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

Maarten Wolsink and Jeroen Devilee

Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 2009, vol. 52, issue 2, 217-236

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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09640560802666552 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jenpmg:v:52:y:2009:i:2:p:217-236

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CJEP20

DOI: 10.1080/09640560802666552

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Environmental Planning and Management is currently edited by Dr Neil Powe, Dr Ken Willis and George Bill Page

More articles in Journal of Environmental Planning and Management from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().