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n a world where relentless demands for productivity push the generation of more and more stuff, and to which even the scholarly enterprise is not immune, I am deeply grateful for the thoughtful and patient engagement of six eminent interlocutors. My hope in writing Recycling Class was to produce a work that was sufficiently open, transparent, and empirically detailed to be read from multiple vantage points. Each reviewer pushes the work in different directions. Yet important synergies emerge across the forum. These reveal three unresolved tensions for the book and, in my opinion, for broader debates in environmental scholarship. I take these up in order.
The first concerns the challenge of developing analyses that are locally salient while also globally legible, and the implications this has for the analytics and theory one chooses to foreground. This question becomes even trickier for scholarship situated in the South, but as is the hubris of this text, has something to say to the North. This tension is particularly visible in the questions raised about the relationship between capitalism, caste, and race, about how to theorize their relation in a way that neither collapses specificity into analogy nor renders generative comparison impossible.
In response, first, a brief note on audience. Recycling Class speaks to global debates about the governance responses to environmental problems—debates that unfold across applied scholarship and critical scholarship, within disciplinary and interdisciplinary academic milieus, and in the broader public. In writing, I had in mind a scholarly audience positioned at different points along a spectrum of critical engagement, alongside perhaps the naive hope that a member of the public might download this open-access book. The project was also animated by a desire to bring insights from critical scholarship to bear on policy debates. A central message this book conveys to this broad audience is that environmental governance is not a straightforward outcome of coordinated public action or aggregated individual behaviour change. Rather, it is produced through the stratified labour arrangements that sustain everyday environmental services.
Consequently, the book’s wager is that environmental governance must be analysed through the social organization of labour. In India, that organization is irreducibly shaped by caste. As Sapana Doshi and Pradnya Garud point out, “there is no capitalism in India that can be analytically separated from casteist social relations.” Caste, in this sense, is not merely an identity or ideology attached to environmental governance from the outside; it structures the metabolic division of labour through which environmental services are actually performed.
Sapana Doshi and Pradnya Garud’s review sharpens the understanding that performative environmentalism and communal sustainability cannot be reduced to mechanisms of distinction or sources of moral authority for middle-class actors, as a primarily Bourdieusian reading of ecological class politics might suggest (Carfagna et al., 2014; Comby, 2024). They are sites where caste-based sociality and labour are selectively reworked through (neo)liberal idioms of ecological responsibility, entrepreneurialism, green aesthetics, and civic action. These idioms allow caste capitalism to be partially rearticulated and, in the process, more effectively obscured. The book’s empirics detail the liberalized reproduction of caste power within elite environmentalist milieus, through what might be called the upper-caste cultural politics of sustainability.
At the same time, as David Pellow suggests, there are good reasons to think comparatively with frameworks such as environmental racism and racial capitalism. Race and caste cannot be conflated, yet thinking comparatively can be analytically productive: it allows us to ask how historically specific hierarchies of embodied difference become attached to labour, value, and vulnerability, and how environmental privilege is secured through those attachments. It is in this comparative spirit that Recycling Class places Bourdieusian relational sociology in conversation with scholarship on social reproduction, racialization, and caste, instead of treating them as incompatible vocabularies.
Therefore, to respond to Vinay Gidwani, Recycling Class does not attempt to resolve the relation between caste, race, and capitalism, a task others have taken up more persuasively (Dhanda, 2024; Yengde, 2024). Its primary intervention is to insist that environmental scholarship must attend much more closely to embodied differences and the metabolic division of environmental labour. Although the specific formations of embodied social difference enacted through labour hierarchies might vary and the intellectual lineages of concepts such as coloniality (Mignolo, 2007), racial capitalism (Robinson, 2000), or anti-caste politics (Ambedkar, 2014) are themselves historically grounded, Recycling Class puts these ideas in dialogue to focus attention on the processes of racialization through which distinctions between the clean and polluting, worthy and unworthy, governing and governed are naturalized and lived. Racialization is essential and functional to contemporary modes of environmental management in green capitalism because it supplies the labour power that keeps entropy from overwhelming systems of production and consumption (Gidwani, 2022).
My plural theoretical approach also evolved with experiences of presenting this work outside South Asia. Audiences often interpret the dynamics I detail as culturally specific or exceptional, as evidence of a “traditional” social order yet to be transformed by modernity. As Sapana Doshi and Pradnya Garud state forcefully, this is a profound misreading. While caste is historically specific, comparable systems generate metabolic divisions of labour which mark certain bodies to bear the burden of pollution management and recycling. These systems structure environmental governance across contexts, whether through proximate migrant labour in European cities or through extended value chains that displace waste from Europe and North America to Asia. Engaging a diverse body of scholarship is, in part, an effort to make these dynamics legible beyond India—to show that what appears particular is, in fact, globally resonant. At the same time, reading theories of cultural capital or social reproduction through caste allows for a reworking of those frameworks themselves, sharpening analyses of class, distinction, and environmental practice by foregrounding the embodied and hereditary dimensions of labour that they often understate.
Ultimately, these reviews have helped me think about how Recycling Class also functions as a theoretical contact zone: it brings together urban political ecology, cultural sociology, and anti-caste critique in order to understand how environmental governance operates through everyday practices and social relations. This convening necessarily produces tensions between different theoretical traditions, but it also allows for a more expansive conversation across them.
A second unresolved tension concerns the relationship between sociological analysis of inequality and theories of social change. Where must we locate our sources of transformative theory: in ideal visions or in the compromised, often contradictory realities through which people struggle and make do? Much of Recycling Class adopts the latter strategy. Rather than starting from a normative theory of environmental justice or anti-caste praxis and evaluating the empirical world against it, the book begins from the messy terrain through which middle-class actors, municipal systems, and waste worker organizations encounter one another. This orientation also shaped the methodological choice to “study up”: to focus on elites, governance processes and institutional actors while tracing how waste pickers and their allies navigate and reshape these arenas.
The forum essays illuminate the stakes of these choices. Sapana Doshi and Pradnya Garud underscore how a more explicit grounding in anti-caste political traditions can sharpen what is politically at stake in these contradictions. David Pellow’s question—whether the system described in the book might be functioning exactly as intended rather than being broken—pushes in a similar direction. Melanie Samson, meanwhile, reflects on why the book lingers with the contradictory spaces it calls contact zones.
It is in this context that the book approaches the question of inclusion. The analysis rejects self-congratulatory narratives of inclusion within sustainability systems, but it also refuses the equally easy theoretical move in which inclusion is dismissed as compromised from the outset. Instead, projects of inclusion are treated as material-political and relational terrain. For waste picker organizations, struggles over legality, recognition, access to waste, remuneration, and participation are often articulated through claims to inclusion, even when the actors involved are fully aware that the terms of inclusion are structured against them. In Bengaluru, as the book suggests, sustainability and environmentalism have become unavoidable terrain for waste workers’ struggle. This does not make inclusion emancipatory in of itself. It means that struggles against disposability frequently must pass through contested claims to inclusion.
In other words, the book stays with these contradictions because they are part of ongoing dialogues and struggles in practice, in cities across the world, and in global environmental forums such as the UN Plastic Treaty negotiations (O’Hare and Nøklebye, 2024). The book’s failure to normatively resolve the question of inclusion reflects an effort to remain faithful to struggles whose political resolution remain provisional. The reviews help clarify that the ideal of inclusion as a noun, i.e., as incorporation into an already existing order, does not lead to transformative outcomes. Yet the struggles conducted around processes of inclusion can also force dominant systems to contend with actors, demands, and forms of knowledge that are not easily assimilable to their prior logics.
Contact zones remain open to both emancipatory and reactionary transformation, and those possibilities cannot be decided in advance at the level of theory alone. Therefore, I agree with Melanie Samson that assessing the political potential of contact zones would require more sustained, processual analysis of interactions, internal debates, and strategic orientations of waste picker organizations than the book provides. The choice to prioritize a relational, “studying up” perspective, rather than a more worker-centric account of these dynamics, necessarily limits what Recycling Class can show about these processes, even as it brings other aspects of environmental governance into view. Read alongside the rich body of worker-centred scholarship on waste, the focus on contact zones is intended as complementary: it shifts attention to the sites where the terms of inclusion, recognition, and value are actively produced and contested.
This brings me to the third tension raised across the forum: the proposal of reparation by inclusion introduced in the book’s conclusion and its relation to more radical political horizons, most notably the annihilation of caste.
This proposal begins from an empirical observation. Informal environmental labour has long subsidized urban environmental governance. Waste pickers perform the work that allows cities to “discard well,” yet that labour remains stigmatized, criminalized, and systematically undervalued. Any serious sustainability politics must therefore begin with an acknowledgment of these historical and ongoing injustices. Reparation by inclusion was proposed as a way of naming the political demand that follows from this observation: that environmental governance must redistribute resources, authority, and recognition toward those whose labour has made urban sustainability possible. In this sense, the proposal is directed squarely at the political economy of sustainability. It asks what it would mean for environmental governance to repair the harms it has historically depended upon.
Several contributions in the forum place this proposal in tension with horizons of liberation and social transformation, such as the annihilation of caste and abolition of racial capitalism. David Pellow asks whether inclusion and annihilation can ultimately be reconciled. Can struggles conducted within the language of inclusion ever lead to the dismantling of caste hierarchy, or do they simply defer that possibility indefinitely? As Sapana Doshi and Pradnya Garud point out, there are very good reasons to be “deeply sceptical of the political viability of reparations frameworks in India when mobilisation depends primarily on alliances with caste-privileged middle classes who often refuse to acknowledge caste altogether.”
These questions resonate strongly with the dynamics explored in the book itself. As the book concludes, inclusion within existing social forms cannot, on its own, dismantle caste hierarchy. Nor is it presented in the book as the horizon of transformation. What the ethnography shows instead is that sustainability initiatives have created contact zones in which the metabolic dependencies and contradictions of environmental governance become newly visible and politically negotiable. In Bengaluru, alliances between middle-class environmentalists and waste picker organizations produced new forms of recognition and influence, even as they remained structured by unequal social relations. These spaces are unstable and politically ambivalent. They can reproduce hierarchy as easily as challenge it. Yet they also reshape the political terrain on which environmental governance unfolds.
Kathleen Stokes’s intervention is especially helpful here. She asks whether the contradictions of liberal environmentalism documented in the book might nevertheless be contributing to shifts in state–society relations. Her question for me raises a broader debate: what are environmental politics to democratic politics themselves? As foreshadowed by Vinay Gidwani, limits are nigh, and techno-fixes such as the circular economy cannot keep pace with the sheer scale of economic excretion. While I am less persuaded by claims that an “earth politics” will supersede obdurate social relations of capital (Latour et al., 2022), it is increasingly clear that more politics are becoming environmental politics. Contact zones articulating around climate, sustainability, and environment have become an expansive terrain on which the contradictions of caste, labour, and inequality are actively fought through.
The political potentials that emerge within these contact zones are not a substitute for radical anti-caste organizing nor for constitutionalist struggles toward substantive democracy. Yet they are an increasingly important part of the broader socio-political field in which contestations take shape. This ethnography suggests that initiatives often framed as inclusion generate contact zones in which waste pickers emerge not only as subjects of governance but as political actors and epistemic agents. As Melanie Samson highlights, this is not unique to Bengaluru: waste picker organizations are carefully engaging in these types of inclusion initiatives across the world as part of broader struggles to redress entrenched inequalities. Seen from this angle, the contact zones described in the book are not just sites of accommodation or co-optation. They are also arenas in which claims to citizenship, labour rights, and environmental responsibility are renegotiated in ways that may modestly expand the possibilities for substantive democracy. Recycling Class suggests that reparation by inclusion can multiply the sites in which the limits of existing orders are made visible and contested. However, the relationship between these sites and more autonomous forms of Dalit–Bahujan organizing or abolitionist struggle remains an open and crucial question.
References
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Manisha Anantharaman is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po in the Centre for the Sociology of Organisations (CNRS). She works at the intersection of economic and cultural sociology, political ecology, and environmental governance, using ethnographic methods to examine how ecological transitions are shaped by inequality, identity, and institutions. She is the author of Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability (MIT Press, 2024), which received honourable mentions for the American Sociological Association’s Book Award for the Sociology of Development and the International Studies Association’s Book Award for Global Development Studies, and co-edited The Circular Economy and the Global South (Routledge, UK, 2019).
