NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard)

Definition and origins
NIMBY is an acronym for ―not in my back yard‖. According to the Collins dictionary, people affected by the NIMBY syndrome are those who object to the occurrence of something if it will affect them or take place in their locality. For a long time, governments and corporations have built unwanted and/or hazardous projects (often in predominantly poor neighbourhoods), with little regard for public consultation or consideration. In order to defend their neighbourhoods, health, security and way of life, local communities had to band together in order to defend their local area against these decisions. Opposing residents themselves are sometimes referred to as Nimbies.

NIMBY is characterized by intense, sometimes emotional, and often adamant local opposition to the situating of proposals that residents believe will result in adverse impacts. Project costs and risks, such as effects on human health, environmental quality, or property values, are geographically concentrated while the benefits accrue to a larger, more dispersed population. The recurrence of Nimbyism in recent years may be traced to the public's broad embrace of new environmental values and its fear of dreadful and unknown technological risks - such as hazardous waste, toxic substances, and nuclear power, as well as to a dramatic increase in publicly available information on health and environmental risks of proposed facilities. Additional factors are a decline of confidence in the ability of government and
industry to make informed, prudent, and equitable decisions about risky technologies, and statutory creation of new opportunities for public participation in administrative and judicial processes.

Almost all of the literature that deals explicitly with the NIMBY syndrome (published since the late 1980s) originates from the USA. The term is widely used by those involved in or commenting upon local development disputes, but is also used to discredit project opponents, pejoratively describing opposition and undermining the legitimacy of community assertions against proposals such as those for nearby tall buildings, wind turbines, incinerators, power plants, mobile phone network masts, new roads or railways. People using the expression NIMBY consider opponents to new projects as having a narrow and selfish view of the situation. In the Southern context however it has a very different meaning which is strongly linked to community power and grassroots democracy. Since NIMBY, many expressions have emerged around locally focused social movements: NOOS (Not On Our Street) ; LULU (Locally Unwanted Land Uses) ; NIABY (Not In Anyone‘s Backyard) ; NOPE (Not On Planet Earth) ; NIMTOO – (Not In My Term Of Office) ; CAVE (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) ; GOOMBY (Get Out Of My Backyard ); NOTE (Not Over There Either) ; and BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone).

Approaches to NIMBY
Both the scholarly literature and recent politics reveal two kinds of responses to the rise of NIMBY, one highly critical and one fairly positive. The former is clearly the predominant view. Critics of the NIMBY response argue that as a result of the social and political developments noted, essential projects have become impossible to situate, thus restricting or delaying local economic development and technically superior solutions to problems such as hazardous waste disposal. Nimbies are seen as small groups skewing the system in their favour; using political opportunities to obtain outcomes that suit them at the expense of other people and their rights. In this way they selfishly erode the rights of the larger community. The figure above offers a model of this conventional view of the NIMBY phenomenon.

The more positive assessments of NIMBY politics suggest that the public's position on siting issues may be rational and politically legitimate. Citizens may have a fairly good grasp of the issues and a reasonable concern for genuine risks to community health and welfare that are ignored by technical and administrative elites. From this perspective, local opposition may serve a broader public interest, for example in identifying important weaknesses in expert analyses underlying siting proposals (see post-normal science) and forcing consideration of a broader range of sites, some of which may be more technically suitable. NIMBY protests are essentially clashes of incommensurable values, and clashes over whose values can be legitimately expressed. Such conflicts are often the only way citizens can express their concerns and influence government policy.

In 1971 in Australia, a small group of concerned local women from Hunters Hill joined together in order to conserve the last remaining bush land on the Parramatta river known as Kellys Bush (Mundey). This group combined with the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) to oppose the planned development on the site. The BLF put a development ban on Kelly‘s Bush, preventing a high-density development and this ban became known as a Green Ban. From there Green Bans mushroomed‘ under the BLF and a number of significant sites were preserved, including the Rocks area and Centennial Park in Sydney. The emergence of Green Bans highlights how a local group made a difference, not only in their local community, but also in broader society. They were the catalyst for the formation of a larger social movement and had a much broader impact in the long term.

Examples such as the one cited above illustrate a broadening and deepening of public involvement in decision-making, especially through innovative mechanisms of education and participation which offer significant political influence to citizens and promote a cooperative search for solutions. We argue that policies on technological risks should be based on democratic principles to promote a number of important objectives: to encourage technical review by a diverse set of policy actors, to facilitate consideration of public fears and concerns, and to build public support for policy implementation. Despite its now frequent occurrence in a diversity of settings, there have been few rigorous efforts to conceptualize the NIMBY response or to assess its policy implications, and only a handful of empirical studies that help to clarify its behavioral and political dynamics.

Ban the term NIMBY?
Although many people might be cynical of their motivations and although some Nimbies are motivated by fear of outsiders and protecting their assets, most NIMBYs actually try to create change at a local level and seek to create better communities. The fact that these groups can be found around the world indicates that there is a broader element to their objectives and in this sense they might be considered an immature expression of a social movement, which under the right conditions and leadership could expand into a fully-fledged social movement. NIMBYs are a result of and reaction to a local political and social context. Their meaning, shape, size and definition are all relative to these contexts, as well as to the individual personalities involved. They share a sense of community and as a result also shape the identity of the people involved.

In contrast with the negative depiction of NIMBYism, local resistance can be viewed as an essential starting point and ongoing component of dynamic environmental movements. However, given that the term NIMBYism has come to be synonymous with limited, selfish or irrational responses, continuing to describe local protesters as NIMBYs makes little sense given growing recognition of the diversity of concerns typically raised, factors which constrain local responses, the inevitability of attempts to protect one‘s own backyard as inevitable and perhaps even environmentally positive.