Tensions in the Enactment of Neoliberal Consumer Responsibilization for Waste

Abstract

Abstract Research has explored consumer responsibilization processes, yet there is a lack of understanding about the tensions that consumers might experience when enacting their responsibility. Using a large data set collected in France around waste responsibilization, we demonstrate how waste pathways can generate spatiotemporal, guidance, and destructiveness tensions in households. Consumers respond to such tensions by keeping waste at home, which allows them to suspend, clarify, or reappropriate their waste responsibility. In delineating the waste responsibility tensions, our study reveals the boundaries of neoliberal governance’s success in mobilizing entrepreneurial consumers’ actions, namely, community structure/shared vision, emotions, and market demand. These boundaries illustrate the challenges for neoliberal governance in providing and maintaining for consumers an illusion of control through the crafting of heightened uncertainty, abstraction, and risk–benefit categorizations. This study has implications for waste management actors, as well as consumer researchers interested in neoliberal governance, consumer responsibilization, consumer activism, sustainability, and waste disposal.