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2 Facility Siting: The Theory-Practice Nexus S. Hayden Lesbirel INTRODUCTION Being a siting practitioner is not an easy task . The siting and development of a range of projects, such as waste repositories , prisons, energy facilities, airports, and industrial projects have and continue to be a lightning rod for social and political conflict in all nations . States and firms may need to develop such projects to provide a range of social and economic benefits for the national community . Yet, while local community interests may agree with the broader social need for these projects, they often oppose them vigorously as they perceive them as imposing significant costs, such as environmental degradation, unacceptable levels of risk, and disruptions to social relationships, on their communities . These responses often create considerable conflict and can delay or even cause abandonment of facility plans . Siting is clearly a case of contentious politics that can impose significant costs on stakeholders . Siting is a significant policy issue that impacts the achievement of state, corporate, and community objectives . Disputes have been costly for states, particularly where projects are needed for national technological , economic, and security objectives . Conflicts have often been costly for developers and include increased uncertainty over capital cost escalations due to inflation and interest repayment burdens . They have also been costly for communities as they have, for example, altered existing social and political relationships and levels of social capital within those communities . Such outcomes might be beneficial, since the grounds for opposition might be well based, but they may be, in other cases, socially undesirable since failure to site such facilities might carry opportunity costs that are felt by other communities . Facility_final2207.indd 7 22/07/2011 5:32 PM 8 | Facility Siting in the Asia-Pacific Practitioners confront a complex range of information, much of which is incomplete and ambiguous when contemplating facilities siting . They may have incomplete information about the magnitude of changing societal needs for projects they are planning . They may not be clear about the character of the stakeholders with whom they will need to negotiate in order to win agreement for the project siting . They are more than likely to be uncertain about the preferences and underlying motivations of these stakeholders and how they will respond to siting processes . They may have conflicting information about which strategies and policy tools might work and which ones might not . Furthermore, in many cases, as the stakes involved in these conflicts are large, such as with capital expenditures, getting any of these things wrong can be extremely costly for stakeholders . Reflecting the increasing importance attached to siting as a social and policy problem, there has been a growing literature on the production of knowledge about the origins and management of conflict in the development of unwanted projects . Over the last thirty years or so, social scientists, including economists, geographers, historians, political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists, have developed a range of theoretical explanations that seek to account for recurring patterns of behaviour and discourse in siting controversies over time and across space . They have offered diverse explanations of siting processes, issues, and outcomes using a wide range of political, economic, demographic, and technological variables . They have used various competing theoretical and methodological approaches in seeking to explain and interpret siting controversies . While the field is relatively new, it has developed into a rich multidisciplinary field of inquiry . Contemporaneously, there has been a growing literature on the utilisation of knowledge by a range of social scientists in a variety of policy fields, both domestic and international . This literature has sought to explain the relationship between knowledge production and utilisation in policy processes . It has sought to develop a range of models to investigate the use and impact of research on practical politics and policy and the processes through which knowledge production finds its way into knowledge utilisation (Stone et al ., 2001) . One recurring theme in this literature relates to understanding and analysing the factors, such as the cultural gap between scholars and practitioners , the validity and reliability of research, and the ways in which research is useful for practitioners involved in practical political processes . How is it possible to make sense of this diverse scholarly siting literature and its possible usefulness to siting practitioners? What have been the major developments in the siting literature and what does the evolution of literature tell us cumulatively about siting? Have siting scholars developed theoretical Facility_final2207.indd 8 22/07/2011 5:32 PM [18.221.85.33] Project MUSE (2024...

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