Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West (review)

If "bringing the state back in" summarizes the analytical orientation of much political scholarship a generation ago, it might be said that the agenda has shifted to "bringing civil society back in." It has become accepted, for better or worse, that stakeholder participation improves governance in states and firms; it therefore behooves even very large and powerful organizations to encourage – even facilitate – outside participation and public disclosure. Aldrich's interesting book reinforces this point, but reminds us of the inherently coercive nature of modern states.

Site Fights explores the influence of civil society on the process of placing "divisive facilities" – nuclear plants, airports and dams – in communities in Japan, France and, to a lesser extent, the United States. First and foremost, the book finds that siting decisions depend on the strength of civil society; civically anemic communities are much more likely to find themselves with environmental bads in their backyards, regardless of their economic or racial composition. In addition, weak participation frees the hand of the state to use more coercive tactics in response to protest.

The Japanese cases are the focus of the book and, impressively, build on 80 interviews and an original data set culled from a broad array of reports and government records. The French case lacks similarly systematic data, but Aldrich's 24 interviews provide the foundation for a thick description of French struggles over certain facilities. The selection of France and Japan as cases for comparison offers both advantages and disadvantages for Site Fights. It is helpful that both are "strong states" and have similar bureaucratic structures; this allows Aldrich to argue that the level of opposition to sites is the crucial varying factor. On the other hand, the author devotes much more attention to Japan than France, which makes the comparison somewhat uneven.

Siting decisions are rarely straightforward and involve not just concerns about popular resistance but also more practical environmental and geographic worries such as soil quality, proximity to urban areas (particularly for airports), and costs to taxpayers. Aldrich starts off by using the Japanese data to test a number of explanations for site selection: technocratic concerns about land quality, dominance of one political party (and resistance by the opposing party), environmental racism, community wealth and the strength of civil society. Although Aldrich contends that initial site placement decisions by states depend on the strength of local civil society, there appears to be more to the process than meets the eye. Consider, for example, that the measures for civil society quality and capacity are, respectively, percent of population change from 1950 until the siting attempt, and change in the percentage of the workforce in farming and fishing (35). Although these variables may be the best available, they are perhaps better conceptualized as measures of population and economy. Putting that concern aside, the full models for such siting decisions are available – unfortunately not in the book but on the author's website – show that only in the case of nuclear sites does population change have a significant effect, and "civic capacity" has little influence on dam siting. As for whether a project is successful after site selection, locales with strong fishing and farming employment resist sites more effectively, but population change is not influential. Overall, then, the quantitative evidence for the primary influence of civil society appears to be rather equivocal.

The bulk of the book is comprised of case studies, and these provide a more convincing account of the independent influence of civil society on siting processes. States, Aldrich argues, choose between coercive tactics (such as eminent domain), hard social control measures (closed hearings, cutting off access to information), incentives that reward cooperation, and soft social control (i.e., PR, facilitation and pro-nuclear programs in schools). Overall, the case studies repeatedly find that fragmented resistance is associated with coercive state responses; this is especially true for Japanese dams and airports. One implication of this is...