| At present,the main methods of waste treatment in China are landfill,incineration and composting.Among them,waste incineration is used more and more due to its advantages of small footprint and weight reduction.However,as a kind of NIMBY facility,while the waste incineration plant brings overall benefits to the region,the negative external effects are only borne by the residents near the site.Because of the imbalance in the distribution of benefits and risks,NIMBY incidents are not uncommon.When residents feel that their right to know,health,and property rights have been compromised,they will continue to make demands to the government in hopes of getting a response.In essence,NIMBY conflict is a game of interests between the government and residents around NIMBY facilities,and the government’s response is crucial to the direction of the conflict.However,looking back on real cases,when the government responds to residents’ demands,conflicts between the two sides sometimes intensify,which also reflects that NIMBY conflict is a difficult task.Therefore,it is of great significance to think about the dilemma of NIMBY governance from the perspective of government response.The social combustion theory compares social conflict to the combustion process in nature,and describes and analyzes the evolution process of conflict through three necessary conditions:combustibles,accelerants,and fuses.By selecting classic cases and taking social combustion theory as the analytical framework,an intuitive evolution model of NIMBY conflict in waste incineration projects can be constructed.The study found that NIMBY conflict is not inevitable,and residents’ protest behavior will change with the government’s response behavior.If the government closes its decision-making in the early stage,lags in the response in the mid-to-late stage,and responds with a single content,it is likely to promote the continuous escalation of the conflict between the two sides,and the scale of the residents’ protest will gradually expand,the form of protest will become increasingly fierce,and eventually lead to group conflicts.In the process of responding to residents’ demands,the government is prone to fall into the dilemma of lack of risk communication and ineffective response behavior.In response to this dilemma,we can build a scientific government response mechanism from three aspects: eliminating combustibles,suppressing combustion accelerants,and eliminating fuses.Specifically,it includes broadening the channels for public opinion expression,strengthening the popularization of waste incineration projects,building a response platform for government-civilian interaction,and adopting effective response methods.By strengthening responsive governance,the government’s ability to respond to NIMBY problems can be improved,the NIMBY dilemma faced by waste incineration projects can be solved,and the efficient treatment of waste can be promoted. |
