The motives for accepting or rejecting waste infrastructure facilities. Shifting the focus from the planners' perspective to fairness and community commitment

Abstract

In environmental planning, decision making on land use for infrastructure increasingly causes conflicts, particularly with regard to contested waste facilities. Risk management and perceptions have become crucial. Empirical investigations of these conflicts brought clear advancement in the fields of environmental psychology, geography and risk research. However, in planning and policy design the dominant one-dimensional approach among planners remains, and the approach to address resistance to facility siting is not firmly founded in empirical evidence. Instead, it uses simplified assumptions about the motives of opponents, seeing residents as merely protecting their ‘turf’ and exclusively focusing on their own ‘backyard’. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study on risk perceptions, based on a large-scale survey in six decision-making processes for different types of waste facilities. A scale is developed to measure the planners' perspective of the motives for opposition. The analysis shows that the crucial factors in perceived risk perceptions are not personality traits (e.g. selfishness, economic rationality) but perceived environmental injustice, fairness of the process, and personal commitment to others. Continual thinking in terms of ‘backyard’ motives disregards the socially motivated norms for equity, fairness, and commitment to others and may easily undermine co-operative behaviour.

Keywords:

• risk perceptions
• waste infrastructure
• NIMBY (‘not-in-my-back-yard’) scale
• community commitment
• equity
• procedural fairness

Acknowledgement

This research was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The authors would like to thank two reviewers for their suggestions and constructive comments.

Notes

1. Christian Science Monitor, 4 November 1980, ‘Hazardous waste’. This apparently first documented use of the term ‘NIMBY’ already refers to name-calling by the waste industry.

2. Because the imputation should not affect the differences between the sub-samples, missing data were replaced by corrected item means (CIM), in which a missing value on an item is imputed by the sub-sample mean corrected for the other scores of the respondent on the same scale (Huisman 2000). This leaves structural differences between sub-samples intact. The reliability of all scales was tested before the imputation.