Using citizen science in environmental justice: participation and decision-making in a Southern California waste facility siting conflict

Uses of science by environmental justice (EJ) activists reflect struggles to challenge professional scientific expertise, achieve fair outcomes, and effectively participate in decision-making processes. This qualitative research analyses the relationship between citizen science and EJ in a new waste facility siting conflict in urban Los Angeles, namely connections between citizen science and four dimensions of EJ: fair distribution, respect and recognition, participation in decision-making, and community capabilities. Citizen science is one tactic in EJ, yet little research investigates its role in a new facility siting conflict, particularly in relation to multi-faceted EJ goals. The research reveals opportunities for individual empowerment and community capacity building using citizen science, and a small measure of improved respect and recognition for participants who brought their own knowledge, research, and voices to the table. At the same time, the work identifies limitations on citizen science to improve local participatory procedures and decision-making, which also constricted the achievement of outcomes most desired by the EJ group: to prevent approval and construction of the new waste facility. This paper argues that uses of citizen science contributed to partial achievement of EJ goals, while hindered by governance processes that call for public participation yet shield decision-makers from substantive engagement with the volume or content of that participation.     

Failing to Site Hazardous Waste Facilities Voluntarily: Implications for the Production of Sustainable Goods

A current approach to the process of siting hazardous waste facilities is to seek 'willing host' communities that will not oppose but rather voluntarily accept risky facilities. Voluntary siting strategies have been put forward as the solution to hazardous waste location problems, and there have indeed been a small number of siting successes achieved voluntarily. This paper argues that, despite claims about voluntary processes, there are indications that few 'willing host' sites will be found in response to the many that are proposed. Instead, it suggests that the limited success of siting attempts, voluntary or otherwise, signals a new phase in hazardous waste management, a shift in focus from where to site a facility to whether a good is worth producing at all if its wastes are not siteable. A characteristic of this phase is the growing influence that the disposal potential of the generated waste can have on future management decisions to produce a good. In practice, siting failure may be one of the critical turning points on the road to sustainable production. It can accomplish what technology and environmental assessments have generally been unable to do: foresee the sustainability of a good. In this way, siteability can be seen as one indicator of sustainable production. A good can be considered sustainable if the wastes associated with its production are siteable.     

An Analytic Network Process approach for siting a municipal solid waste plant in the Metropolitan Area of Valencia (Spain)

In this paper the Analytic Network Process (ANP) is applied to select the best location for the construction of a municipal solid waste (MSW) plant in the Metropolitan area of Valencia (Spain). Selection of the appropriate MSW facility location can be viewed as a complex multicriteria decision-making problem that requires an extensive evaluation process of the potential MSW plant locations and other factors as diverse as economic, technical, legal, social or environmental issues. The decision-making process includes the identification of six candidate MSW plant sites and 21 criteria grouped into clusters for the construction of a network. Two technicians of the Metropolitan Waste Disposal Agency acted as decision makers (DMs).The influences between the elements of the network were identified and analyzed using the ANP multicriteria decision method. Two different ANP models were used: one hierarchy model (that considers AHP as a particular case of ANP) and another network-based model. The results obtained in each model were compared and analyzed. The strengths and weaknesses of ANP as a multicriteria decision analysis tool are also described in the paper. The main findings of this research have proved that ANP is a useful tool to help technicians to make their decision process traceable and reliable. Moreover, this approach helps DMs undertake a sound reflection of the siting problem.     

Canadian Innovations in Siting Hazardous Waste Management Facilities

/ Siting hazardous waste facilities is an extremely complex and difficult endeavor. Public aversion to the construction of these facilities in or near their community often results in concerted opposition, referred to as the NIMBY syndrome. For the most part, siting processes do not fail because of inadequate environmental or technical considerations, but because of the adversarial decision-making strategies employed by the proponents. Innovative siting processes used in the provinces of Alberta and Manitoba offer tangible evidence of the successful application of an innovative siting approach based on the principles of decentralization of decision-making authority and full and meaningful public involvement. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate four Canadian siting processes from the perspective of public participation and access to decision-making authority. Examples of siting processes related to hazardous waste management facilities are provided from the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, British Columbia, and Ontario. Siting has evolved from approaches dominated by top-down decision making to increasing decentralized and pluralistic approaches. Focusing on social and political concerns of potentially affected communities and on the process of decision making itself are fundamental to achieving siting success. In Alberta initially, and later in Manitoba, this new "open approach" to siting has resulted in the construction of the first two comprehensive hazardous waste treatment facilities in Canada.KEY WORDS: Hazardous waste facilities; Siting methodologies; Public participation     

Making or breaking waste facility siting successes with a siting framework

Waste facility siting successes depend on many linked factors of facility design and impacts, site characteristics, and community beliefs and values. A facility siting framework is constructed to combine important elements and cause–effect linkages that affect the siting outcome. The framework consists of three main components: (1) core elements of facility design, effects, and community beliefs, attitude and response; (2) contributing factors of site and community characteristics, community beliefs and values that affect the interpretation of the facility and its effects; and (3) siting management interventions to manage the process and facility impacts. The framework is applied in an unsuccessful and a successful siting case to determine the key elements that contribute to siting outcome: (1) thorough need justification for the facility from the proponent's and the community's perspective; (2) careful facility design and prediction of the impacts and to select impact management compensation measures; (3) screening and selection of communities where the beliefs and values are compatible with the type of facility and its effects, (4) cooperatively selected impact reduction (i.e., prevention, control, and mitigation) measures followed by compensation and incentives; and (5) intensive process management to balance the community characteristics and values with the proponent's efforts to plan, design, assess and manage impacts, and ultimately, gain approval of the facility. The siting framework provides a comprehensive and robust structure of key factors that contribute to siting outcome and, therefore, provides the tool to identify, evaluate, and design siting interventions to enhance the chances of successful siting outcome.     

An analytic network process approach for locating undesirable facilities: an example from Istanbul, Turkey

Locating an undesirable facility is a sophisticated problem, for the evaluation procedures involve several objectives and the solution to the problem calls for some compromises to be made between probable conflicting criteria. This paper addresses the problem of undesirable facility location selection using the analytic network process (ANP), a multi-criteria decision-making technique. The ANP technique enables us to consider both qualitative and quantitative criteria as well as the interdependencies and feedbacks. A number of criteria (benefits, opportunities, costs and risks) and their sub-criteria are considered for siting a new facility with which this study has dealt. The questions of what criteria would be considered and what the interdependencies between these criteria and their weights would be were discussed and determined via interviews with some competent authorities of the Istanbul Municipality and of two environmental organizations. Four representative locations were evaluated and the most convenient one was selected. This was followed by the sensitivity analyses of the results.     

Risk Communication and the Waste-to-energy Incinerator Environmental Impact Assessment Process: A UK Case Study of Public Involvement

With a view to suggesting ways in which we might arrive at a more socially acceptable waste management facility siting process, this paper considers the effectiveness of a more innovative approach to risk communication for a planned municipal waste-to-energy incinerator in Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK. The risk communication programme involved a contact group process designed to enable key members of the local community to participate in structured and informed discussions about the proposal before it was submitted as a planning application to the competent authority. The paper concludes that the communication model was dominated by the findings of technical assessments and that it provided only limited opportunities for interested stakeholders to participate fairly and competently in the development process.     

Historical paths of environmental injustice: a century of placing industrial facilities in Helsinki,Finland

The article explores the historical process of creating unjust environmental conditions in one geographical area in the Finnish capital, Helsinki. The study traces back the decision-making processes about placing environmentally burdensome, communal facilities, such as power plants, waste disposal and other infrastructural facilities. Also the lack of environmental amenities is investigated. The study covers a time period from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the 1980s. The historical analysis of the development of land-use decisions in the city is based on documentary and archival sources about the decision-making processes and it is conducted in the framework of distributive and procedural environmental justice. Four different periods of siting policies are identified. The motives for land-use decisions at each phase reflect geographical, political and historical reasoning. The concept of path dependency is introduced to explain, how environmental injustices were reproduced because of past paths of siting policies locked in subsequent decisions and created a negative twist of accumulating environmental burden.     

Genetically Engineered Animals,Drugs, and Neoliberalism: The Need for a New Biotechnology Regulatory Policy Framework

Genetically engineered (GE) animals that are meant for release in the wild could significantly impact ecosystems given the interwoven or entangled existence of species. Therefore, among other things, it is all too important that regulatory agencies conduct entity appropriate, rigorous risk assessments that can be used for informed decision-making at the local, national and global levels about the release of those animals in the wild. In the United States (US), certain GE animals that are intended for release in the wild may be regulated as new animal drugs by the Food and Drug Administration. This paper argues that the decision to treat them as new animal drugs is attributable to the influence of neoliberalism on the US biotechnology regulatory policy framework. The case is made that there should be public democratic deliberations and decision-making about the values and concerns that should guide the nation’s biotechnology regulatory policy paradigm, including the risk assessment process for GE animals meant for release in the wild.     

Environmental criteria in industrial facility siting decisions: An analysis

Environmental criteria are increasingly being employed in industrial facility siting, usually in multicriteria decision contexts, together with technical, socioeconomic and other considerations. This paper analyzes the criteria that have appeared in the published literature with the aim to offer guidance for their selection in a particular facility location problem. A number of alternative classification schemes are presented, first based on the most prevalent classification dimensions which are: the economy-environment relationship, purpose of the criterion, complexity, spatial and temporal scale, and level of measurement. The major scheme adopted draws from the economy-environment relationship and assigns environmental critera to one of seven categories: general characterizations of the environment, characteristics of individual environmental components, measures of the magnitude and intensity of the activity, measures of the nature and volume of wastes which are produced, characteristics of impacts on separate environmental media and receptors, general characterizations of environmental quality, and impacts on humans. Within each of these categories the criteria are analyzed in terms of the other classification dimensions. Common characteristics among the various criteria as well as future trends in their development are identified. This paper also discusses the most important factors conditioning the choice of criteria in a particular facility siting context and outlines a systematic procedure for their selection in real-world applications.     

Valuing environmental damage remediation and liability using value estimates for ecosystem services

The European Environmental Liability Directive aims to ensure that damaged habitats are restored where possible, but allows for complementary remediation with replacement habitat where restoration is not possible within a reasonable time. It also allows for compensatory remediation of the resource based on an assessment of environmental values in cases where there are interim social losses. This paper concurs with the argument that physical remediation without consideration of social values can fail to be equivalent to the resource that has been lost. Using, as a case study, a river in Ireland, it demonstrates that estimating social value can be challenging in practice, noting also differences between the value of environmental gains and losses. The paper argues that estimates of final ecosystem service values, including wastewater treatment costs, can provide a measure of social value and makes a case for the systematic collection of these data to inform decision-making.     

Management challenges of urban biosolids: narratives around facility siting in rural Ontario

The emerging challenge of managing increasing volumes of urban sewage has resulted in municipalities pursuing sustainable ways to manage urban biosolids and their by-products. Using content analysis of public debates, and situating the debate within science, policy and facility siting literature, this study examines claims and counterclaims relating to the siting of a biosolid processing facility in rural Ontario. The equivocal evidence on the health and environmental effects of biosolids resulted in a heated “expert versus lay” debate. The study critically evaluates the importance of trust and the shifting role of scientific evidence in politicised settings, while making relevant policy recommendations.     

Siting and Routing Assessment for Solid Waste Management Under Uncertainty Using the Grey Mini-Max Regret Criterion

Solid waste management (SWM) is at the forefront of environmental concerns in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV), South Texas. The complexity in SWM drives area decision makers to look for innovative and forward-looking solutions to address various waste management options. In decision analysis, it is not uncommon for decision makers to go by an option that may minimize the maximum regret when some determinant factors are vague, ambiguous, or unclear. This article presents an innovative optimization model using the grey mini-max regret (GMMR) integer programming algorithm to outline an optimal regional coordination of solid waste routing and possible landfill/incinerator construction under an uncertain environment. The LRGV is an ideal location to apply the GMMR model for SWM planning because of its constant urban expansion, dwindling landfill space, and insufficient data availability signifying the planning uncertainty combined with vagueness in decision-making. The results give local decision makers hedged sets of options that consider various forms of systematic and event-based uncertainty. By extending the dimension of decision-making, this may lead to identifying a variety of beneficial solutions with efficient waste routing and facility siting for the time frame of 2005 through 2010 in LRGV. The results show the ability of the GMMR model to open insightful scenario planning that can handle situational and data-driven uncertainty in a way that was previously unavailable. Research findings also indicate that the large capital investment of incineration facilities makes such an option less competitive among municipal options for landfills. It is evident that the investment from a municipal standpoint is out of the question, but possible public–private partnerships may alleviate this obstacle.     

Environmental justice meets the right to stay put: mobilising against environmental racism,gentrification, and xenophobia in Chicago's Little Village

After decades of fighting for clean air and green space in the face of environmental racism and urban disinvestment, Chicago's Latinx Little Village neighbourhood has begun to see environmental improvements take place. Activists are wary of the potential for gentrification in the wake of clean up, and are advocating for the right to stay put in the community they have worked so hard to improve. These ongoing contestations have recently intersected with accelerating racialized state violence as renewed anti-immigrant and white supremacist rhetoric, policies, and actions have targeted Latinx communities. In this paper we ask, how do struggles against environmental racism, gentrification, and xenophobia interlock, and how does the framework of environmental justice serve to enable activism across all three sites? For racialized minority communities, repeated experiences of forced migration and displacement often mean that an anti-displacement ethos is particularly well-articulated and grounded in collective historical memory. Drawing on an extensive analysis of media materials complemented by archival research, fieldwork, and interviews with community organisers, this paper argues that tight linkages between environmental justice and anti-displacement principles inform community responses to multiple forms of structural racialized violence.     

A comparative analysis of the psychosocial impacts of waste disposal facilities

This paper reports the results of a comparative analysis of the psychosocial impacts of municipal solid waste disposal facilities (both landfills and incinerators) in six communities in the provinces of Ontario and British Columbia, Canada. Telephone surveys were administered to random samples of residents living around each facility between 1990 and 1995 (total n=1203). The results of logistic regression analyses show that type of facility was the strongest predictor of residents' awareness, concern, and actions taken in response to site concerns. Essentially, residents living in close proximity to a landfill had a higher probability of reporting awareness, concern or actions than residents living around an incinerator site. There was little evidence of differences in reactions between Ontario and British Columbia (BC) residents, despite variations in provincial policies on waste disposal. The effects of other predictors, with the exception of involvement in the local community, were not consistent, supporting previous findings that the determinants of facility impacts are outcome‐specific. It is essential that environmental managers take this constellation of factors into account in the operation of existing, or siting of new, facilities.     

Host community attitudes towards solid waste landfill infrastructure: comprehension before compensation

One of the most controversial planning issues internationally is the siting of waste disposal infrastructure in local communities. Compensation is viewed as a possible solution to siting difficulties in many countries. However, existing empirical evidence is conflicting as to whether or not compensation-based siting has reduced opposition to such developments. Thus, before compensation policy can be considered as the solution for recognising social costs and introducing equity into the waste planning system, it is important to understand why people reject waste disposal infrastructure developments and if this rejection continues over the lifetime of facility operations. This paper utilises information gathered through surveys to examine the effects of distance, local authority consultation efforts, experience and other factors, on attitudes towards non-hazardous solid waste landfill developments in two examples of a potential and actual host communities. Our findings suggest distance proxies expectations of environmental risk in communities with no experience of living with landfill infrastructure. Community consultations by authorities are consistently important, even after a landfill has been in operation for a number of years. This suggests to policy makers to consult thoroughly and adequately before pursuing compensation policies.     

Beyond self‐interest: a model of public attitudes towards waste facility siting

This study examines the attitudinal and demographic determinants of public preferences towards siting solid waste disposal facilities in the United States. Survey data is collected from a random sample of 400 individuals selected from the population of the State of Connecticut. A logit statistical model of public preferences towards siting is created. The results are consistent with previous research indicating the importance of variables reflective of self‐interest motivations, such as perceptions of costs and benefits, in influencing attitudes. However, it is also revealed that more longstanding values, in addition to narrowly defined personal costs and benefits, influence siting preferences. These include widely‐shared norms concerning need for the facility and the appropriate sphere of government influence. Effective, efficient and equitable siting policy must consider and respond to these additional public motivations.     

Use of strategic environmental assessment in the site selection process for a radioactive waste disposal facility in Slovenia

The benefits of strategic environmental considerations in the process of siting a repository for low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste (LILW) are presented. The benefits have been explored by analyzing differences between the two site selection processes. One is a so-called official site selection process, which is implemented by the Agency for radwaste management (ARAO); the other is an optimization process suggested by experts working in the area of environmental impact assessment (EIA) and land-use (spatial) planning. The criteria on which the comparison of the results of the two site selection processes has been based are spatial organization, environmental impact, safety in terms of potential exposure of the population to radioactivity released from the repository, and feasibility of the repository from the technical, financial/economic and social point of view (the latter relates to consent by the local community for siting the repository). The site selection processes have been compared with the support of the decision expert system named DEX. The results of the comparison indicate that the sites selected by ARAO meet fewer suitability criteria than those identified by applying strategic environmental considerations in the framework of the optimization process. This result stands when taking into account spatial, environmental, safety and technical feasibility points of view. Acceptability of a site by a local community could not have been tested, since the formal site selection process has not yet been concluded; this remains as an uncertain and open point of the comparison.     

Learning in participatory environmental governance – its antecedents and effects. Findings from a case survey meta-analysis

ABSTRACT

Theory on participatory and collaborative governance maintains that learning is essential to achieve good environmental outcomes. Empirical research has mostly produced individual case studies, and reliable evidence on both antecedents and environmental outcomes of learning remains sparse. Given conceptual ambiguities in the literature, we define governance-related learning in a threefold way: learning as deliberation; as knowledge- and capacity-building; and as informing environmental outputs. We develop nine propositions that explain learning through factors characterizing governance process and context, and three propositions explaining environmental outcomes of learning. We test these propositions drawing on the ‘SCAPE’ database of 307 published case studies of environmental decision-making, using multiple regression models. Results show that learning in all three modes is explained to some extent by a combination of process- and context-related factors. Most factors matter for learning, but with stark differences across the three modes of learning, thus demonstrating the relevance of this differentiated approach. Learning modes build on one another: Deliberation is seen to explain both capacity building and informed outputs, while informed outputs are also explained by capacity building. Contrary to our expectations, none of the learning variables was found to significantly affect environmental outcomes when considered alongside the process- and context-related variables.     

Environmental Racialization: Linking Racialization to the Environment in Canada

This paper introduces the concept of environmental racialization to account for how race is socially and spatially organized in large Canadian cities. Drawing on a theoretical analysis of the notion of intentionality as conceived in environmental justice literature, the argument is made that claims of environmental racism must include direct a connection between agent's subjective racist intent and the powerful racist outcomes. In contrast, environmental racialization recognizes that agents' intentional actions can result in unpurposeful racist outcomes, even if these outcomes are systemic. The case study of the community of Mid-Scarborough in Toronto illustrates the relevance of the concept of environment racialization.