The gap between risk awareness and makeshift practices : a criminological analysis of medical waste management in Kinshasa

This article analyzes the paradox of healthcare institutions in Kinshasa which, while fulfilling a mission of care, generate major sanitary and environmental risks through the deficient management of their pathogenic residues. Based on qualitative research conducted within emblematic facilities (Makala General Reference Hospital, University Clinics), this study explores the gap between the risk awareness displayed by field agents and the ubiquity of makeshift practices (such as burning with tires and the use of colonial-era pits). Through the lens of Green Criminology, the study demonstrates that this management is not the result of ignorance, but rather of organizational deviance by omission, dictated by a chronic infrastructural impasse. The findings reveal how sanitation technicians neutralize their guilt regarding pollution through a discourse of "non-choice," transforming the hospital into an actor of silent environmental victimization. The article concludes on the necessity of a preventive criminology focused on the reconfiguration of institutional dynamics and the enhancement of human capital. Rather than moving toward ineffective criminal repression, the study pleads for a regularization of environmental health public policies, aiming to restore the hospital's protective mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo.