From state entrepreneurialism to state-led ecological civilisation: changing dispositifs of governing e-waste metabolism and ‘cyborg’ urbanisation in China’s e-waste cities

This chapter presents an urban political ecology analysis of China’s environmental governance of e-waste cities. Situating e-waste cities’ cyborg urbanisation and e-wastescapes transformations within broader power geometries, it explicates how urban environments, as socio-ecological hybrids, are made, remade and modified by multiscalar dispositifs. In all, it showcases two distinct patterns of urban e-waste metabolism and accompanying regimes of environmental governance laid down by two sets of dispositifs. Against the first dispositif of ‘state entrepreneurialism’, e-waste cities became urbanised with grassroots, informal workshops ‘digesting’ global e-waste flows. The environmental governance regime was characterised by recurrent episodes of campaign-style governance mobilised by local entrepreneurial states. Against the second dispositif of ‘ecological civilisation’, the technocentric state employs multiple governmentalities to suppress informal workshops and enrol large, modernised industrial parks and formal enterprises into the metabolic imbroglios of e-waste cities. Yet, the state-led construction of an eco-civilised utopia is infused with conflicts and asymmetric power relations. Despite the national state’s success in re-controlling the local environment, contested socio-environmental justices loom large in such socio-environmental changes.