Abstract
NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) refers to an oppositional attitude from local residents against some risk generating facility that they have been chosen to host either by government or industry. The attitude is claimed to be characteristic of someone who is positive to a facility but who wants someone else to be its host. Since siting cannot be provided if everyone has this attitude, society ends up in a worse situation. The attitude is claimed to be egoistic and irrational. Here it is argued that the NIMBY critique rests on questionable assumptions about the rightness of weighing total benefit against total cost. This weighing-principle will sometimes have to yield so that the rights of individuals can be acknowledged.
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Notes
Rabe has described the situation in Canada and the United States where the opposition against siting hazardous waste has led to a situation where: “virtually no new hazardous waste treatment or disposal facilities have been opened in either nation since the mid-1980s” (Rabe 1994, p. 2). Wolsink (1994) has described a similar situation in the Netherlands. See also Easterling and Kunreuther (1995).
Even though the NIMBY attitude is mostly negatively conceived in the risk literature, it has defenders, who criticize the risk imposers’ characterization of the opposing locals as irrational and egoistic. Some claim that the NIMBY attitude is a good that comes with democracy. Others argue that the concept is too simplistic since it disregards that there are a variety of different motives behind resisting a facility (cf. Lober 1996; Sjöberg and Drottz-Sjöberg 2001; Wolsink 1994). The assertion that the facility to be sited is perceived as a public good by the opposing locals has also been questioned. On the contrary, it has been argued that the local residents in question are not positive to the facility or technology in general and that the opposition should more correctly be described as NIABY, i.e., “Not In Any Backyard” (Wolsink 1994, p. 857). Moreover, the industry’s expectations of and belief in the NIMBY phenomenon is blamed for reinforcing itself; expectations that the public reason irrationally and egoistically will make the risk imposers want to keep information secret until it is too late to oppose any plans. This secrecy is claimed to strengthen a suspicion among the residents of a chosen community that the risk imposers cannot be trusted, a suspicion that can trigger the NIMBY phenomenon (see e.g., Rabe 1994; Wolsink 1994).
Some of the problems that risk managers face have been explained by the distinction between the objective and the subjective risk. The objective risk is the value one gets from multiplying the (estimated) probability of a negative event with a measure of the size of its damage. The notion of the subjective risk refers to how an individual or group of people perceives a risk. Critics claim that since the public are ignorant of probability estimates, and often react emotionally, the subjective risk will differ from the objective one, and consequently, decisions are taken on false grounds.
C.f. Gillroy who argues that from the perspective of the policy analyst the NIMBY phenomenon is characterized as a Prisoner’s Dilemma: “the prospective ‘hosts’ of a facility will be looking to maximize their personal welfare within a preference schedule that would rather have use of the good without it being sited near them; the idea being to ‘free-ride’ on the cooperation of whatever ‘others’ get stuck with the site” (Gillroy 1991, p. 324).
As described above, the NIMBY concept has been questioned in several respects, one of them being whether the NIMBY is in fact as positive to placing the facility elsewhere as is usually claimed. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that not many people are in fact NIMBYs in the ‘true’ sense of the word. According to some authors NIMBY is just a word of abuse See e.g., Sjöberg and Drottz-Sjöberg (2001) and Wolsink (1994).
Naturally one can imagine that under certain circumstances a person exercising her right not to do X would be considered selfish and immoral. I will not here try to delineate what these circumstances are. However, obvious cases should be when doing X does not imply any apparent sacrifices, or only a reasonable sacrifice, for the person doing it. It seems, however, difficult to set criteria in advance for what such a reasonable sacrifice is, especially concerning social policy decisions.
Some may feel reluctant to think of the body as property since this might open up for persons as commodities that can be sold or traded on a market. I will not try to settle the issue here of whether or not I own my body. However, the kind of ownership I have over my body seems to differ from the ownership I have over external material goods. One such crucial difference that has been emphasized is that I am allowed to sell objects that I own, such as my books, if I want to but I am not allowed to sell myself (my body) (Björkman and Hansson, in press). For a defence of the body as property see Thomson (1990) who claims that whereas my body is my first property, other external material goods are my second property (p. 225f.). Andrews argues from the context of medical research and patients’ rights to receive compensation that people should “not [...] be treated by others as property, but [...] [should] have the autonomy to treat their own [body] parts as property, particularly their regenerative parts” (Andrews 1986, p. 37). For Munzer “some body rights are property rights” while the other body rights are personal rights (Munzer 1990, p. 47).
In what has been called the ‘Decide-Announce-Defend’ model the developer makes the decision about a preferred site without interacting with local residents, announces this decision and “If he mentions alternatives, they often seem factitious. He appears to approach the public with a single firm decision camouflaged behind impossible alternatives. His strong position sets the stage for conflict” (O’Hare et al. 1983, p. 7).
In an earlier article (Hermansson 2005), I have argued that a model of procedural justice for risk decisions has to be developed in order to combine the need to accept certain risks and to respect the rights of the risk exposed. The idea is that policies that comply with such a model would treat individuals with equal respect and concern, avoiding unfair risk exposure.
One such difficulty with compensation is to decide of what kind it should be. Money is only one type and it will work in some situations but not in others. If resistance against some risky facility is principled, money offers may be perceived as a bribe or a sell-out. In that case compensation could, as Michael O’Hare et al. has suggested, instead be “in-kind”: “if a project is built on land used for hunting or picnics, the developer might acquire other land and develop it for outdoor recreation to balance the loss” (O’Hare et al. 1983:72). In such cases, compensation in-kind can replace what will be damaged with something similar.
One example can be local residents who oppose the building of refugee camps, or nursing homes for mentally handicapped or mentally retarded in their community. I am not defending such discriminative NIMBYs. Although one can imagine that there could be situations when it is difficult to discern between a “good” NIMBY and a “bad” NIMBY, I believe this will become apparent from the dialogic procedure that I have argued should precede siting decisions (Hermansson 2005).
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Hermansson, H. The Ethics of NIMBY Conflicts. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 10, 23–34 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-006-9038-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-006-9038-2