Information Dissemination and Control of NIMBY Projects under Stigmatization

Abstract

NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) projects are easily stigmatized due to their environmental risk. Stigmatization enlarges residents’ risk perception, urges residents to spread information, and takes actions to resist project implementation, causing environmental mass emergency. Taking paraxylene (PX) project as an example, information dissemination model of NIMBY project under stigmatization based on SEIR model in small world network was established, and the information dissemination process and characteristics of NIMBY project under stigmatization were simulated and analysed. The results show that (1) the public risk perception deviation caused by stigmatization promotes residents to disseminate information; (2) stigmatization has a greater impact on the information dissemination of NIMBY project with low environmental risk; (3) stigmatization accelerates the speed of information dissemination and increases the number of residents participating in information dissemination in different dissemination environment. The contribution of this paper is that SEIR model in small world network is used to verify the role of stigmatization in promoting information dissemination of NIMBY project by comparing the information dissemination before and after stigmatization.