NIMBY opposition and solid waste incinerator siting in democratizing Taiwan

Abstract

To address Taiwan's waste crisis, the Taiwanese government has embraced incinerators as a major policy instrument for waste disposal. Although the adoption of waste burning policy was not debated much, the siting of incinerators has been vigorously opposed by community-based protest movements, emerged with Taiwan's transition to democracy. In response, both the Kuomintang (KMT) government and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government have used compensation to induce the acceptance of local hosting communities as in other countries. Nevertheless, the use of compensation has never been effective in resolving not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) conflict without mobilizing local political and government support to suppress NIMBY protests in order to enforce the timely construction of needed incinerators. To accommodate the rising democratic expectation of public participation in deliberations over the incineration waste policy, this article also argues that the role of citizen participation must be addressed to increase public support for incinerator option in managing Taiwan's waste.