Contested Understandings of Reclaimer Integration—Insights from a Failed Johannesburg Pilot Project

In the context of global debates on how to ‘formalise’ informal workers, work in the waste and recycling sectors has shifted to focus on the ‘integration’ of reclaimers (also known as waste pickers). This article analyses a pilot project conducted by the City of Johannesburg and its Pikitup waste management utility at the Robinson Deep landfill to explore how contested understandings of ‘integration’ by officials and reclaimers shape integration programmes and their perceived successes and failures. The article establishes that reclaimers and officials held almost diametrically opposed conceptualisations of integration. This conceptual rift, and Pikitup and the City’s ability to enforce their interpretation, played a central role in the failure of the pilot. The article contends that academic literature on integration should critically interrogate the power-laden, contested processes through which particular conceptualisations of integration are adopted in specific places, and the resultant implications for reclaimers. This approach can potentially offer new ways of analysing initiatives to meaningfully improve conditions and incomes of informal workers in other sectors, and spark conversation on what it would mean to focus on integration rather than formalisation in these other areas of work. At a more pragmatic level, the article concludes that any integration process must start with reclaimers and officials collectively developing a common conceptualisation of integration, while also acknowledging the challenges in doing so in the context of profoundly unequal power relations between them.