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

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.