The Application Of Risk Governance In The Governance Of NIMBY Conflict

The social transformation characterized by reforms on politics and economy is a process of the benefit differentiation.During this process,the contradictions and conflicts among different sorts of benefits make this society filled with different kinds of risks.These risks result in varieties of social conflicts,and these conflicts have significant impacts on the order of society.In these years,one risk gradually draws the attention of people,and that is NIMBY(not in my backyard)risk.This concept first proposed in 1980s in Western countries.It refers to the opposition by residents to a proposal for a new development which is close to them and involves controversial or potentially dangerous technology.The roots of social conflicts are social risks.Therefore,the best way to solve the problem of NIMBY conflicts is to improve the social risk governance.So,this essay tries to use the idea of risk governance to improve the governance on NIMBY conflicts.As there are no enough cases about the success of risk governance on NIMBY,in this essay,the author tries to propose a framework of the governance on NIMBY risks.Then uses it to analyze two real cases and tries to find the problem of the framework.At last,there are some advice on the improvement of the risk governance on NIMBY.The framework of risk governance includes five elements:risk pre-assessment,risk appraisal,the characterization and Assessment on the risk,risk management,risk communication.However,the result of the analysis on two cases,the opposition of high-speed rail in Beijing and the opposition of PX program in Jiujiang,fails to explain why the conflicts happened in these two cases,with the use of the framework of the governance on NIMBY risk.Then,after the analysis based on the mechanism of the growing and the development of NIMBY risk,we can draw two conclusions.The first conclusion is that the uncertainty of the mechanism of the growing of NIMBY risk weakens the reliability of the appraisal of NIMBY risk.And the second one is that the mechanism of the growing and the development of NIMBY risk is so complicated that it brings more difficulties on the risk appraisal.At last,the essay proposes some advice on the improvement of the governance on NIMBY risk such as more opportunities for communities and specialized agencies on participation,and the diversification of the methods of communication.To solve the problem of NIMBY in China is not easy,and it will take time.Nevertheless,the ideas of risk governance meet the need of the development of the society.It will benefit the society very much that to use the ideas of risk governance in the field of risk analysis and the risk management based on risk analysis.From now on,more researchers will engage in the study of the use of risk governance to solve the problem.