Along with much of the rest of the world's waste after the 1970s, waste in the West Bank came to be managed within a new rubric: “environmental protection.” In the mid-1990s, the responsibility for managing Palestinian waste in the West Bank was “transferred” to the bureaucrats, experts and engineers of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Since then, they have been managing internationally funded, multimillion dollar sanitation projects to mitigate what is frequently called the “environmental catastrophe” they inherited from three decades of military occupation. In their work constructing landfills, sewage networks and treatment plants for the would-be state, these bureaucrats encountered new forms of involvement by international donor representatives, foreign consultants and Israelis of various professions—all professing concern about waste’s effects on a “shared environment.” As a result, the sense among PA waste managers that their work was subject to “international standards” was palpable daily. The experience was one of being overheard, overseen and evaluated for performance in two fields: “state readiness” and “environmental awareness”. It has been argued that technical standards are “important because they help to standardize the subjects of measurement—enabling engineers and technocrats to trust each other’s numbers not on the basis of any direct personal relationship, but simply owing to the existence of recognized standards laboratories and the discipline of well-defined measurement procedures” (Barry 1993: 464). However, in post-Oslo Palestine, where much—including the environment—is assumed held hostage to politics, technical trust is often subject to proof of the standards’ “sincerity.” That is, their non-political character. Thus, a distinction emerged between implementation of international standards in the form of a wastewater treatment plant, for example, and the sincere “environmental awareness” with which they were implemented. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the West Bank and Israel, this paper examines some of the forms of speech and comportment elicited by this experience of being “overheard.” It explores the possibility for comparison between the dynamics of proving sincere environmentalist thinking and those of proving sincere religious conversion in colonial mission encounters (e.g. Keane 2007).