Municipal solid waste management systems of many developing countries are commonly constrained by factors such as limited financial resources and poor governance, making it a difficult proposition to break with complex, entrenched and unsustainable technologies and systems. This article highlights strategic partnerships as a way to affect a distributed agency among several sets of stakeholders to break so-called path dependencies, which occur when such unsustainable pathways arise, stabilize and become self-reinforcing over time. Experiences from a North-South collaborative effort provide some lessons in such partnership building: In Uganda and Denmark, respectively, the World Wildlife Fund and the network organization access2innovation have mobilized stakeholders around improving the municipal solid waste management system in Kasese District. Through a municipal solid waste management system characterization and mapping exercise, some emergent lessons and guiding principles in partnership building point to both pitfalls and opportunities for designing sustainable pathways. First, socio-technical lock-in effects in the municipal solid waste management system can stand in the way of partnerships based on introducing biogas or incineration technologies. However, opportunities in the municipal solid waste management system can exist within other areas, and synergies can be sought with interlinking systems, such as those represented with sanitation.
Keywords: Developing countries; Uganda; innovation; partnerships; path dependencies.
© The Author(s) 2014.