How do those who know more about good environmental practices help those who know less? The answer is implied in the question: education. If you knew what I know, then you would act like me, the logic goes. However, this logic fails on several fronts. Firstly, ethicists, especially Christian ethicists, will remind us that just because someone knows the right thing does not mean they will do the right thing. What Paul writes in Romans 7:19 (NIV), ‘For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing’, continues to apply to humanity today. Mere knowledge is insufficient to ensure ethical behaviour.

Secondly, implicit in the idea of education is that someone knows more than another; there is superior knowledge that will help overcome inferior ignorance. This is not necessarily true, especially when it comes to complex human behaviour. Knowledge can be different, even complementary, not just superior or inferior, because knowledge is always contextual and situated. Feminist and postcolonial scholars point to the difference between a patriarchal and colonial mindset versus one that considers the knowledge of women and the colonised (Belenky et al. 1997; Santos 2018). The existence of contextual or situated knowledge implies that the hierarchical relationship between superior and inferior is not as clear as it might first appear.

Thirdly, implicit in the idea of ‘good’ environmental practices is a kind of moral clarity that is not necessarily attainable or universally agreed upon. The ambiguous moral status of some environmental practices is revealed in the hypocrisy of developed economies that dictate ‘good’ environmental practices to developing countries while ignoring their own. For instance, while we are aware of ‘good’ waste management practices, the dynamic of ever-increasing consumption, one of the underlying principles of capitalism and a primary driver of waste production, is rarely seriously questioned. What is moral in one context might contradict another moral imperative in another. It is moral for Westerners to reduce waste, but this does not impinge on their lifestyle. In other contexts, reducing might affect quality of life, thus contradicting the moral good of the right to life.

For example, the average waste production per capita in Malawi is approximately 0.5 kg/person per day. This figure is consistent for urban centres such as Lilongwe and Blantyre, although some variation occurs in high-income areas where waste production can reach up to 0.61 kg/person per day (African Clean Cities Platform 2022). This is compared to the US, which is approximately 2.22 kg/person per day (United States Environmental Protection Agency [US EPA] 2017). Furthermore, most household waste in Malawi (about 82%) is organic, with plastic constituting only 7%, paper 4%, glass 3% and metals 1%; most organic waste is consumed by animals, burned or left to compost, leaving comparatively very little trash for collection or as litter (Sustainable Inclusive Business n.d.).

At root, each of these three limits points to a logic at work in people’s lives. ‘Ignorant’ people are not so much irrational or immoral as they act out of their own immanent logics. Various moral sentiments inform these logics, making it impossible to summarise them as ‘people act out of self-interest’. Parents make many choices that are not self-interested. Sacrificial actions on behalf of another make sense within a moral order, but they are not strictly self-interested. It is only partially accurate to attribute immoral behavior on vices such as pride, jealousy, or greed. We may break a moral rule while still behaving out of a virtue, such as love. At times, people are unaware of the logic underlying their behaviour, but if pressed, they might offer a moral justification that makes sense within their context and particular moral framework.

Knowing this immanent logic, what makes sense to the person in this context and with these particular circumstances, is a prerequisite for changing moral behaviour. It is not sufficient to know what moral action we want to see because that moral action is entirely predicated on our own context and particular circumstances. We must enter into the moral universe of the other person so that a new morality might emerge that takes both moral logics into account.

The other’s immanent moral logic, the insufficiency of education, its contextual nature and the scale of moral action are not simply abstract problems. Recently, we sought to address an environmental issue in Blantyre, a large urban area in southern Malawi. Among the many environmental problems they faced, residents of densely populated areas, such as Ndirande, lived surrounded by mountains of waste. Simply put, many Malawians were not engaged in ‘good’ waste management practices. Waste such as plastic containers clogged precious waterways, made streets impassable and created a locus for disease. The city, for all its efforts, routinely runs out of petrol to keep its insufficiently small waste-collection fleet on the road, leaving residents largely responsible for their own waste management.

Waste management experts concerned with the well-being of large numbers of everyday Malawians face severe limits in what they can do to change behaviour. While governments have various levers to change behaviour, for instance, they can sanction through fines and incentivise through payouts, non-governmental agents cannot compel behaviour change. This places more pressure on the means they do have available. Education becomes the primary engine driving behaviour change.

This article explores the immanent moral order of everyday life of Malawians regarding solid waste. Without understanding this, no educational campaign will succeed. As the research proceeded, it became clear that Malawians construct their understanding of waste and thus of moral action surrounding waste, using their Christian faith. This was not the only framework they used, but it is an important one. It is important because waste management tends to understand the world in strictly material terms. Christianity, on the other hand, understands the world as both material and spiritual. How the material and spiritual relate, and how people live out that relationship, is critical to understand whether we want to influence behaviour around waste management.

The moral and theological significance of waste has long preoccupied scholars across anthropology, sociology and cultural theory. Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger remains foundational, defining dirt as ‘matter out of place’ and showing that what societies label as pollution or waste reflects moral and symbolic boundaries – distinctions between the pure and impure, the sacred and profane, order and disorder (Douglas 1978). Later theorists, such as Zygmunt Bauman, Gay Hawkins, Susan Strasser, John Scanlan and Joshua Reno, have extended this insight, showing that waste provokes anxiety precisely because it unsettles these boundaries: it is simultaneously familiar and abject, useful and rejected, integral to daily life yet threatening when encountered outside prescribed spaces. For scholars such as Hawkins and Scanlan, waste therefore embodies a productive ambivalence – a space where material, moral and cultural values are negotiated (Hawkins 2006; Scanlan 2005).

This article expands on prior research by Marc Kalina and Elizabeth Tilley (Kalina & Tilley 2020; Kalina et al. 2022).

The study, ‘“Bad” Trash: Problematising Waste in Blantyre, Malawi’ examined the perspectives of subsistence maize growers and informal waste pickers at the Mzedi Dump Site, using Foucault’s problematisation lens (Kalina & Tilley 2020:187). The study ‘”Where Does It Go?”: Perceptions and Problems of Riverine and Marine Litter among South Africa and Malawi’s Urban Poor’ conducted extensive interviews (28 in Ndirande, 18 in Likhubula, 18 in the Central Business District of Blantyre, and 32 with Johanna Road residents in South Africa) using the same theoretical framework.

Both articles use Foucault’s concept of problematisation, ‘the process through which inert, apolitical, and fixed objects (such as waste) transform into sets of fluid, conditional, political relations’ (Kalina & Tilley 2020:190). Problematisations are not inevitable or clearly self-evident but rather the results ‘of particular social relations, contingent on human practice’ (Kalina & Tilley 2020:190). As Kalina and Tilley (2020:190) go on to say, problematisation is a way of ‘referring to the ways in which individuals put an issue, object, etc. forward or designate something as problematic’ (Kalina & Tilley 2020:191). Individuals will take the information they have and consider what constitutes a ‘problem’ based on their particular social location, including their needs and the roles they play.

It is not accidental that Kalina and Tilley (2020) use the moral terms ‘bad’ and ‘good’ to describe trash. They build on Greg Kennedy’s (2007) An Ontology of Trash: The Disposable and Its Problematic Nature, and the insight that:

There is no significant qualitative difference, but there is a moral difference. Some things are good, and others are bad, but the line between the two is thin. Yet, as sociologists of waste have argued, these problematisations are never only political or technical: they are moral and affective, revealing the cultural logics that underpin what is valued or abjected. The ‘badness’ of trash, as Kennedy and Hawkins suggest, is inseparable from the moral discomfort it evokes. When Kalina and Tilley note that ‘bad trash is not problematised because it is a hazard … it is problematised because it has no value’, their respondents are echoing precisely this moral ambivalence that Douglas and later scholars describe – that waste’s danger lies in its capacity to blur categories and disrupt social order (Kalina & Tilley 2020:198). This firmly fits within a utilitarian ethical framework, which in turn depends on the immanent logic of the moral agent to make sense. Utilitarianism judges moral behaviour by a criterion inherent in the moral agent. Foucault’s method, therefore, inadvertently reveals theological commitments because it raises moral issues. Problematisation calls for a response. In this regard, it asks the basic moral question, ‘What ought to be going on?’ (see Osmer 2008 for a fuller vision of how the moral theology fits within practical theology). A problem, however framed, calls for a response, and this response is grounded in a moral reality.

Kalina and Tilley were frustrated with the moral framework, which led to this project. Malawians use theological categories to challenge their understanding of waste. This is according to a study conducted by Kalina and Tilley. In an extended quote, they report a respondent saying, ‘God has his ways of ensuring that no impacts happen and that plastic does not get into oceans’ (Kalina et al. 2022:14). There is a certain amount of theological thinking at work here. The respondent believes that God has the power and will to ensure that polluted rivers filled with waste from Ndirande will not pollute the sea but has no rational reason for this belief beyond what they know from their Christian faith. Although it is underdeveloped, a doctrine of providence is inherent in the response. To use the categories of the Reformed theologian Karl Barth, the respondent has faith not only in the creative power of God but also in the preserving, accompanying and ruling power of creational providence (Barth 2004:58–288, specifically paragraph 49: God the Father as Lord of His Creature). This was not an isolated incident. Respondents in the ‘Where Does It Go?’ study consistently used theological categories to problematise waste in their local environment.

As scientists, Kalina and Tilley lack categories to account for spiritual interpretations of the world, which is more fully explored in a study by Bertrand (2025). Recognising this, they invited this theological collaboration. They reoriented their subsequent research questions to capture how Christian worldviews shape environmental thought and practice. This collaboration produced a second round of interviews incorporating explicitly theological prompts. All interviews were conducted in Chichewa, transcribed into English, coded thematically in NVivo and analysed for recurring theological motifs.

One of the most helpful lenses through which to understand these data are A.J. Swoboda’s Tongues and Trees: Towards a Pentecostal Ecological Theology (Swoboda 2013). This is true because Malawian Christianity in all its forms has been influenced by the pentecostal and charismatic movement (Munyenyembe 2011). Swoboda offers a comprehensive survey of ecotheology from all theological perspectives, with a special focus on the pentecostal and charismatic movement. In Chapter 2 of Tongues and Trees: Towards a Pentecostal Ecological Theology, Swoboda maps out four main schools of ecotheology, namely: Roman Catholic; Orthodox; Protestant; and Ecofeminist. In Chapter 3, he reviews the relevant literature in pentecostal and charismatic circles. Notably, his review largely focuses on the West for the usual reasons; he is in the West, and it has produced more written sources. This limits his review, at least for the purposes of this study, in two ways. Firstly, his focus on the African charismatic experience is limited (but not entirely absent). Secondly, his account is academic and thus distant from the lived experience of the average person living in southern Africa. Still, he provides some universally true frameworks and, as he notes, pentecostal and charismatic theology is never far from religious experience.

Two of Swoboda’s categories, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, map relatively well onto the religious makeup of a country such as Malawi. Between the Catholics and Presbyterians, a majority of Christians are covered. While there are Orthodox Christians within Malawi, they remain a minority. Swoboda’s category of Ecofeminism crosses denominational boundaries, including Roman Catholics such as Elizabeth Johnson and Protestants such as Sallie McFague. This way of thinking may have shaped the everyday beliefs of Malawian believers. Still, even Swoboda admits that the ecofeminist stream has more influence in academic circles than in the lives of everyday Christians. It suffices to say that the majority of Malawian believers would get captured by the first two categories.

Published in 2013, Swoboda’s account of these schools of thought is succinct but comprehensive. For Roman Catholics, he cites thinkers such as Matthew Fox, Raimon Panikkar, Charles Murphy and Leonardo Boff. To update the Roman Catholic ecotheology, he would need to take into account ‘Laudato Si’ (Kiel 2019; Kiel & Rossing 2017). In Protestant thought, he points to the towering figure of Jürgen Moltmann and his influence on 20th-century ecotheology. Notably, Swoboda dismisses ecotheologies based on the stewardship motif. He notes that the word does not appear in Scripture in relation to creation. While he mentions Douglas John Hall, a proponent of an environmental approach grounded in stewardship, he does not address Hall’s work (Hall 2004). Nor does Swoboda address any of the various ecumenical statements regarding the environment. These are not sufficiently constructive in their theological formulations, a point that is perhaps true, at least from an academic perspective.

Swoboda works to develop a fifth category: the Pentecostal Charismatic. He puts forward his own constructive proposal for a pneumatologically based ecotheology, grounded in the classic marks of pentecostal and charismatic theology. While his particular constructive proposal may have merits, it is unclear whether it has had a significant influence on the lived, everyday theology of Malawians. Nor it is clear that the African pentecostal and charismatic ecotheology movements that Swoboda points to have had a long-lasting effect. He dwells on M.L. Inus Daneel and his work with the Association of Zimbabwean Traditional Ecologies and African Association of Earth-Keeping Churches (Swoboda 2013:77). While Daneel is undoubtedly influential, he does not appear to have a significant impact in Malawi. Munyenyembe does not cite Daneel, for instance (Munyenyembe 2011).

Rather, it is the foundation of Swoboda’s work, the marks and characteristics of pentecostal and charismatic ecotheology, that offers the best heuristic lens. For instance, he notes that ‘Pentecostal theology has been more strongly situated in action over and above theological reflection’ (Swoboda 2013:155). This is a point that other pentecostal and charismatic theologians, such as Jamie Smith, have pointed out (Smith 2010). It has also been observed that this is one reason that the pentecostal and charismatic movement has resonated ‘well in African cultures and religious practice where charismatic, experiential, and ecstatic expression is in the nature of the homo religiosus of the African sphere’ (Swoboda 2013:76). It should not surprise us, then, that the respondents don’t have a fully articulated ecotheology. Rather, their actions and experiences inform what they believe.

While there is diversity among pentecostal and charismatic believers, the ‘full Gospel’ is very common among them. The full Gospel is: (1) justification by faith; (2) sanctification by faith as a second work; (3) healing of the body through the atonement; (4) premillennial return of Christ; and (5) baptism followed by glossolalia (Swoboda 2013:100). Again, not all pentecostal and charismatic believers hold to these exact tenets. Some would not strictly connect baptism and glossolalia, but the majority would, and those who do not will still expect the Spirit to work in miraculous ways in the believer’s life. Of note here is the premillennialism. Eschatology plays a significant role in ecotheology. If, as many pentecostal and charismatic believers hold, Jesus will return after a time of tribulation, then there is less incentive to take environmental action. This world must suffer before Jesus returns; to alleviate that suffering is to delay the return of Christ. This theology fosters a focus on heaven (hastening the return of Christ so that the millennium can begin) and pessimism (the world is coming to an end, which is seen as a positive development), both of which hinder an activist ecotheology (Swoboda 2013:88). Where the postmillennial Protestant vision might be for the transformation of the world, the premillennial pentecostal and charismatic vision is for the annihilation of the world (Swoboda 2013:72). This, as Swoboda points out, has been a major issue in developing a pentecostal and charismatic ecotheology. In contrast, Swoboda claims that Roman Catholics operate with a largely realised eschatology, which sees the need for an ecotheology framed with the Kingdom that has come (Swoboda 2013:35).

In addition, there are several pentecostal and charismatic traits that Swoboda points to that may impact ecotheology but have not to this point. For instance, a mark of the pentecostal and charismatic movement is an emphasis on healing. This can range from miraculous healing in a large-scale revival meeting to a soteriology that includes the full embodiment of humanity. But, as Swoboda points out, ‘healing is viewed, in pentecostal practice, in anthropocentric terms rather than cosmic terms’ (Swoboda 2013:104). We would not expect healing to be a motif among our respondents. Connected to this is the difficulty that the pentecostal and charismatic movement has with the source of sickness. Often, ‘Pentecostals who have little to no context for comprehending death, sickness, and pain aside from the demonic’ will struggle to understand larger systemic causes (Swoboda 2013:149). With this understanding, we might expect that ecotheology could include exorcism (getting rid of the demonic causes) but would not centre the healing of the world.