Toxic ecologies and harm stabilization: a critical realist account of social-ecological harm at Nairobi’s Dandora Dumpsite

Urban waste systems can reproduce severe harm even where it is extensively documented and repeatedly targeted by policy. This article asks how unjust human-nature relations become stabilized as routine under these conditions, using a critical realist analysis of Nairobi's Dandora Dumpsite. It proposes the concept of toxic ecology, an emergent configuration in which contaminants, infrastructures, institutions, and everyday practices cohere into durable patterns of exposure and inequality. A mixed-genre documentary corpus is synthesized through structured extraction and retroduction to identify recurring regularities and infer a conjunctural configuration of six interacting mechanisms, spanning responsibility diffusion, regulatory deferral, infrastructural lock-in, normalization, unequal valuation, and de facto control. Rival framings such as informational deficit and implementation failure are assessed as rebuttals and judged insufficient on their own. The analysis explains how chronic harm is restabilized as ordinary and governable, reframing sacrifice zones as stabilized human-nature relations rather than implementation failures.