Hazardous Decisions

The relationship between democracy and environment is a troubled one, many believe. It is suggested that, for a variety of reasons, neither representative nor direct democracy will be capable of solving environmental problems. The managerial thinkerargues that environmental disputes should be solved by expert managers. The pluralist rejects debate and emphasizes the clash of interests. The communitarian, on the other hand, thinks that environmental problems need to be solved by local communities. Each of these lines of thinking ('discourses') emphasizes different institutions for decision making, some of them democratic, others not. Each discourse stresses a different set of arguments to legitimize a decision, and contains wildly varying assumptions, as on the role of ordinary citizens in environmental issues. One of the areas where this discussion is relevant is the location hazardous waste facilities. Three countries, each with a strongly different approach to siting hazardous wastes (the UK, the Netherlands and Canada), have been selected to study the impact of the such 'discourses' on environmental and planning law.In addition, an assessment is given of the effect of the three discourses on three actual hazardous waste siting debates, one in each country. The conclusion is that managerial and pluralist thought has dominated the debate on environmental legislation in each of the three countries. The implied predominant concern with the technical and economic quality of decisions sometimes encounters with strong resistance at the local level, when hazardous waste facilities are proposed. This resistance is dealt with in a different way in each of the three countries, sometimes with surprising consequences for the quality of the outcomes of the decision processes. The book ends with recommendations for the improvement of decision making practices in all three countries, partly based on the experiences in the other countries.