Pathways, Pitfalls and Opportunities in Partnerships for Development:Municipal Solid Waste Management in Kasese, Uganda

The municipal solid waste management systems of many developing countries are commonly constrained by factors such as limited financial resources and poor governance, making it a difficult proposition to break with complex, entrenched and unsustainable technologies and systems. This paper highlights strategic partnerships as a way to affect a distributed agency among several sets of stakeholders to break so-called path dependencies, which occur when such unsustainable pathways arise, stabilize and become self-reinforcing over time. Experiences from a North-South collaborative effort provide some lessons in such partnership building: In Uganda and Denmark respectively, the World Wildlife Fund and the network-administrating organization access2innovation have attempted to mobilize stakeholders around improving the municipal solid waste system in the rural district capital of Kasese. Through a municipal solid waste system characterization and mapping exercise, some emergent lessons and guiding principles in partnership building point to both pitfalls and opportunities for designing sustainable pathways