One of the most vexing problems for governments is building controversial facilities that serve the needs of all citizens but have adverse consequences for host communities. Policymakers must decide not only where to locate often unwanted projects but also what methods to use when interacting with opposition groups. In Site Fights, Daniel P. Aldrich gathers quantitative evidence from close to five hundred municipalities across Japan to show that planners deliberately seek out acquiescent and unorganized communities for such facilities in order to minimize conflict. When protests arise over nuclear power plants, dams, and airports, agencies regularly rely on the coercive powers of the modern state, such as land expropriation and police repression. Only under pressure from civil society do policymakers move toward financial incentives and public relations campaigns. Through fieldwork and interviews with bureaucrats and activists, Aldrich illustrates these dynamics with case studies from Japan, France, and the United States. The incidents highlighted in Site Fights stress the importance of developing engaged civil society even in the absence of crisis, thereby making communities both less attractive to planners of controversial projects and more effective at resisting future threats.
Daniel P. Aldrich is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Purdue University.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Site Fights and Policy Tools 1 Picking Sites 2 A Logic of Tool Choice 3 Occasional Turbulence: Airport Siting in Japan and France 4 Dam the Rivers: Siting Water Projects in Japan and France 5 Trying to Change Hearts and Minds: Japanese Nuclear Power Plant Siting 6 David versus Goliath: French Nuclear Power Plant Siting Conclusion: Areas for Future Investigation
What People are Saying About This
Barry G. Rabe
"Daniel P. Aldrich provides a fresh look at a familiar and enduring arena of political stalemate. His comparative approach cuts across multiple siting venues and offers important insights that can serve to guide contentious land use decisions."
Wesley Sasaki-Uemura
"In Site Fights, Daniel P. Aldrich looks at frictions between state bureaucracies and elements of civil society and posits a model for their interactions and mutual influences over time. He argues that states worry primarily about the strength of civil society in the areas they target for their projects. Therefore, civil societies play a crucial role in the development of a country and its democracy."
Hayden Lesbirel
"Daniel P. Aldrich has produced a fascinating book that investigates how states approach the siting of public nasties comparatively. Integrating the social capital and facility siting literatures, it qualifies the dominant paradigm that states seek to develop controversial projects through open, noncoercive, and participatory strategies. Site Fights will generate a lively scholarly and policy debate about the relationship between the state and civil society in the management of contentious siting politics."
Ezra Suleiman
Daniel P. Aldrich has written an important book that analyzes the ways in which national bureaucracies interact with anti-project social movements. He explains with impressive empirical evidence why in highly charged policy areas governments sometimes use coercion, whereas in other cases they adopt softer policy instruments.
