Syria, self-made: Can you crowdfund trash collection?

“Early in the transition we were drowning in garbage,” said a community leader in a densely populated neighborhood of Damascus. “So, we gathered donations to fix up our garbage trucks.”

Syria has for years struggled with waste management, and the problem could only escalate in the tumult of Syria’s transition. Communities across Syria have swelled with residents returning from displacement, while the transitional government is desperately short on both cash and administrative capacity. There’s not enough money to pay trash collectors, put fuel in their trucks, or repair those trucks when they break down. There aren’t enough bins to put trash in. And that’s just about trash collection, to say nothing of disposal.

The result is a pestilence of waste. It piles up in streets, vacant lots, and irrigation canals, poisoning the air and drawing packs of feral dogs. People burn it out of desperation, a practice that recently triggered a (non-lethal) explosion in Aleppo.

We can learn a lot from how communities handle this very visible, visceral problem. In post-Assad Syria, neighborhoods and villages test spontaneous, solidarity-based solutions, showcasing the entrepreneurial spirit for which Syrians are rightly known. But such efforts only go so far: They rarely tackle the root causes of dysfunctional services, and can worsen inequality between areas with more or less capacity for self-help.

Examples of such initiatives are many. In crowded, under-serviced towns of Eastern Ghouta, locals donate to buy new dumpsters and fuel for trucks. Such efforts often entail a loose coalition of public and private actors: activists and notables circulate calls for support, businesses donate cash, municipalities collect and disburse funds. Arrangements can be idiosyncratic yet effective: In a picturesque village in Syria’s coastal mountains, a local cultural association has teamed up with the municipality to gather donations from restaurant and hotel owners eager to see trash disposed of.

There’s much to be admired in these efforts: They tackle urgent needs and foster local ownership over public services. But there are also downsides to such extreme, chaotic decentralization. At a moment when Syria urgently needs to be rebuilding institutions, do-it-yourself services reinforce a decidedly ad hoc relationship between the state, citizens, and civil society. Public services become a matter of charity and volunteerism, which are no substitute for functioning taxation and institutions. This is particularly concerning given that Syria’s leaders have yet to articulate a state-led plan for reconstruction, even as they promote glitzy national fundraising drives.

And such improvised fixes are ill-suited to the more technical, capital-intensive aspects of service provision. While many neighborhoods, towns, and villages can summon the resources to collect and remove their garbage, few can properly dispose of it. In the same mountain village, organizers are proud of their clean streets but anxious about the fact that their garbage ultimately winds up in an open dump 50 meters from the spring that supplies their drinking water.

Solidarity-based service provision also poses problems of inequality. If your trash collection depends on local donations, you had better hope you have neighbors or diaspora support networks with the means and motivation to donate. A town with a stable hospitality sector, a suburb known for its robust manufacturing, a village where every household has relatives in the Gulf: These might cobble together solutions while poorer and more isolated communities choke on trash.

At its worst, such inequality can exacerbate social and political tensions. Across much of Syria, diverse confessional groups live in close proximity: a Sunni village across the street from an Alawi or Ismaili one; a city split between Christian, Sunni, and Alawi neighborhoods. Those communities share an environment, but—having often been on opposite sides of the war—not necessarily a shared sense of the public good. Nor do they share equal access to solidarity-based financing: Alawis in particular have historically depended on employment in Syria’s state and security apparatus, and have comparatively weak networks in the private sector and diaspora.

Those imbalances shape what projects get funded, to whose benefit. “Syria is divided by sect even when it comes to public services,” argued an Alawi community leader in the diverse, rigidly divided city of Homs. He recounted being asked to join a campaign to clean up the city, neighborhood by neighborhood—an uplifting notion with one major problem: “Every neighborhood on the list was Sunni!” In the Houla region of the western Homs countryside—known for its olive oil, diverse social fabric, and bloody history of sectarian massacres—a Sunni businessman claimed that a wealthy expatriate had sought his advice on what kinds of projects to fund. “He placed only one condition: That no Alawis benefit from it.”

Such sectarian leanings must be understood in the context of the past fifteen years. In Houla, Sunni villages were depopulated and picked clean by looters, while Alawi and Shia villagers remained. In the eastern quarters of Homs city, working class Sunni neighborhoods were ravaged by bombing; across the street, Alawi neighborhoods lost young men but remained physically intact. As Syria’s transition unfolds with little by way of either transitional justice or state planning, the country’s many divisions inevitably shape patterns of self-help.

This problem, however, is also an opportunity. Communities that share an environment—the fumes they breathe, the groundwater they drink, the rivers they irrigate with—have more reason than most to find ways of cooperating. Savvy, sensitive community leaders know this better than anyone. In Houla, a local official is seeking funds to rebuild a public hospital that once treated (and employed) Syrians from across his diverse, politically divided region. In the Tartous town of Baniyas, which has likewise endured sectarian massacres, an activist is struggling to build momentum around voluntary efforts to repair damaged areas across conflict lines.

Critically, projects of this type—which serve a region rather than a village, a city rather than a neighborhood—are also the ones least likely to arise from spontaneous local giving. That, in turn, is all the more reason for Syria’s state and its international supporters to define a far more structured, institutional approach to reviving essential services. Garbage would be just one place to start.

All photos by the author in the Old City of Homs.