Conference Agenda

The negotiation of an international treaty on plastics and litter, including in the marine environment is underway, with the aim of addressing the issue of plastic pollution. However, the focus on plastics presents both opportunities and challenges. On one hand, the treaty has the potential to address a multitude of interrelated issues and become a key lever in addressing the complexity of plastic (pollution) management. On the other hand, the treaty's design could contribute to the fragmentation of earth system governance and result in unintended consequences, such as problem shifting. For example, a ban on plastic items may lead to the use of unregulated and potentially more harmful substances or a significant impact on biodiversity and land use as a consequence of the use of alternative materials. A focus on circular economy approaches of plastics may shift the burden of pollution to secondary effects, such as legacy pollution in secondary plastics after recycling. This study seeks to analyze the negotiation of the plastics treaty to date, identifying its potential and risks, with a focus on the issue of problem shifting. Drawing from existing literature on institutional design and key design elements, the study critically assesses the negotiation process and provides recommendations for moving forward. The ultimate goal is to ensure that the treaty's design addresses the issue of plastic pollution and its interconnected challenges, without creating new sustainability problems.

While global climate politics evolved predominantly through an intergovernmental process that was complemented with a wide range of transnational and subnational governance ‘beyond the state’, plastic politics might be described as a movement in the opposite direction, from the local to the global. This raises fundamental questions about the scalar politics of plastics, and how the direction of travel between local and global plastic initiatives can be understood.

A recent materialist turn in the field of environmental politics has seen a marked attention to everyday life as a site of activism and resistance to unsustainable flows of goods, resources, and energy. Departing from this literature, we reflect on the potential of alternative plastic economies to advance our understanding of global plastic politics. To do so, we synthesize theoretical developments across three interrelated themes of study: sustainable materialism, prefiguration, and scaling of post-growth alternative organizing. Our contributions in this article are primarily theoretical, and we aim to articulate a research agenda for sustainable materialist research on the plastic crisis that traverses the local-global divide.

By alternative plastic economies, we mean diverse and non-growth oriented forms of exchange and circulation of plastic materials. We contend that such examples of ‘living well with plastics’ are overlooked in the now emerging global politics of plastics, epitomized in the currently negotiated United Nations Treaty on Plastic Pollution. This is not surprising in itself, but we further argue that the study of alternative plastic economies opens up unexplored avenues for engaging politically with plastics while revealing certain shortcomings of mainstream plastic governance paradigms such as the circular economy.

The absence of a sense of collective ownership and responsibility for environmental and climate problems can be especially problematic in the field of pollution. Plastics waste pollution, exacerbated by reliance on single-use plastics, is one such example of a problem marked by a lack of community ownership and responsibility for it. Young people are often habituated to using plastics in daily life without considering the negative impacts of single-use plastics for both the environment and the climate, and/or without access to sustainable alternatives.

This study examines impacts caused by plastics waste pollution in local communities and explores how more adaptive legal and policy tools can contribute to ownership and sense of responsibility within populations, supporting the objectives of protecting the environment and minimising the effects of climate change. Having designed intervention tools based on citizen participation, our three case studies in Kenya, Jamaica, and Malawi allow us to evaluate governance tools to support the objective of reducing single-use plastics within schools (Jamaica), youth groups (Kenya) and universities (Malawi).

Building on existing research on plastics ownership and engagement initiatives and case-study results, this paper identifies governance tools that can: (i) build ownership and a sense of responsibility over the problem of plastics waste; (ii) engage citizens; and (iii) drive action to minimise plastics use in local communities and its negative effects in the environment. The results are used to compare legal and policy frameworks and to suggest recommendations and guidelines to optimise governance frameworks in the field of single-use plastics. We suggest that community engagement and adaptive legal and policy instruments can contribute to the reduction of the use of plastics and their adverse impacts on the environment and climate change.

Currently, more than 11 million metric tons of plastic are flowing into the ocean each year from different sources. Plastic waste has been found in all areas of the globe, from the deepest seas to the most remote mountains. It causes harm to wildlife and ecosystems, but also disrupts the livelihood of millions of people, as well as posing major risk to human health and the world economy. It is a challenge to deal with this type of global and complex problem under the sphere of national countries, which calls for a great effort of cooperation among nations globally, especially its entry in the ocean and coastal zones. In March 2022, UN Member States agreed on a mandate to negotiate a legally binding global instrument to end plastic pollution, including the marine environment. This framework will be negotiated throughout a series of meetings across the globe, and is expected to be in place by the end of 2024. The first Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting, INC-1, took place at the end of 2022 in Punta del Este, Uruguay, and an upcoming meeting is expected to happen in May 2023 (INC-2), in France. Thus, drawing on process tracing (i.e. observations, interviews, and literature and documental analysis), we will highlight several critical issues in the emerging institutional design of a future agreement for addressing plastic pollution in the marine ecosystems. Using the architecture and agency lenses, these analyses will include the polarization between countries and coalitions in the negotiating process, the uneven participation of scientific and industry stakeholders, and the challenge of formulating a legal and binding instrument that relies on cooperation across levels. The conclusion will contribute to the next Intergovernmental Conferences, and assess the potential of reaching an effective agreement before the negotiations are scheduled to conclude by 2024.

How agents of change - policy-makers and regulators - define solutions to environmental problems is connected to how such problems are framed. The prevailing narrative around plastics pollution was shaped by increased public awareness of the impacts of releasing plastics into the environment. This was informed by scientific findings on plastic flows and accumulation, especially in oceans, as interpreted in arresting images and footage - notably in Attenborough’s Blue Planet II series. The ‘Attenborough effect’ had a galvanising impact on law and policy and caused ‘durable shifts’ in audience perceptions of the environmental impacts of plastics waste. There is growing scientific recognition that plastics production and its resulting pollution drives the exceeding of the planetary boundary for novel entities.

It is a paradox that plastics are integral to modern society; a world without plastics is unimaginable. Features rendering plastic an environmental problem (durability, stability, persistence) also make it a valuable commodity. Therefore, regulating plastics to preserve their social utility while reducing or eliminating damaging pollution is important.

Translating this ‘wicked’ problem into a coherent narrative which can drive effective governance solutions is the essence of the puzzle this paper addresses. Presenting findings from the project ‘The Wicked Problem of Plastics Waste’ (AHRC/GCRF), case-studies from selected countries in Africa and the Caribbean aimed to identify links between the narratives around plastics, the salience of stakeholders aiming to influence plastics law and policy, and resulting governance instruments. We take a multidisciplinary approach with the synthesis of communications and governance central to the analysis. Our findings on the communications-governance nexus, offer scope to strengthen future plastics governance, and by extension, to restore planetary boundaries.