality into the design of municipal waste policy is essential not only for environmental justice, but also for the successful and effective implementation of urban environmental interventions.