Legal infrastructures for discarded electronics: Trailing transboundary flows between Europe and Ghana

The thesis investigates the role of law in transnational flows of discarded electronics and interrogates how actors manoeuvre regulatory frameworks to ship electronic discards inter-regionally. While there is a rich and diverse scholarship on issues pertaining to waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE), this thesis attends to legal aspects with greater scrutiny. Simultaneously, the thesis enriches legal analysis with empirical findings from multi-sited fieldwork conducted in Ghana and the Netherlands.

To explore the role of law, as well as how actors navigate, contest, and recursively shape the law, the thesis works through and extends the analytical framework offered by legal infrastructures. A key value of thinking about law as a type of infrastructure is bringing attention to normative connectivity and entanglements at the interface between different legal domains and rulesets. This allows capturing how electronic discards flow across legal regimes. The legal infrastructure lens furthermore allows giving due regard for laws role in enabling or obstructing particular types of circulation, to which this thesis adds the notion of topographic traits of legal infrastructures.

Inspired moreover by studies that combine an infrastructural lens with ethnography, the thesis adopts a socio-legal perspective to capture how actors engage with legal infrastructures. The ethnographic fieldwork brings attention to how the density of legal rules and topographic traits in the legal infrastructure makes alternative routes appear, which are conceptualized as shadow flows. Overall, the thesis makes a contribution to research on global circulations of discarded electronics, the emerging analytical framework of legal infrastructures, and socio-legal scholarship.