Understanding System Change: Assessing Sydney’s Waste Reduction Target
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2023
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This thesis investigates what system change in city waste management looks like when undergoing a waste reduction target. Specifically, it addresses two objectives. Firstly, to explore and describe an active city waste management system attempting a waste reduction target; see Chapter Three. Secondly, to explore and describe key factors that may impact an active city waste management system attempting a waste reduction target; see Chapter Four.
A desktop review, semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted to address the two research objectives. Transdisciplinarity was the philosophical perspective applied to this thesis. The methodology featured participatory action research and included a systematic inductive approach to data analysis. Chapters Three and Four together present one city case study: the City of Sydney local government area and its 2030 zero waste target.
‘Zero waste’ as a concept was observed acting as a boundary object and was followed in the thesis to understand system change in the city case study waste management system. Key findings from the desktop review in Chapter Three include three challenges to implementing and measuring the case study target: 1) poor communication of the target by the City of Sydney; 2) conflicting and incomplete public reporting of waste data by the City of Sydney; and 3) an absence of public reporting of waste data by other key stakeholders. Key findings from the semi-structured interviews and focus groups in Chapter Four include fourteen factors impacting change in the city waste management system toward its waste reduction target and were distributed across six factor categories: 1) financing; 2) pivotal events; 3) communication; 4) physical surroundings; 5) leadership; and 6) local government employment. Findings from Chapters Three and Four were developed into a conceptual model of three interacting domains of change (‘materiality’, ‘reporting’, and ‘sentiment’) and acts as a navigational tool to understand the city case study waste management system.
This thesis extends the work of Zaman and Lehmann (2013b) and Zaman (2014b) by taking a holistic approach to assess a city waste management system in relation to its waste reduction target. The research contributes to the limited literature that holistically assesses a city waste management system with a waste reduction target that includes a social system mapping approach. Further, this is the first holistic study of an active waste management system in Sydney, Australia.
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