Development of the IDEAS Collaborative Governance Framework to Manage Disposable-Diaper Waste

Abstract Disposable-diaper waste poses a critical environmental and public health challenge in rural South Africa, where municipal waste collection services reach fewer than one in five households. This article reports on the development of the IDEAS Collaborative Governance Framework, a five-phase, empirically grounded instrument designed to enable collaborative management of disposable-diaper waste in rural, low-resource communities. Drawing on three sequential studies funded by the South African Waste Research, Development and Innovation Roadmap, and grounded in Ansell, Sørensen, and Torfing’s co-creation theory, the framework was developed iteratively through participatory engagement with communities, traditional authorities, local government, civil society, and researchers across the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Region of Limpopo Province. The acronym IDEAS represents five sequential phases: Initiation, Design, Execution, Assessment, and Sustainability. A rigorous baseline assessment, comprised of 1,576 household surveys, 18 focus-group discussions, 24 thematic mapping exercises, and the GPS mapping of 433 illegal dumpsites across seven villages, established the empirical foundation on which the framework was built. Key findings confirmed that the barrier to responsible diaper disposal is structural rather than attitudinal: residents are aware of environmental and health risks but have no viable alternative in the absence of collection infrastructure. These findings reframe the governance imperative from individual behaviour change to structural service delivery, with direct implications for rural waste and sanitation policy across South Africa and comparable low-resource settings globally. This article makes three contributions: it develops one of the first empirically grounded governance frameworks specifically targeting disposable-diaper waste in rural contexts; it extends participatory co-creation theory to a rural African setting; and it demonstrates that robust collaborative governance can be built in communities with high unemployment and limited infrastructure, provided the process is genuinely participatory and sustained over time.