Uneven global connections

end-of-life vehicle management and used car and car parts markets

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the connections between state provisions regulating the disposal of end-of-life vehicles and the formation of local and transnational economies for used automobiles and auto parts. For this discussion, we will draw on what we have learned from three specific empirical contexts: Street mechanics in Saint-Denis, north of Greater Paris, France; the trade in used auto parts in the Abossey Okai region of Acra, Ghana; and the dismantling of vehicles for the sale of parts on Avenida Riacho, in São Paulo, Brazil. This discussion is based on the preliminary results of the Globalcar project, a multi-sited and collective ethnographic research project on the (in)formal and (il)legal economic circuits of second-hand vehicles and auto parts, which has been under development since 2021. In the contemporary context, end-of-life vehicles are valuable global resources, disputed by different economic circuits – such as the recycling industry, the reuse of second-hand parts and even the export for repair and resale as second-hand vehicles to territories with less restrictive or more easily circumvented regulations. These transnational networks represent backroads of the automotive chain, mechanisms for expanding and spreading the "system" of automobility in the peripheries of capitalism. Their dynamics reveal global connections and frictions and raises a debate about the unequal geographies of environmental policies, economic development and globalization.