Open waste burning in Iraq is a failure of governance rather than of compliance. Although explicitly prohibited under Iraq’s Environmental Protection and Improvement Law No. 27 of 2009, the practice has become a routine feature of urban life, particularly in peripheral districts, informal settlements and overstretched dumpsites. Its persistence exposes structural weaknesses in how authority, financing and enforcement are organised across Iraq’s waste management system. What appears to be a local nuisance is, in reality, one of the most visible expressions of state weakness in everyday life.
The scale of the problem is significant. According to Central Statistical Organization (CSO) data, Iraq produces 20.6 million tonnes of municipal solid waste per year, at an average of approximately 1.3 kilograms per capita per day. Urban waste collection rates in some major cities exceed 90 per cent – yet even a steady share of unmanaged waste is enough to sustain consistent dumping and burning. Children, the elderly and those with respiratory illnesses bear the most immediate health costs, experiencing persistent coughing, eye irritation and aggravated asthma attacks. The majority of affected residents lack both awareness of the risks and the means to mitigate them.
Collection without governance
Municipal bodies in Iraq are primarily mandated to collect and transport waste, and their performance is judged largely by how clean streets appear. What happens after collection – how waste is treated, where it is disposed of, and whether environmental standards are respected – receives far less institutional attention.
Regulatory oversight sits with the environmental authorities, while operational decisions are taken locally by municipalities and governorates. This division leaves disposal practices – particularly at informal and unregulated sites – weakly governed. Enforcement authority, budget control and day-to-day site management are distributed across institutions with limited leverage over one another. When burning occurs, inspectors may identify violations, but municipalities control equipment and staffing, while governorates influence administrative decisions. Problems are therefore identified but not decisively resolved.
Official data illustrate the scale of this gap. Of 212 landfill sites nationwide, only 79 have received formal environmental authorisation following a site assessment and compliance review by the Ministry of Environment; 133 operate without it. Iraq has 30 regular and temporary transfer stations, of which eight lack environmental approval. More striking is the proliferation of 86 non-regular transfer points – temporary dumping nodes – of which only three meet environmental standards. These informal sites absorb overflow while escaping oversight. In this context, open burning is not an aberration; it is a predictable response to unmanaged accumulation.
The root causes lie in how authority is distributed. Municipalities are responsible for collection and landfill operation; the Ministry of Environment oversees compliance; governorates control local directorates; and key decisions such as landfill siting involve additional ministries. Because oversight, enforcement, financing and operational control sit in different hands, responsibility shifts rather than settles. As a result, when burning occurs, no single institution clearly owns the failure.
Over time, this diffusion of responsibility has normalized open burning as a feature of everyday life. Unlike electricity shortages or water cuts, which are typically presented as national infrastructure challenges, waste burning unfolds at street level, in full public view. Beyond its environmental and public health impacts, the practice has deepened public disillusionment with the state’s capacity to deliver basic services.
Fragmented authority, diluted accountability
Governance arrangements further compound the problem. Outside the Kurdistan Region, municipal services operate across 15 governorates under multiple administrative chains. Baghdad’s municipal authority functions as a quasi-ministry responsible for the capital, while municipal services in the remaining governorates formally fall under the Ministry of Housing, Construction and Municipalities. In practice, most local directorates report to governorate offices rather than directly to the ministry. Governorates, in turn, coordinate with the General Secretariat of the Council of Ministers through the High Authority for Coordination between Governorates.
This layered structure diffuses accountability and weakens enforcement. Decisions about daily waste management are taken locally, while regulatory authority is exercised centrally, often without effective coordination.
Institutional complexity also extends to technical decisions. The identification and allocation of land for sanitary landfills – a prerequisite for any regulated waste system – has historically been assigned to the Science and Technology Centre, now a directorate under the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. While technically justified, this arrangement adds another layer to an already crowded governance landscape. Coordination between municipalities, environmental regulators, governorate authorities and a non-service ministry slows site selection, delays investment and leaves existing dumpsites operating beyond capacity.
Financing gaps and informal solutions
Weak financing reinforces these governance failures. Although municipalities are formally self-financed, they remain heavily dependent on central government transfers. Waste and wastewater fees are collected through water bills for residential areas, while commercial and industrial generators are inconsistently billed. Cost recovery is minimal, limiting the ability of municipalities to invest in regulated landfills, transfer stations or monitoring systems.
CSO surveys conducted across all 16 municipal directorates – including Baghdad and the governorates – present a consistent picture. Every directorate identified the absence of waste segregation at source, shortages of specialised machinery, random dumping and weak enforcement frameworks as core constraints. More than 93 per cent cited insufficient financial allocations and difficulty securing land that meets environmental standards. Municipalities are therefore expected to manage waste outcomes without being given the regulatory tools, financing mechanisms or land access required to do so.
When enforcement is costly, financing weak and authority fragmented, informal practices fill operational gaps. Burning may be initiated by scavengers seeking to extract metals from waste, or by dumpsite workers attempting to reduce waste volume and extend landfill lifespan. Although authorities classify such acts as punishable, their persistence reflects structural pressures rather than isolated misconduct.1
Practical pathways for reform
Addressing open waste burning is less a question of new legislation or technology adoption than of effective implementation. Reform depends on better alignment between financing mechanisms, institutional responsibilities and social realities within the existing system.
First, municipalities require predictable and enforceable financing. Charging commercial and industrial entities through the annual business licensing renewal process – making fee clearance a prerequisite for legal operation – would improve compliance. Residential collection should be decoupled from the inconsistent water billing system and integrated into higher-compliance channels such as the electricity bill. Crucially, these revenues must be ring-fenced for waste services only in order to strengthen municipal capacity and reduce reliance on informal practices.
Second, governance roles require functional clarification. Clear protocols defining responsibility for landfill standards, inspection schedules and responses to open burning incidents – particularly outside Baghdad – would improve cooperation between municipalities, environmental regulators and enforcement bodies. This would reduce reliance on ad hoc arrangements and help ensure that waste management systems remain functional over the long term.
Third, preventive readiness should take precedence over reactive legal punishment. While open burning is already prohibited under Law No. 27 of 2009, penalties fail to deter the practice because they do not address the lack of disposal alternatives. Tackling accumulation at identified hotspots, strengthening transfer station management and piloting basic two-stream waste segregation in urban and commercial districts could substantially reduce incentives to burn. This is particularly important as organic waste constitutes a large share of municipal waste, but no national segregation system exists.
A social dimension further complicates reform. Informal waste pickers – typically young and economically marginalised – are currently treated as illicit actors subject to police interference rather than as economic participants. Their exclusion has not eliminated scavenging but displaced it into more hazardous and unregulated spaces. Integrating informal workers into controlled sorting and recycling operations could simultaneously reduce burning and generate livelihoods.
What this means for Iraq’s governance agenda
Iraq’s waste crisis reflects a failure shaped by fragmented authority, weak financing and entrenched informal practices. These are not problems that more legislation will solve. What is required is institutional realignment: clearer mandates, enforceable financing and coordination mechanisms that match the complexity of the system as it actually operates. Until that alignment is achieved, waste will continue to be managed outside formal systems regardless of how many strategies or laws are adopted. For citizens, the air pollution caused by burning waste is not merely a health hazard – it is a daily measure of the distance between the state’s formal commitments and its capacity to deliver.
This article is part of the Reform Monitor series which provides in-depth insights into the inner-workings of Iraq’s government and evaluates what recent developments – both public and behind the scenes – reveal about the future of the Iraqi state. The Reform Monitor aims to offer policy recommendations to the Iraqi government, international policymakers, multilateral organizations, and NGOs working in Iraq to inform decision-making and programming aimed at building a more stable, accountable and prosperous Iraqi state.
The Reform Monitor series is part of the workstream on the political economy of reform, under the Middle East and North Africa Programme’s Iraq Initiative, led by project director Dr Renad Mansour.
Photo credit: Wdhaa Abdulkareem Flayyih | وضاء عبد الكريم فليح
