Global Electronic Waste, Third Party Certification Standards, and Resisting the Undoing of Environmental Justice Politics Available to Purchase

This article provides a critical assessment of a shift in discourse and political actions taken by the Basel Action Network (BAN), the primary non-governmental organization involved in overseeing and regulating the international trade in hazardous wastes in general and electronic waste (e-waste) in particular. First, we review recent scholarship focused on changes in social movement tactics that more directly target corporate practices, specifically the rise of voluntary third party certification standards. In particular, we attend to early efforts of the global environmental justice movement to address the trade in hazardous wastes, including e-waste. Next, we discuss our research findings on the changes in discourse, strategy, and political demands of environmental justice activists engaged in e-waste recycling. These findings support other recent case studies that suggest that the development of voluntary third party certifications adopt neoliberal market logics and corporate governance practices. In addition, our findings also more explicitly consider how changing discourse—in this case, a shift from exploitation to expertise—transforms political strategies and undercuts environmental justice approaches to global e-waste politics. As engaged social scientists and e-waste activists working against neoliberal intrusion, we argue that resistance to these transformations is a matter of de-economizing the systemic expansion and efficiency management practices conditioning the contemporary global e-waste trade and the strategic greenwashing of e-waste recycling. We further argue that developing interventions in e-waste management and policy based on ethical principles of global environmental justice is a critical step forward for applied social science engagements with emerging e-waste studies.