Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability

Anantharaman Manisha, Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024; 296 pp.: ISBN: 9780262376976, £43.00/$45.00 (paperback).

What does it mean to be ‘included’ in the making of sustainable cities? In Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability, published as part of MIT Press’s ‘Urban and Industrial Environments’ series orientated towards environmental and social justice, Manisha Anantharaman argues that inclusion is far from a neutral or inherently just process. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork with waste pickers, NGOs, municipal actors and middle-class environmentalists in Bengaluru, India, she shows how the promise of inclusion often masks deep contradictions. Her ethnographic vignettes reveal that while waste pickers gain symbolic recognition in sustainability initiatives, they must perform environmental legitimacy on terms set by middle-class actors, accept precarious entrepreneurial identities defined by NGOs and navigate moralised expectations of ‘good behaviour’ that reinforce rather than challenge existing hierarchies. The book critiques the celebratory language of inclusion within zero-waste and participatory urban governance, arguing that these frameworks frequently reproduce the inequalities they claim to dismantle. Commendably, MIT Press has made the complete text available in an open-access format, ensuring wider accessibility of this important critique.

Anantharaman is a sociologist and political ecologist whose work builds on feminist urban theory, postcolonial political ecology and relational ethnography. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Sociology of Organisations at Sciences Po in Paris. Previously, she was an Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California in the Global Studies and Environmental Studies programmes.

With this book, she contributes centrally to current debates on urban sustainability, environmental justice and the governance of informality in cities of the Global South. The title itself –Recycling Class – gestures towards the dual processes of material recycling and the social reproduction of hierarchies through sustainability discourse. Situated at the intersection of waste, labour and environmental governance, the book makes a compelling argument for rethinking what it means to build just and inclusive urban futures.

The central thesis of the book is that inclusion within urban sustainability agendas is not inherently emancipatory; instead, it often reproduces existing social hierarchies, particularly those based on caste and class. Through the case of waste management in Bengaluru, Anantharaman argues that so-called inclusive policies – those that claim to integrate informal workers into ‘green’ urban infrastructures – often operate through conditional, moralising and extractive logics. Instead of redistributing power or recognition, they place new burdens of responsibility on already marginalised workers while reinforcing middle-class norms. Rather than joining mainstream development and policy discourse that celebrates informal sector inclusion as a step towards social equity, Anantharaman offers an analysis rooted in India’s distinctive socio-political context that aligns with broader critiques of neoliberal sustainability.

The book effectively challenges readers to think beyond surface-level indicators of inclusion and to interrogate who benefits, on what terms and at what cost. In this sense, the book’s accomplishment is timely and significant: it reframes ‘inclusion’ from a normative goal to an analytical problem, offering a deeply situated and theoretically innovative critique of sustainability from below. The book is structured around six chapters, organised thematically.

Chapter 1 introduces the central thesis through the concept of ‘performative environmentalism’, examining how middle-class green consumption practices in Bengaluru create class-based distinctions that exclude the urban poor from environmental legitimacy. The chapter demonstrates how seemingly inclusive sustainability practices actually reinforce existing social hierarchies, as ecological citizenship becomes accessible only to those with sufficient cultural and economic capital to perform environmentalism in socially acceptable ways.

Chapter 2 examines the moral economy of waste segregation in the domestic sphere. It highlights how middle-class residents offload ecological responsibility onto domestic workers, reinforcing caste and class hierarchies within the home.

Chapter 3 turns to grassroots green citizen groups and the ways in which waste pickers must perform environmental legitimacy to be included, often reproducing paternalistic dynamics.

Chapter 4 explores the rise of the waste entrepreneurship and the NGO-led valorisation of informal labour through market-based inclusion. Here, Anantharaman critiques the framing of waste work as empowering, showing how entrepreneurship can become a mechanism of responsibilisation.

Chapter 5 analyses participatory governance mechanisms and how they produce selective forms of recognition, often mediated by NGOs or elite citizens. The final chapter concludes by calling for a reparative politics of sustainability – one that goes beyond symbolic inclusion to address structural inequalities in labour, risk and ecological responsibility.

Anantharaman supports her argument through extensive ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, and interviews with waste pickers, municipal officials, NGOs and green citizen groups. She also draws on participatory research methods and direct engagement with waste worker organisations. The empirical material is multilayered. Ethnographic vignettes – from middle-class residents policing waste segregation to NGO-led workshops for waste entrepreneurs – demonstrate how caste, labour and morality are mobilised within sustainability discourses.

Methodologically, the book is a model of embedded, relational ethnography. Anantharaman reflects openly on her own positionality and the power dynamics of research, strengthening the book’s ethical and analytical integrity. Her long-term engagement with the field lends depth to the analysis, allowing her to track institutional shifts and relational dynamics over time.

Nevertheless, two critical gaps emerge. First, the book largely treats the city as context rather than as an active agent. Spatial processes – segregation, infrastructure, zoning – are referenced but not deeply theorised. The urban fabric of Bengaluru remains a backdrop rather than a co-producer of sustainability regimes. Second, while the book examines governance through NGO–state–citizen relations, it lacks a transversal analysis of urban authority. The state appears episodically, primarily as a policy actor or public service provider, but not as a contested field of power or legitimacy. Building on the work of scholars like Simone (2004) on urban infrastructure, Benjamin (2008) on occupancy urbanism or Chatterjee (2004) on political society, this theoretical dialogue could open additional interpretive dimensions to her already insightful ethnographic work, especially for readers approaching the text from political economy and state theory perspectives.

Indeed, the contradictions of inclusion explored in Recycling Class resonate strongly with the trajectories of waste governance and informal labour mobilisation in Latin American contexts, where scholars like Sternberg (2013), Perelman (2010) and Chronopoulos (2006) have documented similar tensions between symbolic recognition and material redistribution. Nevertheless, what distinguishes many Latin American experiences, as Carenzo (2018) and Schamber and Suárez (2007) argue, is the more explicitly political and contestatory nature of waste picker organising, which tends to frame claims through the language of economic justice and labour rights rather than environmental legitimacy. In Argentina, for instance, the political subjectivity of informal workers is more frequently shaped through collective labour struggle and contestatory relations with the state than through NGO mediation or middle-class environmentalism.

Inclusion, in this context, is less likely to be filtered through environmental legitimacy and is more often embedded in wider claims to economic justice, urban citizenship and state recognition. This comparison underscores the analytical value of Anantharaman’s conceptual toolkit for scholars of Latin American urbanism. Her work invites deeper interrogation of how legitimacy, recognition and sustainability are constructed from below – and on whose terms. It also opens possibilities for thinking across regional contexts without collapsing their differences, pointing to the value of grounded, relational approaches that examine how sustainability discourses are translated, reworked or resisted in specific political and institutional fields.

Recycling Class thus offers a compelling starting point for a South–South dialogue within urban environmental scholarship. Its insights are not only relevant to the Indian context but also generative for thinking through the politics of informality, environmental labour and inclusion in Latin American cities and beyond. The book is especially valuable for those working at the intersection of urban studies, political ecology, informality and environmental justice. It should be required reading for scholars and practitioners interested in the politics of sustainability, particularly in postcolonial and Southern urban contexts.

In a time when calls for inclusive green transitions proliferate, Anantharaman reminds us that not all forms of inclusion are created equal. Some reproduce precisely what they claim to remedy. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding – and undoing – the structural inequalities that persist in the name of sustainability.

References

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Carenzo S (2018) Más allá del asociativismo: Técnica y política como objetos de debate para cooperativas de recuperadores urbanos. In: Schamber P, Suárez F (eds) Recicloscopio V. Buenos Aires: UNGS-UNLa, pp.281–316.

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Sternberg CA (2013) From ‘cartoneros’ to ‘recolectores urbanos’: The changing rhetoric and urban waste management policies in neoliberal Buenos Aires. Geoforum 48: 187–195.

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