Garbage, Health, and Well-Being in Managua

Long described as a city "drowning in garbage," Managua is ground zero in the fight against unsightly municipal solid waste in Nicaragua. The completion of a large-scale international development project involving the capital city's only waste site in February 2013, together with the announcement of the Vivir Bonito national health and well-being campaign a month earlier, may be changing the ways Nicaraguans think about garbage. While striving to improve the city's physical environment, these recent developments may also change the ways the environment, public health, and, more broadly, citizens are governed. The campaign, nicknamed Vivir Bonito, is the hallmark of the new cabinet post of Family, Community, and Life, which was created through a constitutional amendment. Vivir Bonito calls upon Nicaraguans to rethink and change individual behaviors so as to promote individual, community, arid national health and well-being. Waste governance plays a key role in meeting Vivir Bonito's environmental stewardship goals.