Linking wastes and climate change: Bandwagoning, contention, and global governance

In the light of long‐standing waste activist involvement in global climate negotiations, and the waste industry's condemnation of the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, this review examines the links between wastes and climate change as global problems. It describes the main technological and policy responses in utilizing waste and waste management to combat climate change—and the main sources of contention. Next, it scales up to the global level, demonstrating how waste‐climate linkages have entered the broader arena of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and associated agreements and organizations. This review incorporates the theoretical literature in the field of global environmental politics that can be brought to bear on this complex case. It focuses on the literature on linkages across issues and governance regimes, and work on climate “bandwagoning” (Jinnah, 2011)—strategic linkages whereby actors expand their mission to include climate‐oriented goals that might further their own agendas, looking at variants of this behavior that might explain the emerging relationships between global climate and global waste governance and politics. This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance