Using NIMBY rhetoric as a political resource to negotiate responses to local energy infrastructure: a power line case study

ABSTRACT

Research has shown how the NIMBY explanation for local opposition to energy infrastructures has made its way into the discourses of developers, policy makers, the media and active protesters. However, few studies have explored how community members draw on discourses of NIMBYism to interpret and negotiate responses to local energy proposals. We address this gap drawing on qualitative data from two UK case studies. Analyses show that NIMBY, as a representation of objection, is both widespread and polysemic. Aside from providing a means to talk about space, NIMBY is sometimes rejected by discourses positioning publics as custodians of valued landscapes. In other instances, it is assumed to be a normative and legitimate way for participants to decide what is best for them in a neo-liberal society. The findings reinforce the importance of examining socio-cultural dimensions of social acceptance, specifically representations of community responses to infrastructures as political devices in local siting disputes, and publics as reflexive actors.

KEYWORDS:

• NIMBY
• socio-cultural dimensions
• everyday re(-)presentation
• “regular” community members
• power lines

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Research Council of Norway (SusGrid – Grant No. 207774). The writing up of this paper was supported by a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship to the first author, funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation (Grant no. SFRH/BPD/96061/2013).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Susana Batel http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6586-6716

Notes

1 This refers to the number of times that NIMBY and associated concepts were used across all the focus groups, by the same or different participants.

2 These notations refer to: CS1=Case Study 1 (Hinkley Point C connection); CS2=Case Study 2 (Mid Wales connection); FG=Focus Group 1, 2, 2a, 2b, 3, 4, 5a, or 5c (as described in the Method).

3 This extract could also be alternatively interpreted as the participant wanting to emphasize, in more of an ironic way, that this issue is so obvious that even a person who is not very clever and well-educated should understand it. However, and taking into account how this was uttered by the participant at stake and his/her interventions in the remainder of the focus group - even following the moderator’s further discussions of this issue -, the interpretations provided in the main text seem to be the most adequate ones.

4 With this we do not aim to imply that responses to RET are only rational - they are also emotional/affective and symbolic – and that even when they are only rational, this rationality is based on an economic cost-benefit ratio only – it might also be based on identity politics and on psycho-social, experiential, dimensions (Lertzman 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Research Council of Norway (SusGrid – grant number 207774). The writing up of this paper was supported by a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship to the first author, funded by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (grant number SFRH/BPD/96061/2013).Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. Norges Forskningsråd.