Social movements challenging environmental policies? : reframing the garbage crisis in Lebanon -

Abstract

This master’s thesis explores the social movement formed as a response to the Lebanon garbage crisis during the summer of 2015. This was arguably the largest such movement organized by Lebanese civil society in the post-civil war years as the protestors’ shifted from merely demanding effective waste polices to a wider movement against a corrupt class of political elites and failed state. While the political and sectarian elite have largely instrumentalized or restricted Lebanon’s social and environmental movements, thus fragmenting them, the 2015 crisis managed, at least for an initial period, to coalesce various disparate groups into a movement that briefly threatened this elite. The purpose of this research is thus to investigate if and how this movement reacting to the garbage crisis shaped the wider environmental and social policy debate in Lebanon; and why it eventually failed to influence the final policy outcome that basically entailed a return to the status quo ante. While traditional policy analyses utilize positivist, rational theory frameworks, this thesis applies an interpretive policy analysis, which posits that multiple interpretations are possible in the social world. In particular, it uses a narrative analysis framework to understand this crisis. As such, it distinguishes the various groups (protestors, civil society, government, political elite) competing to shape the policy debate; and analyzes their respective narratives without attributing a truth-value to them. Such an approach views stories as carriers of meanings. The research techniques include literature review, document analysis, and participatory observation with guided conversations. The analysis shows that the demonstrations seriously contested the political elite’s dominant narrative, and thus shaped the debate around both the environmental failures and larger corruption endemic to Lebanon’s political structure. Issues such as decentralization and the immediate holding of parliamentary elections came