Environmental justice in municipal solid waste management: decision-makers’ attitudes as barriers to inclusive implementation

This article examines how institutional assumptions and policy design shape uneven implementation outcomes in environmental policy, and demonstrates that inequality is not merely a by-product of policy failure but a structuring condition of its persistence. Focusing on municipal solid waste management (MSWM), a domain marked by both environmental and social inequality challenges, the study addresses persistent implementation gaps that existing scholarship has largely attributed to technical, regulatory, and economic constraints. Based on a mixed-methods approach, and drawing on insights from environmental justice (EJ) scholarship, the study combines statistical analysis of municipal recycling rates with in-depth interviews with senior policymakers to identify systematic disparities in performance along socio-economic, sectoral, and geographic lines. Specifically, Jewish municipalities show significantly higher recycling rates than Arab municipalities, with recycling performance correlating positively with socioeconomic cluster, and negatively with peripherality. It further shows that these disparities are not treated as policy failures but are normalised within policymakers’ interpretations. Implementation is guided by efficiency-oriented reasoning and operationalised through ostensibly neutral instruments that systematically advantage high-capacity municipalities while marginalising weaker ones. We conceptualise these dynamics as a self-reinforcing policy cycle in which dominant policy framings shape instruments that both reproduce inequality and undermine MSWM policy goals. The study focuses on Israel, with particular attention to disparities affecting Arab municipalities as the most disadvantaged localities within the system. While Israel represents an analytically intense case, the findings speak to broader challenges in environmental governance, highlighting how universal policy frameworks may reproduce inequality when applied across unequal local contexts.