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CUHK LAW CCTL Environmental, Energy and Climate Law Cluster Seminar – ‘The Economic Lives of Waste Pickers in The Shadow of South African Sustainable Development Law’ by Dr. Allison Lindner (Online)
2025年10月22日
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm (HKT)
Online via ZOOM
Dr. Allison Lindner has been a Lecturer in Law at UCL Faculty of Laws since September 2021. She is interested in economic and sociolegal approaches to environmental law problems with a research focus on waste, sustainable development and the informal economy in the Global South. She is a member of the Academic Circle advising the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Development on the fulfilment of his mandate from 2024-2026. Allison founded and is chair of the Waste Law Research Group, a community of academics specialising in waste law.
In addition, she holds a PhD from Kent Law School, an LLM International Economic Law from SOAS, University of London, and a B.A in International and Comparative Studies from Huron University College, at the University of Western Ontario. She has worked at the Commonwealth Secretariat as a Legal Researcher and is previous chair of the Public Interest Environmental Law UK Conference.
https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13714499
Registration Deadline: 21 October 2025, 12:30 pm (HKT)
This talk uncovers the difficulty in achieving sustainable development, a South African constitutional guarantee, for waste pickers, who collect and sell recyclable materials for a living, through an empirical case study using an ethnographic methods. Waste pickers are motivated to recycle for their survival due to a lack of job opportunities. However, the company they sell recyclables to also faced constraints which prevented it from fulfilling its plan to improve waste pickers’ lives. Ultimately, people who were in a position to translate rules that waste pickers needed to comply with to take advantage of opportunities to improve their socio-economic position did not do so due to a lack of resources. This solidified the vulnerable socio-economic position of waste pickers and maintained the waste management economy status quo. The research findings illustrate how sustainable development survives and fails through the actions of people, thereby disrupting its promise to achieve socio-economic development.
Language: English
