Rethinking NIMBYism: The role of place attachment and place identity in explaining place‐protective action

Abstract

The 'NIMBY' (Not In My Back Yard) concept is commonly used to explain public opposition to new developments near homes and communities, particularly arising from energy technologies such as wind farms or electricity pylons. Despite its common use, the concept has been extensively critiqued by social scientists as a useful concept for research and practice. Given European policy goals to increase sustainable energy supply by 2020, deepening understanding of local opposition is of both conceptual and practical importance. This paper reviews NIMBY literature and proposes an alternative framework to explain local opposition, drawing upon social and environmental psychological theory on place. Local opposition is conceived as a form of place-protective action, which arises when new developments disrupt pre-existing emotional attachments and threaten place-related identity processes. Adopting a social constructivist perspective and drawing on social representation theory, a framework of place change is proposed encompassing stages of becoming aware, interpreting, evaluating, coping and acting, with each stage conceived at multiple levels of analysis, from intrapersonal to socio-cultural. Directions for future research and potential implications of the place-based approach for public engagement by energy policy-makers and practitioners are discussed.

The contribution of sense of place to social-ecological systems research: a review and research agenda

“…Attachment is based on meanings: We become attached to a landscape as embodying a certain set of meanings, and it is those meanings we seek to preserve (Stedman 2003a, Devine-Wright 2009. Place meanings and attachment are thus analytically distinct: people who are all strongly attached to a place are not necessarily attached to the same thing because one setting can embody many different sets of meanings, each emphasized by different actors.…”

“…Sense of place has been shown to be a powerful predictor of attitudes toward potential changes and behavioral intentions, both reactive and proactive (Bonaiuto et al 2002, Devine-Wright 2009. A great deal of the sense of place literature implicitly assumes (or explicitly asserts) that greater place attachment leads to pro-environmental behavior.…”

When is enough, enough? Identifying predictors of capacity estimates for onshore wind-power development in a region of the UK

“…When considered in these more general terms, and if conceptualising resistance to proposed development as a form of place-protective action fuelled by anticipated threat to the local physical and/or social environment (see Devine-Wright, 2009; see also Twigger- Ross and Uzzell, 1996;Twigger-Ross et al, 2003), it is perhaps easy to see why community attachment was retained as a predictor within this study.…”

Contending Expertise: An Interpretive Approach to (Re)conceiving Wind Power's ‘Planning Problem’

“…Despite criticism of this view (Owens, et al, 2004), the generation of such information in planning practice remains inured to linear-rational models of knowledge production that a e assu ed to p o ide the fa ts of a situatio y virtue of their internal merits (Adelle, et al, 2012). This disregards the variety of ways in which the world is interpreted and knowledge claims about reality are produced (Devine-Wright, 2009;Rydin, 2007). Consequently, efforts to identify, understand and solve the pla i g p o le of i d po e may be handicapped by a blinkered epistemological commitment to an inherited bias in modes of knowledge generation.…”

“…For advocates of wind energy development, this provokes an unnecessary obstacle course of planning processes that must be negotiated in proposing new windfarms (Hadwin, 2009). For those opposed to such developments, planning is seen at best as an uncomfortable ally in helping them articulate objections (Cowell, 2007), and more commonly as an arena where unfair accusations of NIMBYism proliferate (Devine-Wright, 2009;van der Horst, 2007;Wolsink, 2012).…”