From Environmental Conflict to Liberalization: The Uncontrolled Deregulation of the German Waste Management System Questions the Modernisation Successes of the Early 1990s

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, the German Federal Government has been trying to implement the liberalization of waste management, against the resistance of municipalities. But instead of creating a new fitting regulative environment for the sector, the strong position of the municipal waste management has been decomposed by delayed regulation. As a by-product of this policy of uncontrolled deregulation, some important effects of the modernisation strategy which was enforced in the early 1990s by the same government, under pressure of the environmental movement, are contested again.