Garbage Odysseys: Navigating the Fickle Institutional Context of Waste Management by Zanzibari Hotels

This paper addresses the wicked problem of waste management in tourism in the Global South. Despite the abundance of green labels and sustainability pledges, tourism and hospitality operators accumulate huge volumes of waste, while tourists themselves are generally oblivious to challenges related to food and plastic waste or excessive resource (water, energy) consumption. Current research presents hotel operators in the Global South as weak or opportunistic agents, who merely reproduce greenwashing claims and exploit tumultuous local institutional /policy contexts instead of adopting truly sustainable practices. Based on an extensive fieldwork, survey data and qualitative interviews among operations managers on the island of Zanzibar, this article offers a more refined analysis of fickle sustainability performance and reports high variance among individual and organizational practices. By adapting institutional logic (Hoffman, A., 2001; Silva & Figueiredo, 2017) and Adner’s (2016) notion of ecosystems as an analytical framework, this study maps co-existent waste accumulation, waste handling and waste valorization constellations of independently operated and franchise hotels. The paper is concluded by offering a typology of managerial responsibilization strategies to effectively navigate turbulent regulatory and social environments around waste management.