From Response to Responsibility: An Academe–Industry Partnership on Solid Waste Management in the Philippines

Abstract

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a shift in environmental governance began to focus on advocates for effective environmental management by looking into communities and local institutions as important actors to involve in the process of environmental governance. There emerged a new view in environmental governance by pinpointing three (3) social actors, the states, markets and the civil society (Lemos and Agrawal in Annual Review of Environment and Resources 31: 297–325, 2006). Taking the cue from said representation leads to an examination of environmental governance by this author, in an attempt to take an in-depth look on the roles, participation, and accountability of non-state actors in the implementation of the solid waste management program. The paper is a portion of the author’s dissertation project. Further, the paper took a look also into the trajectory of environmental governance, the roles and the specific tasks particularly in the performance of private sector in its pursuit of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Citing a specific example for the research, the author chose as a case study, Toyota Auto Parts Incorporated and the different schools in implementation of solid waste management in the City of Santa Rosa, Province of Laguna in the Philippines which explored a least studied partnership known as the Social–Private Partnerships (SPP). Making this study unique as it tackled the actual participation of non-state actors such as the private corporations, academic institutions, and industries that are engaged in solid waste management partnerships. The data were collected using interview, focus group discussion and secondary data analysis to determine the strengths and weaknesses of different partnership arrangements in the implementation of Solid Waste Management (SWM) in the City of Santa Rosa. The paper concludes that successful environmental governance requires improved incentive mechanism and accountability measures specially in partnership arrangements among non-state actors. The paper makes recommendations for improvements of partnerships in environmental governance, particularly in the area of law, policy, education, and research.