HAZARDOUS DECISIONS Hazardous Waste Siting in the UK, The Netherlands and Canada. Institutions and Discourses

Transcription

1 HAZARDOUS DECISIONS Hazardous Waste Siting in the UK, The Netherlands and Canada. Institutions and Discourses

2 ENVIRONMENT & POLICY VOLUME 34 The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

3 Hazardous Decisions Hazardous Waste Siting in the UK, The Netherlands and Canada. Institutions and Discourses by Dave Huitema Institute for Environmental Studies, Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS NEW YORK, BOSTON, DORDRECHT, LONDON, MOSCOW

4 ebook ISBN: X Print ISBN: Kluwer Academic Publishers New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow Print 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers Dordrecht All rights reserved No part of this ebook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher Created in the United States of America Visit Kluwer Online at: and Kluwer's ebookstore at:

5 Table of contents Foreword: of bullets and churches xi Chapter 1: Hercules, Leviathan or Promotheus? The age of ecology Democratic institutions and their alternatives The siting of hazardous waste facilities Outline of this book; research questions and structure Chapter 2: Knowledge, competition, or dialogue? Institutional 33 variations and their relation to discourses on facility siting Discourses on environmental decision-making The managerial discourse on decision-making The pluralist discourse on decision-making The communitarian discourse on decision-making An agenda for the rest of this book Chapter 3: Hazardous decisions. The problems of hazardous waste, institutional responses and the ideas underlying them The arrival of hazardous waste problems Regulations concerning hazardous waste The rest of this chapter The role of the market, experts and representatives Shifting discourses and institutional arrangements Institutional developments since Review The role of the courts The general place of the courts in government Judicial activism? The authority of the court

6 vi The issue of standing; what are the boundary rules? Quasi-judicial procedures Costs of judicial and quasi-judicial proceedings Some conclusions 3.4 The role of the community Citizen participation in the pollution control system Citizen participation in land use planning Environmental assessment Some conclusions on citizen participation Conclusions Chapter 4: The UK: Political control with the benefits of judicial authority? 4.1 Seal Sands: linked incinerator proposals Internal preparations, first contacts with authorities Official procedures The role of various institutions and discourses Some reflections 4.2 Newport: an attempt to reject the logic of the planning system The development of the proposal: private initiative Official procedures start, decisions made Appeal and inquiry A new round and a new inquiry The role of the various institutions and discourses Review 4.3 Rotherham: expertise from the local population Presentation of plans and broad rejection Inquiry The role of the various institutions and discourses Review of the case 4.4 Conclusions Cross case comparison Theoretical feedback

7 Table of contents Chapter 5: The Netherlands: participation through the court system 5.1 North Refinery: an example of the art of gedogen Various proposals The art of gedogen The role of various institutions and discourse in this case 5.2 Kaliwaal: how to take rational decisions and still end in court The various proposals made The role of various institutions and discourses Some reflections 5.3 Dordrecht: national policy under stress Conclusions Formal procedures The role of the various institutions and discourses Cross case comparison Theoretical feedback vii Chapter 6: Canada: Community-based siting Alberta: the development of an innovative approach to siting The genesis of invitational siting Invitational siting is redesigned and applied, twice Developments after facility construction The role of the various institutions and discourses Review Manitoba: competition between rural and urban communities The development of a siting approach Actual siting discussions The role of various institutions The role of discourse Review of the case Deep River: Low-level radioactive wastes The solution to the low-level waste problem

8 viii Implementation The role of various institutions and discourses Review of the case Conclusions Cross case comparison Theoretical feedback Chapter 7: Comparison of case studies. Institutions, discourses, actors, and decision quality in the nine cases The institutions involved : private sector versus other institutions Elected representatives The role of experts The role of the courts The role of the community 7.3 The actors involved The role of experts The role of market parties Politicians Voters Parties to a court case Members of the community 7.4 The role of discourse The presence of various discourses The consequences of the use of discourses 7.5 The quality of decisions Technical rationality The economic quality of the proposals The social quality of the decisions The political quality of the decisions Overall assessment of quality: patterns? The interest-discourse divide Conclusions Conclusions within the theoretical framework

9 Table of contents ix Some conclusions about the theoretical framework 447 Chapter 8: Summary and conclusions The collective choice level: institutionalization The concrete choice level: siting debates Remarks about discourse analysis Implications for environmental decision-making The practice of hazardous waste siting The practice of environmental decision-making References Appendix 1: List of interviewees Appendix 2: Explanation of case selection About the author

10 Foreword: of bullets and churches The title of this book, Hazardous decisions, was chosen to reflect the character of the decision-making processes that are studied in this book. Far less hazardous, but still somewhat adventurous and uncertain, was the decision to start the research that is the basis for this book. Having unsuccessfully attempted to avoid staying in university for some time, I was offered a position as a researcher at the Center for Clean Technology and Environmental Policy (CSTM) at the University of Twente in After working on various externally-funded research projects and even teaching a bit, the question was put by Hans Bressers, the Director at CSTM, of whether I d be interested in writing a Ph.D. thesis on a topic that I liked. This question was accompanied by the statement that in order to have a career at a university, one should have a Ph.D. degree. Never having regarded myself as someone desiring such a career, the statement gave rise to serious reflection. Fortunately, I had the help of a T-shirt that I once brought from the United States, specifically from Auburn University s Graduate Student Organization. This T-shirt provided a wee test for deciding whether one should become a graduate student or not. It went like this: True False I enjoy being a professor s slave 0 0 My idea of a good time is using jargon and citing authorities 0 0 I feel a deep need to continue the process of avoiding life 0 0

11 xii Having wholeheartedly filled out True for all three questions I decided that I should perhaps have a go at it. A difficult decision was taken, or as we say in Dutch: the bullet went through the church. In the years that followed it turned out that many bullets still had to follow and that I was not always such a good shooter. We tried to get funding for my - still developing - plans from the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO). Although nobody apparently really disliked our plans, they weren t too keen on investing the sum of money we asked for, even though I had never asked for anything in my life so politely. But then, perhaps politeness should indeed not be the decisive criterion for funding research (I would not mind an experiment with this criterion though). Fortunately for me, Hans Bressers still liked my ideas for doing research, which all revolved around citizen participation in environmental decisions, especially decisions on Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULUs). Where my fascination with this topic came from I don t know exactly, but I do know that I definitely considered a large degree of citizen participation necessary. My original plan was to study the issue by using the concept of policy style and I went to the University of Florida for a literature study on this topic, and perhaps some empirical work as well because I was considering an international comparison between the Netherlands (my own country), the United States and the United Kingdom. With the help of my hosts at the Department of Political Science, Albert Matheny and Walter Rosenbaum, I narrowed my focus down to decision-making on hazardous waste facilities and decided that Canada should replace the United States in my research, mainly because the Canadians were apparently experimenting with highly participatory decision processes (more so than in the US). It might be rather ironic that my hosts at Florida, Albert Matheny and Walter Rosenbaum, were giving me much relevant literature, but that little of this seemed of interest to me, because it was not on policy styles. Only later did I realize that the concept of policy styles is not that suitable for studying decision-making on hazardous waste facilities because it is a concept for use at the macro-level and not at the micro-level of local decision processes. The literature I picked up in Florida, largely about institutional and discourse analysis, was in fact much more useful. So I had been firing through the wrong church, which sounds like a violation of a rather basic principle. Having been converted to a new church (or less dramatically: having changed theoretical lens), I then went to the University of Essex in the UK,

12 Foreword xiii where Jeremy Richardson, Albert Weale and Hugh Ward were excellent hosts at the Department of Government and Thomas Christiansen a very good roommate. Having included the UK as a country where decision processes were far less participatory (and thus worse in my own view) than those in the Netherlands, I started doing my first interviews there, which were mainly intended to identify suitable case studies for research. But then I read a highly critical review of a book that had a similar topic as my study. The critique was that cases of hazardous waste siting cannot adequately be studied without understanding their national context. This made me decide to devote some attention to the legal context of hazardous waste siting in the three countries of interest (which is of course only a part of the national context) and its development through the years. The study of the UK system of environmental regulation and land use planning was not a simple issue, and I was warned various times (for instance by Andrew Blowers at the Open University) that the legislation was highly complex and easily misinterpreted. I felt personally touched by such warnings and decided that I should perhaps approach the UK system a bit less as an evil empire and maybe be a bit more objective in my appraisals. I am not sure whether the continuously friendly talks with planning officers, environmental regulators, and academics were influential in this respect, but I certainly did start to develop more sympathy for some of the (indeed more hostile towards participation) thoughts underlying the UK system of environmental regulation. At Essex, this interest was shared with Tony Barker, who has written what must be the longest journal article ever on the topic (Barker and Couper, 1984: 113 pages), and was willing to spend hours sorting through this article with me. One of the people that I also spoke to during my first visit to the UK was Judith Petts, who was then at Loughborough and later moved to the University of Birmingham. She is one of the best-informed persons in the UK hazardous waste scene and had much extremely useful information for deciding which case studies to do, and for actually doing them. Based at the Centre for Environmental Research and Training at Birmingham, I finally did these cases studies during a second visit to the UK. By then I had given up the hope that I could do five case studies in each of the three countries involved, and changed that number to three, which was already a demanding number anyway. One indication of the involving nature of the work that needed to be done was the amount of paper that I mailed back to the Netherlands. I sent at least three boxes of 25 kilos of documentation on the case studies back home by mail and carried many more kilos myself.

13 xiv Before my last visit to the UK, I had already visited Canada, land of what I expected to be the pro-participation orientated government. Looking for connections there, Hans Bressers gave me a paper from Audrey Armour of York University in Toronto. It turned out that she had been personally involved in actually designing one of the decision processes and that she had extensively studied the other processes as well. She was so kind to arrange for an office at the Faculty of Environmental Studies and despite the fact that she was on sabbatical leave, she helped me tremendously with my work and continued to give me wise advice. She stressed that the normative evaluation of what I was to observe would be the hardest bit of the work, which turned out to be true as I struggled quite a part with the Canadian case studies, which are unique in many ways, not the least of which is the fact that they greatly deviated from legally prescribed processes. To mention everyone who helped me along the way is almost impossible, but some people stood out in a special way as they took not only a professional, but also a personal interest. Dennis Foidart and Richard Sherbaniuk stand out in this respect. Just to come to grips with all the information I gathered in those few months in Canada and later the UK and the Netherlands (thank you librarians and archivists!), I started writing several extremely lengthy descriptions of the nine decision processes that I eventually studied. Many pages were eliminated from these descriptions at a later stage. One famous sculptor once said that his work was easy: in sculpting a horse, he just cut away all the stone that wasn't horse. The final stages of writing this book felt a bit like that. I had a lot of stone, but still had to cut away all that was not book. The case study descriptions became more and more dense and analytical as time progressed, but I am quite sure that some of the readers of this work might have difficulty in believing this as they might find the current descriptions already quite lengthy. I advise them to quickly turn to the more analytical parts of the case study chapters, which were written in such a fashion that they can be read separately. Having started to formulate my research ideas already in 1995, I had high hopes of finishing up my work in the year This became 2001 in the end (December 2001 is the last month in which parts of this book were written), partly because some of the three Dutch case studies that I included were rather complicated to master. Certainly in one case study, I felt like a rather unwelcome guest at the table because my interviewees either questioned my case selection, wanted to control the information I was gathering, or even refused to talk. Of course this made me all the more interested in finding out what went on, but this then led to issues that were not really that interesting from the perspective of this book (however salient

14 Foreword xv they were). Another reason why this book was not completed in 2000 but only in 2001 is that, and this is perhaps inevitable, the further one progresses with a research such as this, the better one discovers what the real topic was that one was always interested in. I am not sure that I am entirely there in this respect ( Life is a building site says the title of a very funny German movie), but writing down an even mildly coherent book did require a second (or a third) look at many of the texts that I had produced before. Needless to say that I (eternally optimistic in this respect) had not planned for second or third looks. If I were to say something about the message of this book, then it would be that it is still intended rather as a demonstration of certain dilemmas that are present in environmental decision-making and of the perspectives one can have towards them, than as a compelling case for a certain solution to hazardous waste siting problems or a certain perspective. It does not seem to me that (social) scientists have, or can have, nor even should have an important role in setting up real world institutional arrangements for decision-making. What we can do as social scientists is rather limited and would seem to be located principally in the sphere of critical reflection (e.g. by checking whether what people say and do is consistent) and perhaps agenda setting. In hazardous waste siting, or more generally decision-making on LULUs, I hope that this book can to some degree contribute to the setting of a climate, where participatory approaches are carefully reflected upon, which means they are not necessarily regarded as intrinsically bad, but neither automatically good. All of the activities that I have spoken of so far have been performed from a very supportive environment at the CSTM. I have already mentioned Hans Bressers a few times, and this does not even do justice to the large role he played in making this work possible. Apart from him, the contacts with other colleagues were always good, especially with Rob van de Peppel, with whom I shared an active interest in pinball, cars, and other important things in life, and who became a close friend. Furthermore, I was fortunate to share an interest in citizen participation with the likes of Johan Woltjer, Larry O 'Toole and Frans Coenen, which resulted in various common publications, the number of which hopefully continues to grow. The group at CSTM that was there for the greater part of my stay was very close. This can already be gleaned from the fact that, as colleagues, Stefan Kuks, Josee Ligteringen, Ton van Snellenberg, Xandra Timmers and I even went on holiday together and had good times on such occasions. For some reason this group got smaller by one person every holiday. Nowadays

15 xvi Stefan and Josee are the only ones left to go on holiday together. I wish them and others at CSTM all the best and thank them for the good times. If my time at the Institute of Environmental Studies at the Free University of Amsterdam will be equally nice, I can certainly be content. I thank Matthijs Hisschemöller and Harmen Verbruggen for given me a shot at it in Amsterdam and my new colleagues for their warm welcome so far. The book that is in front of you has been prepared in cooperation with various people. At Kluwer, Peter Binfield, Henny Hoogervorst and Gloria Verhey were the ones to decide that they dared publish it. Ada Krooshoop at CSTM did excellent work on the layout of the text and incorporating comments. Su Carleton, in a very pleasant cooperation, corrected some of the English that had gone Dutch in my drafts. Auburn s Graduate Student Organization described the work on a thesis as the process of avoiding life This is partly correct, as a university still is in many ways a very special working environment, with an unusual amount of freedom and emphasis on analytical thought, which separates it from normal life. However, my own experience is that there is plenty of life going on as one writes a thesis, or more generally, works at a university. I remember very fondly how, on a rainy day, I was walking towards the university restaurant, and suddenly there was somebody walking along with me under the umbrella in the pouring rain. From day one you have been a pleasant surprise, Geertruide, and I hope that we can continue to walk under the same umbrella or rather in the sun and enjoy life together. Hopefully, my parents and brother will be around to enjoy life with us as for many more years as well. I thank Gabe and Sonja for their support and for the fact that they were always there, even (or especially) when life was tough. Amsterdam, 24 June 2002