# Vignette 4: Panama's waste ecosystem
When Anibal Cardenas began exploring waste management in Tonosi, where only 50% of residents had reliable waste collection, he spent three months living in the community, discovering a rich network of informal collectives already addressing the challenge: waste pickers who had developed sophisticated recycling expertise, women's groups leading turtle conservation efforts with valuable data on beach pollution, hotels responding to tourist demands for recycling, and community leaders working with schools and youth groups.
This deep community immersion revealed that the real opportunity lay not in creating new structures, but in strengthening existing networks. Building on this insight, Anibal and Jennifer Hotsko from UNDP Panama's Accelerator Lab began by mapping overlapping interests: the turtle conservation groups had data on beach pollution that resonated with municipal officials, while informal waste workers' expertise in waste characterization proved valuable for government planning.
"We did a mapping of mappings," Anibal explains. "We realized there were many previous mappings that were done. And so we already had a sort of landscape of who was doing what." This allowed them to identify natural communities of practice around specific aspects of waste management: recycling, reducing, reusing, and repairing.
The team created spaces where these different collectives could share knowledge and align efforts. They used citizen science and data collection as tools to bring groups together[\[1\]](#endnote-1) (Figure 19), organizing co-creation workshops where hotel owners and business owners who had been recycling independently could design shared collection routes.[\[2\]](#endnote-2) They supported informal waste workers in developing a model for waste characterization that was eventually used across 29 landfills in Panama.
As these local collectives strengthened, Jennifer and Anibal began connecting them to national-level actors. They conducted a national solid waste management and circular economy solutions mapping and then showcased these local solutions to every institution involved in waste management – the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Environment, National Waste Collection Authority, and Municipality of Panama. "They were impressed," Anibal recalls. "They were like 'we didn't know there were these many solutions.'"
This led to the inclusion of these solutions, data and insights in forming larger collective spaces, including a National Plastics Action Partnership with the World Economic Forum and new projects related to food systems and circular economy in public markets at the Municipality of Panama.[\[3\]](#endnote-3) The team invited their community of practice working on plastics and food waste to demonstrate how their solutions were already addressing policy goals and how policies needed adjustment to enable more circular practices.
These expanding circles of collaboration now influence national planning, with the solutions mapping process and the data and insights generated being used in the design of the National Solid Waste Management Plan of the National Sanitation Authority and the Roadmap for Plastics Circularity of Panama as part of the National Plastics Action Partnership with the World Economic Forum. The community of practice helps shape Panama's solid waste management strategy, ensuring policies reflect ground realities while supporting grassroots innovation. What began by understanding local relationships and trust networks in one municipality evolved into an adaptive network spanning from community initiatives to national policy.
{% hint style="info" %}
#### **Key takeaways:**
* **Start hyperlocal:** Spend time understanding existing networks, relationships, and trust dynamics in a specific community before attempting to connect them to larger systems.
* **Build on existing momentum:** Look for where people are already collaborating across different sectors and groups (e.g. conservation groups, cooperatives of waste pickers).
* **Use data collection as a connector:** citizen science and collective monitoring can bring different groups together and coordinate collective learning around challenges.
* **Create spaces for collective intelligence:** create opportunities for different groups to exchange knowledge and align efforts, while ensuring each participant understands how their role supports the broader system.
* **Bridge the middle ground:** Connect grassroots innovators with policymakers by helping each group understand how they can benefit from and strengthen the other's work.
{% endhint %}
***
## Notes
1. See Demel (2021; 2022) [↑](#endnote-ref-1)
2. Hotsko (2021) [↑](#endnote-ref-2)
3. See Cardenas (2023) [↑](#endnote-ref-3)
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