Making Sense of Environmental Governance: A Study of E-waste
in Malaysia

Abstract

The nature of e-waste, which is environmentally disastrous but economically precious, calls for close policy attention at all levels of society, and between state and non-state actors. This thesis investigates the roles of state and non-state actors in e-waste governance in Malaysia. This is undertaken through analysis of e-waste governance, particularly focusing on the locally generated industrial and household e-waste, from the perspective of multiple actors, levels and modes of governance.

From the perspective of multiple actors governance, this thesis recognises three main actors of e-waste governance in Malaysia – the state actor, and two types of non-state actors – the Private Sector Actors and the Civil Society Organisations. Although it appears theoretically simple to classify actors of governance into one of these categories, in practice the line separating these two categories is blurry.

From the multiple modes perspective, empirical evidence from this research has shown that state and non-state actors are involved in four modes of governance – the hierarchical, persuasion, self-governance and co-governance mode; with the roles of state actors being more prominent in the hierarchical modes, while the roles of non-state actors are more significant in the persuasion, self-governance and co-governance modes. State and non-state actors are jointly involved in one variant of co-governance which is the public-private partnership (PPP). Although the inclusion of non-state actors in governance is usually on ‘acutely constrained terms’ (Murdoch and Abram 1998: 49), they may influence the process of decision making.

From the perspective of multi level governance, it is apparent that power and authority in e-waste governance transcend beyond the boundary of sovereign states with the introduction of supra-national legislation such as the Basel Convention, WEEE directive and RoHS directive. This has direct implication on Malaysia as she is a party to Basel Convention, and produces electrical and electronic equipment for global market.