The popular slogan NIMBY—Not in My Back Yard—captures a classic dilemma that confronts policymakers: Although society as a whole requires certain basic public goods, such as energy supplies, improved infrastructure, and transportation hubs, individual communities are often unwilling to bear the localized costs and externalities of hosting these installations. In this fresh, insightful, and creative study, Daniel Aldrich explores the ways in which states decide to site controversial facilities and the types of instruments that public agencies employ to respond to societal opposition against these siting decisions.
Aldrich uses the term “public bads” to refer to the publicly necessary, but locally unpopular, need to establish installations to accommodate the growing demand for “energy, national defense, waste removal, transportation and correctional facilities” (p. 6). He notes that over the last few decades, the time required to build politically controversial facilities, such as nuclear power plants or liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, has increased markedly in the United States, Japan, and other advanced industrialized countries. Facility siting has become a highly charged political issue.
How, then, do states strategize about where to place these necessary public bads? The book's basic argument is that from a list of potentially technically feasible options, state agencies target locations that exhibit weaker civil society and community networks, while they avoid areas where stronger local community organizations might generate more vocal and sustained political opposition. Further, Aldrich argues that states have a distinct set of preferences about which policy instruments to use when placing divisive sites: When civil society is weak, states rely simply on coercive methods such as land expropriation and police action, whereas when civil society is stronger, states must formulate “soft control mechanisms” to co-opt or persuade anti-project associations and civil society networks by means of educational campaigns, selective incentives, or side payments. In-between cases of “moderate levels of civil society” necessitate instruments of “hard social control” designed to block citizen access, information, and mobilization. Thus, the process by which states employ one set of instruments over another is dynamic and remains contingent on the changing nature of civil society and its oppositional campaigns. States that previously relied on coercion when civil society was weak will adopt a new set of soft power strategies when confronted with reinvigorated community opposition.
To support his arguments, Aldrich draws upon a bundle of evidence gathered from extensive fieldwork in Japan and supplementary research in France. Japan is a particularly compelling case given its high population density, land scarcity, powerful state bureaucracies, and variety of citizens' associations and movements. The author skillfully blends insights from media accounts, interviews with state agencies and civil society members, and primary sources such as facilities listings. He constructs an original data set of more than five hundred siting decisions in Japan from 1955 to 1995 and finds strong support for the civil society hypothesis in the case of siting decisions that involved nuclear power plants and airports, though not dams. Instructively, he carefully outlines and rejects a number of competing explanations, showing that the strength of civil society is a better predictor for siting decisions than explanations that privilege purely technical criteria, partisan discrimination, environmental racism, economic conditions, and pork-barrel politics.
Though straightforward in its logic, the argument yields interesting and even counterintuitive findings and extensions. For example, areas experiencing rapid population growth, thereby breaking down their traditional community associations, make inviting targets for hosting controversial facilities. States routinely impose hidden utility or airport taxes in order to retain a funding pool from which to distribute incentives for future site fights. Even strong states routinely conduct citizens' surveys to determine levels of potential opposition prior to making siting decisions. And the exercise of holding public meetings and consultations with community organizations is more often than not an attempt by states to assess future targets for soft power strategies, not a genuine attempt at fostering open and transparent state–society dialogue. Viewed through the prism of state bureaucracies, the Machiavellian strategic logic of a broad range of state interactions with community representatives is revealed.
Chapters that compare and contrast the evolution of siting decisions about airports, dams, and nuclear power plants in Japan and France supplement Aldrich's statistical study of siting decisions in Japan. The chapter on airports recounts the now-famous case of the construction of Narita Airport outside of Tokyo and the intense and even violent opposition that it engendered among local activists and their political allies, though the author goes to some lengths to point out that this was an exceptional case. In fact, the case itself seemingly taught the Japanese government to site future airports on offshore landfills when possible in order to avoid local communities altogether.
Of the case narratives, the chapters on nuclear power are particularly revealing, as they show that the cultural attitudes of Japan and France toward nuclear power seem less important for nuclear policy than the presence or absence of an organized civil society. Despite Japan's strong antinuclear culture, conditioned by its World War II experience, the lack of organized civil society allowed the Japanese government to construct a number of nuclear power facilities in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, nuclear plant construction became more contentious and necessitated the adoption of an elaborate system of incentives in order to secure nuclear sites and co-opt local mayors and communities. In France, by contrast, the fairly consistent lack of oppositional movements to nuclear power, with the exceptional period of the late 1970s, has allowed the French government to rely on basic coercive techniques in order to secure nuclear sites and maintain fairly strong public opinion in favor of nuclear power.
The book's clear argument and unabashed focus on the state's instrumental logics may draw responses from scholars who prefer to focus, either for theoretical or normative reasons, on the importance of civil society and its evolution, rather than on the state. First, historical institutionalists and/or ideational scholars would observe that the very category of “public bads” is itself dynamic and subject to contestation and redefinition. Thus, the policy stability and overall perceptions of public bads, such as nuclear power in the United States, can change in a rapid and punctuated fashion as a result of concerted advocacy campaigns and the dissemination of new information (Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, 1993, Agendas and Instability in American Politics). Accordingly, the successful efforts by civil society over the last two decades to block public bads, convincingly documented by Aldrich, may owe less to the capacity and strength of any single community to act as a veto point for a siting decision and more to the fact that agenda setters and their allies in civil society have successfully recast entire categories of facilities as normatively unacceptable.
Second, scholars of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) may point to the recent advances that have more broadly improved the networking capacity of civil society. Technological innovations, such as the spread of the Internet and cell phones, have allowed for more rapid responses and effective networking of like-minded activists. Even very small organizations can now rapidly mount highly effective advocacy campaigns in response to new proposals made by states or companies by nationalizing their local campaigns and tapping into existing movements and public efforts. Moreover, during the last decade, a significant increase in the global networking of NGOs has allowed activist movements working on similar public bads across different national settings to exchange campaign tactics, information, and media strategies. The rapid growth of a global set of networked anti-base movements is certainly a case in point.
Comparativists may also wonder about how far the lessons learned from Japan and France transfer to an explanation of patterns of state–society interactions in cases with differing state structures and ethnic compositions. The Japanese case is compelling in terms of the strategic nature of its bureaucracies and their extensive policy toolkits. But not all states have the capacity, functional differentiation, or even resources to target potential siting communities with the laser-like precision of the Japanese state. For example, does a more decentralized and uncoordinated state, such as Korea, have the capacity to formulate and provide the same array of incentives to its public-bads hosts?
In addition, the homogeneity of Japan and France might make them less instructive for testing the competing “environmental racism” hypothesis than states where siting decisions map onto ethnic divisions and cleavages, or at least where they might be framed that way by opposition elites and ethnic entrepreneurs. For example, in the late 1970s, Basque separatists targeted the construction of a nuclear plant at Lemoniz, near the city of Bilbao, as a central symbol of their political campaign against the Spanish state, while recently, the Scottish National Party has made great political hay out of a “no new nuclear power” pledge for Scotland. How would ethnic politics and devolution potentially affect the center's calculations about siting or community responses? And while Aldrich finds no basis for environmental racism on Okinawa in the areas of nuclear power, dams, and airports, Okinawan activists insist that Tokyo unfairly discriminates against the island prefecture by foisting on it 75% of all U.S. military installations on the territory of Japan.
From a policy perspective, Aldrich's argument and approach is a timely guide for understanding a wide range of current site fights. From the ongoing high-profile struggle to construct a third runway at London's Heathrow Airport to New York State's recent rejection of a new LNG terminal on Long Island Sound, his approach illuminates the political calculations, responses, and state–society interactions that will continue to inform fights over divisive facilities. Indeed, if Aldrich's argument holds, the current attempt by policymakers in Brussels and Washington to generate a new urgency for improving “energy security” by boosting local supplies will prove difficult to implement unless these calls are accompanied by a new set of incentives to convince future siting areas to accept new nuclear plants, LNG terminals, and/or renewed oil drilling. this book suggests that these ensuing local political challenges will be enormous, if not prohibitive.
Site Fights sets an important research agenda in the comparative study of the politics of divisive installations. It will be required reading for scholars of civil society, environmental politics, public administration, and comparative regulatory policy, as well as for policymakers seeking to better understand the underlying political dynamics that surround contentious land use.
