Synthesis of stakeholder perspectives in siting controversies

Abstract

Stakeholder resistance to the siting of noxious facilities - referred to as LULUs ("locally undesirable land uses") by Popper (1981) - has received frequent attention by researchers since at least 1977 when Michael O'Hare published an article entitled "Not On My Block, You Don't." Since then, this seemingly intractable local pattern of resistance to LULU siting has been referred to, often derisively, as the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard} syndrome. This paper concerns only locational conflicts involving hazardous chemical wastes.

Not all hazardous waste facility locational controversies involve siting proposals, however. For example, Focht (1989) reported a study of stakeholder LULU conflict about the need for and proper means of remediating contamination from an existing facility. He found dynamics similar to those found in siting conflicts. As an analogue to NIMBY, Focht proposed the acronym, TIMBY, for "Threats In My Back Yard," to distinguish remediation from siting controversies.

This paper presents a synthesis of stakeholder perspectives identified in 15 previous studies. This synthesis produces three "ideal types" that seem to dominate these studies. These ideal types are hypothesized to represent the expected views of stakeholders in all locational controversies.