Judith Wolf and Fabian Schroth are enrolled in the Master's program „Public and Private Environmental Management“. They are conducting a research project on municipal waste policy in Indian cities. Their goal is to investigate the conditions for and effectiveness of public private partnerships.

The last trial of the central government to regulate the problem of waste in Indian cities was the Municipal Solid Waste Rules in 2000. According to this rules, the municipalities are responsible for the segregation, transportation and disposal of waste. The implementation in all of the big cities is poor, sometimes there isn't even any attempt to implement them at all. As for this reason, the focus here will be on ways to regulate policies without or just in cooperation with the government. So the project is rooted in the theoretical framework of private governance and governance in the area of limited statehood.

Initiatives of local and transnational NGOs can be found in nearly all larger Indian cities. They try to segregate waste, adopt better transportation methods and incorporate the informal sector in waste projects. Assuming that such private projects can have an impact on local policies, the students will investigate the conditions under which these projects become public-private partnerships, how sustainable those partnerships are, how effective they are and if there are some back couplings to be found in the local policies.

Therefore the students will conduct interviews with governmental institutions, NGOs and other private actors.