Prefiguring a World Beyond Wasteocene? Alternative Futures in Dumaguete City, Philippines from the Lens of “Walay Usik” (zero waste) and “Kauswagan” (change): A Photovoice Technique

In an era of Wasteocene (Armiero et. al., 2020), where the dominance of the narrative that places are produced through the “power of classifying who and what is disposable and how and what is not” take shapes and as capitalism continues to encroach in temporal-spatial boundaries there are movements and thinking in the Global South that seeks to prefigure alternative futures. These alternative development thinking are rooted in local culture, grassroots voices, and lived experiences that seek to reconfigure the way we think about planetary entanglements. Although more broadly, alternative development thinking engenders a prefigurative way of conceptualisation and practices, its potentially significant social and cultural dimensions are yet to be fully examined. While research and experiments on degrowth and post-growth focus on the Global North, similar work is lacking in the Global South.At the crux of the politics behind these alternatives to development movements are the tasks of imagining, producing and circulating better material flows, with important implications for how we use and manage waste.

Using qualitative data from one of the communities in the Philippines which is working towards zero waste, the paper interrogates perspectives of alternative development thinking of people in Dumaguete City from the lens of kauswagan (change) and walay usik (zero waste). Through a participatory methodology called photovoice which is the method of entrusting community members with smartphone cameras to respond to questions by taking photos, the paper offers unique perspectives on how communities think about planetary entanglements and (re)-imagine an alternative future.