Environmental Justice and Collaborative Governance: Building A Socio-Spatial Perspective for Facility Siting (original) (raw)

USC JUDITH & JOHN

Bedrosian Center

ON GOVERNANCE AND THE PUBLIC ENTERPRISE

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE: BUILDING A SOCIO-SPATIAL PERSPECTIVE FOR FACILITY SITING

By Lisa Schweitzer and Sangmin Kim

Collaborative Governance, WP-March 2009-1

Environmental Justice and Collaborative Governance: Building A Socio-Spatial Perspective for Facility Siting

Lisa Schweitzer
Assistant Professor
School of Policy, Planning and Development
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089
lschweit@usc.edu

Sangmin Kim
Graduate Research Assistant
School of Policy, Planning and Development
University of Southern California,
Los Angeles, CA 90089
sangmink@usc.edu

Abstract

Environmental justice concerns, in part, the maldistribution of both environmental hazards and nuisances such that impoverished communities, particularly impoverished communities of color, contend with the effects of industry more so than those who are affluent. As communities of color have organized to confront this problem, their claims of injustice have revealed significant issues across all sectors of environmental governance, both in the U.S. and internationally, and reflect failures of representative institutions in urban land management. In this manuscript, we derive a socio-spatial approach to management of facility siting decisions based on the research in environmental justice. Then we discuss some reforms to facility siting that have been proposed and implemented in the US, Canada, and western Europe over the course of three decades and how these reforms can improve the legitimacy of facility siting decisions.

Environmental Justice and Collaborative Governance: Building A Socio-Spatial Perspective for Facility Siting

INTRODUCTION

In this issue of IJPM, we address the potential contributions of collaborative governance to public management. Jung, Mazmanian and Tang, in the introduction to this symposium, define collaborative governance as a process by which organizations work across sectors—public, private, market, and government-to address public policy issues. In their review, they identify both promises and pitfalls of collaboration. On the positive side, collaborative governance offers the opportunity to address persistent policy issues, like environmental degradation, that affect multiple jurisdictions at multiple geographic scales (Scholz and Stiftel 2005; Booher and Innes 2002). Also positive, collaborative governance can help agencies manage political and financial risks and social conflicts. Collaborative governance attempts to engage diverse stakeholders in joint efforts, reciprocal expectations and voluntary participation (Ansell and Alison 2007).

With collaborative governance, underrepresented groups may be empowered through engagement via learning the policy process, which in turn can prompt individual and group transformation (Mitchell 2005). But spreading responsibilities across multiple agency actors through shared governance may also serve to increase the time costs of participating for community members and to diffuse individual agency’s accountabilities and the promises they make to communities (Koontz and Thomas 2006). Collaboration promises to be a necessary but partial method for serving communities in public management.

This manuscript examines cross-sectoral, collaborative governance of facility siting decisions as viewed through the lens of environmental justice activism. Environmental justice activists have, over the past four decades, identified failures in environmental governance-

across sectors and across democratic processes-that have resulted in socially unjust environmental outcomes (Taylor 2000). These are demonstrated in a large empirical literature that finds a concentration of environmental hazards, including polluting and nuisance industries (such as recycling) among communities inhabited by social and democratic minority groups in the US (Schweitzer and Stephenson 2007). As result, the legitimacy-the socially constructed perception of an institution’s or actor’s decisions-of environmental governance suffers (Sandercock 1998; Kassiola 2002).

Environmental justice advocacy challenges virtually every institution engaged in environmental governance in the U.S. and internationally. Critics name federal, state, and local governments, private industry, and ‘mainstream, one-issue’ environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as contributors to environmental injustice (Gottlieb 2001). Coalitions across these sectors have formed at multiple geographic scales to define and implement environmental policies and plans. Because democratic and social minorities are systematically excluded or under-represented in these coalitions, the environmental justice critique goes, the coalitions have failed to account for the distributive consequences of environmental policy, planning and management (Faber and McCarthy 2001).

In seeking ways that collaboration can redress these problems in environmental governance, it helps to draw on David Harvey’s widely quoted definition that social justice reflects “a just distribution justly arrived at” (Harvey 1972). Land use management distributes social and economic opportunities and costs throughout geographic space, and individual land use decisions, such as for nuisance facilities, accumulate to a regional spatial and social whole (Soja 1980). And indeed, a very large empirical research on environmental justice concerns the geographic distribution of toxic, hazardous, and nuisance land uses, from regional clustering of

these land uses near communities of color (Dolinoy and Miranda 2004; Elliott et al. 2004; Pastor Jr, Sadd, and Morello-Frosch 2004; Atlas 2002) to case studies of individual siting decisions (Roberts and Weiss 2001; Cole and Foster 2001). Less obviously, neighborhood and place act as a set of resources, histories and cultures upon which community members differentially rely by both race and class. By the end of this manuscript, we hope to establish that the old geography maxim that “place matters” is true but incomplete for collaborative management of facility siting decisions. Place matters for some groups more than others, and these differences necessitate different policies during collaboration over siting and land use decisions.

JUSTIFYING JUSTICE: LEGITACY AND LAND USE DECISION-MAKING

Those of us who study justice tend to argue for justice as a cornerstone of public policy and management either a) as an end unto itself or b) for utilitarian reasons because some aspects of injustice, such as inequalities of opportunity, affect aggregate welfare. While those first points may be true, in this manuscript we argue from a third position: that justice affects the institutional legitimacy of public management over the long term (Lombe and Sherraden 2008). Actions and outcomes may be broadly defined as socially legitimate when there is a broad consensus that public actions, and the institutions which make them, are acting within their legally and socially defined roles and with appropriate knowledge. In the case of facility siting and land use decisions, legitimacy suggests that governmental institutions are balancing, if not wholly fulfilling, their various roles protecting public health, property rights, and neighborhood quality, and that they do so according to sound knowledge, evidence and principles. When institutions, such as city governments, take either individual actions or a series of actions that result in injustice, then those injustices affect the institutions’ capacity to act legitimately in potential future collaborations (Sandercock 1998).

Prior to challenges from environmental justice advocates, the institutional legitimacy for regulation of facility siting rested on property rights and nuisance claims. I will turn to the legal and regulatory paradigm next, and then to the major environmental justice critiques of the “spatially blind” institutional practices which weaken the legitimacy of existing land management practices.

LAND AND TOXICS REGULATION IN THE US

In the U.S. and Europe, conflicts between private industry and residential communities (or between companies) have been adjudicated via two western legal traditions: property and nuisance law (Rechtschaffen and Gauna 2002). In one strand of the tradition are those who own property, which includes the entitlement to use and develop land to the highest (or more intensive, profitable) use. Nuisance law developed as a means to sort through competing ‘incompatible’ land uses, when one property’s use infringed upon the use and enjoyment of another’s property.

Land use planning and zoning

Modernist land use planning, as an outgrowth in part of the ‘City Beautiful’ amd ‘City Practical’ Progressive-era movements in the US, envisioned comprehensive city planning as a means of anticipating and preventing nuisance conflicts. The major means entailed zoning, now commonly referred to as Euclidean zoning after the Supreme Court case that upheld municipal zoning. Zoning was justified, its proponents argued, in order to protect homes as assets (Fischel 2004). Municipal and county governments still regulate urban land in the U.S. via comprehensive plans and zoning, even though planners and urban designers have extensively criticized Euclidean zoning for contributing to urban sprawl and racial residential segregation in metropolitan regions (Silver 1997; Rabin 1990).

Community members can take part in comprehensive planning as part of a visioning process, or they can air their views about particular proposals if a landholder needs to request a variance (change) from the existing zoning. But the city and county boards hold the decisionmaking power about variances and zoning; individual community members may have voice, but their influence occurs via representative democratic practice.

Federal permitting

In addition to zoning for the location of industries and possibly regulating their design at the local level, toxic industries have to undergo a federal permitting process in the US. In 1976, Congress enacted the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act which mandated Federal permitting and tracking of industries that make, handle, store, or dispose of toxics. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administers the RCRA permitting and enforcement process. Some states have similar requirements. The U.S. EPA issued in 1995 its RCRA Expanded Public Participation rules (60 FR 6317) that mandate expanded public participation at every stage of the RCRA permitting process. The rules require

• Companies (permit seekers) to hold public meetings prior to completing and submitting a RCRA permit application,

— The EPA to notify the public when it receives a permit application,

• The application contents be available to the public, and
• Public meetings during the application review.

For incinerator facilities, there are additional requirements for seeking community input once a facility has started to burn wastes.

Figure 1 breaks down the contemporary sectors, actors, geographies, and policy or planning tools for facility siting in the U.S. The figure differentiates three geographic levels of

governance for hazards. Industries that handle toxic and hazardous materials have to go through a permitting process at the Federal level, and in some cases, the state level as well. Unlike local zoning and land use planning which often considers facility aesthetics and community benefits in addition to possible risks, permits issued under RCRA are evaluated primarily according to risk assessments and the company’s compliance with required, state-of-the-practice handling and safety practices.

The governance structure that has evolved spans across institutional sectors. In the private and market sector, companies and individuals who want to develop or expand industry have some legitimacy and protection via property rights and permitting. State and Federal public institutions are involved as regulators and experts concerning risk. City councils and county boards of supervisors make decisions on locations through comprehensive planning, their efforts in economic development, and through zoning and variances (Hamilton 2003). For each type of decision-whether permitting or local land use-there are opportunities for public participation, but public input is nonbinding.

RISK AS THE DOMINANT AGENDA

For both institutions and publics, the modernist traditions governing land use control ‘risk’ to either human health or to property values. Risk frames what public institutions are to police, mediate and in the case of environmental justice, distribute in what Giddens (1990) and Beck (1992) refer to as the modernist “Risk World” or “Risk Society.” Because there are few other legally accepted claims to make against capitalist development, risk frames the democratic dialogue surrounding land management and social change, even for land use changes that have nothing to do with toxics or hazards, such as homeless shelters, AIDS hospices, or even just lowincome housing (Takahashi 1998; Pendall 1999).

With collaborative governance for many siting decisions, these risk conversations miss the point. Of course risk matters, and real differences in toxic and hazardous risk do exist between different types of facilities (Elliott et al. 2004; Derenzinski et al. 2003). But just as local government officials and public managers work within different tensions in land use management balancing property rights, economic development, and public health, residents also have multiple goals for the places they live, with safety and public health being perhaps the most basic. Risk assessment, even if it is good science well conducted, explained well, and well communicated among groups does not alone legitimate what are (or should be) democratic decisions about neighborhoods (Hunold and Young 1998; Tesh 1999).

Project opponents can and do doubt the veracity of government- and industry-sponsored risk assessments, based largely on the institutions’ multiple and conflicting motivations (Douglas and Wildavsky 1983; Roberts and Weiss 2001). Local governments, because of their powers over urban land, are simultaneously responsible for constructing the forum for governance and holding a financial stake in growth (Molotch 1976). In a similar vein, regulators and industry representatives may view project opponents’ claims of future risk as largely exaggerated, parochial, or self-interested. Where communities see public institutions and professionals as potential sell-outs, public managers may see what we call “NIMBY”-the famous Not In My Backyard—people who put their concerns over public interests, or even the interests of their neighbors. Whatever the risks really are, these two positions create a shaky basis for attempts at collaboration with any community; neither side has much reason to accept the other’s knowledge or equity claims (McAvoy 1998; Trettin and Mushram 2000). This may be especially true for communities of color who may be poorly represented among municipal elected officials and

among agency professionals and who have experienced years of racism and classism (Gottleib 2001).

What has been absent in collaborative governance over facility siting has only partially been about a lack of clarity about risk assessment. Rather, these conflicts mostly lack consensus about what powers and entitlements neighborhood groups should have over social and environmental change.

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND THE SOCIO-SPATIAL APPROACH

If legitimacy could obtain simply by creating neighborhood-level representation and binding agreements, we could perhaps end the discussion there. After all, these problems of representation between city-level governments and individual communities can be true for all types of neighborhoods and with all types of people. US cities have grown in geographic size, population, and population diversity from the early days of the 20th century when zoning came into use, and municipal government may seem increasingly remote and less representative for any given neighborhood. This is the gap that the neighborhood council model in Los Angeles is meant to help fill (Musso et al. 2006).

Existing Socio-spatial disparities

Yet, lack of neighborhood-level representation has not had the same consequences for all communities. No authoritative formal neighborhood representation has not, on the whole, hurt affluent communities or predominately white communities in a generalizable manner the way it has social and democratic minorities (Shuckman 2001). Because neighborhoods already have unequal environments, ignoring inequalities in future siting decisions can reinforce the problems. Neighborhood-level representation for social minorities should therefore be a priority for legitimate collaborative governance surrounding facility siting. In the US an Executive Order

12898 signed by then-president Bill Clinton in 1993 attempted to require that federal actions demonstrate no disparate impact of projects and plans in areas with where the resident population had over a third of residents from minority ethic groups. However, the Executive Order promotes agency restraint rather than the establishment of neighborhood powers or institutions, such as a special district.

Even with representation, communities of color and impoverished communities that have environmental degradation face steep barriers to local economic growth. These barriers may over the long-term feed into a cycle of slow growth and reinforce poverty. Pellow (2002) describes an incinerator siting conflict in Robbins, Illinois. Even though Robbins had a relatively homogenous population and a long-term tradition of local African American elected leadership, the community divided over the incinerator business. Local elected leaders and local community leaders differed over the promise of badly needed jobs for the residents versus the facility’s nuisance and environmental risk. Pellow contextualizes these conflicts within the history of racial oppression within the region: Robbins as a place experienced years of disinvestment and freeway construction, which exacerbated some residents’ desperation for economic opportunity.

Far from being an isolated instance, the situation in Robbins epitomizes the dialectical relationship between past environmental degradation and having few choices for economic development other than additional industry. Bullard (1993) coined the term “environmental blackmail” to describe situations like those in Robbins, where impoverished jurisdictions have few options other than to trade environments for opportunity.

For impoverished communities, allowing a nuisance facility for short-term job growth may mean a continuation of environmental degradation that sacrifices the neighborhood’s residential environment and places the community at a long-term disadvantage for growth.

In the United States over the last two decades, the research on economic development within metropolitan regions suggests that major engines for economic growth have been white-collar, information, and cultural service sectors in what some have called the “post-industrial” economy of the United States (Currid 2008). The new growth locations in the US, before its economic crisis, were places that offered urban and environmental amenities.

The problems created by poverty and environmental degradation mean that collaborations with these communities have to be connected to a long-term development commitment that challenges our existing ideas about industry, employment, and environment. Currently, little thought goes into making factories and production centers desirable in terms of both job growth and amenity value to residential neighborhoods. Some industries, such as recycling centers, are important to regional sustainability, but communities often do not want them because they are such an eyesore and do not fit within the neighborhood (Sze 2006). For communities with existing industries nearby, poor-quality urban design around industry does little to lessen their visual effect, scale, lack of integration with surrounding environments, and the barrier effects they impose on nearby residents. A commitment to develop job growth in tandem with cleaning up existing industries can help increase the legitimacy of future siting decisions because they acknowledge the existing problems and try to address them.

Homeplace

So far, we have argued that a) lack of formal representation of neighborhoods disproportionately disadvantages communities of color in the distribution of urban land use and b) poverty can coerce communities and their representatives to sacrifice place for economic opportunity when such sacrifices may be destructive to long-term economic growth and, with better design, unnecessary. These rationales for a socio-spatial approach treat neighborhood or

‘place’ for social minorities as potential administrative districts for representation or in utilitarian terms-as a resource in economic development. Our last rationale for a socio-spatial approach concerns cultural preservation and group autonomy that emanate from place.
bell hooks, feminist theorist, writes about the crucial role that ‘homeplaces’ serve in the lives of oppressed people, women in particular, who need a place of their own away from the cultural pressures, implied threats and judgments of the dominant group (hooks 1999). Homeplace can refer to many things, including a Black woman’s kitchen or a Black community where the ebb and flow of daily life, personal connections and planning can occur. So-called ‘public’ spaces in cities can replicate the isolating effect of mainstream and dominant institutions where members of oppressed social minorities may wind up isolated and the only representative of their social or cultural group.

To make hooks’ point tangible, we can look at some numbers from southern California. There are over 4,000 Census tracts (relatively small spatial units the US government uses for understanding population geographies) in the Los Angeles region. Of those, only a little over 80 tracts are clear majority African American even given their estimated 1.5 million population. Social and cultural minorities are also spatial minorities within regions; homeplaces for social minorities are scarce, and therefore precious, within regions.

With that scarcity, community disruption and social change from facility siting in homeplaces portend unrecoverable loss. The loss will be felt by the community members, of course, as the we learned from urban renewal and freeway building in cities throughout the 1960s and 1970s (Bullard and Johnson 1997). Losses to the entire region, in turn, accrue through the degradation culturally meaningful places. Therefore, protecting these neighborhoods and their environments takes on a special significance in land use management.

LESSONS FROM SOCIO-SPATIAL DIFFERENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

The overarching lesson from the research and activism on environmental justice for management theory is that neighborhood inequality affects the social legitimacy of land management. Neighborhood histories, residents’ past experiences with local governments and institutions (including our existing maldistribution of land uses), their goals, and their capacity for economic self-determination differ significantly because of the geographically uneven distribution of poverty and opportunity (Pulido 2000). While all neighborhoods obviously matter, the consequences of degrading the homeplaces of social and ethnic groups entails a greater loss of environmental security for them than for more affluent or mainstream neighborhoods.

For siting decisions and environmental governance, recognition of individual and group difference applies to their spatial context, their homeplaces. For the siting process, recognition suggests:
a) formal administrative recognition (as in special protections) of geographic homeplaces for marginalized groups within cities and regions, such as special districts,
b) long-term community development in those places in recognition of the role that poverty and social exclusion play in coercing marginalized social minorities even in wellintended collaborative decisions about development, and finally,
c) an understanding of how each collaboration about individual projects and facilities contributes to a larger urban and regional landscape of distributive social justice.

Our final lesson links back to idea with which we began: justice implies a reasonable distribution of both opportunities and costs throughout regions. The project-level decisions about

facilities accumulate into a mosaic of urban geography, and that geography influences the resources and problems that affect communities (Soja 1980).

These lessons, though not comprehensive, serve as a set of principles that enhance the possible legitimacy of collaboration with impoverished communities and communities of color over new facilities. These principles show that while collaboration can enhance the legitimacy of land management decisions, collaborations occur within complex socio-spatial contexts where the same proposed facility can have different consequences for different social groups.

In the past 30 years, facility siting conflicts in the US have generated a large volume of research, and many researchers have proposed changes to land use management to improve the facility siting process (Minehart and Neeman 2002). With the lessons from environmental justice activism in mind, we can examine the proposals for their potential to contribute to collaborative governance sensitive to environmental justice concerns.

PROPOSALS TO REFORM SITING

Conflicts over land uses have evolved a set of entirely unique governance practices in the US, with many proposed models for reform that rely on collaboration (Gerber and Phillips 2004; Andrain and Smith 2005). Proposals differ on two key dimensions: the degree to which the unwanted facilities are treated as necessary or legitimate, and the entitlements that community members should have. Table 1 summarizes the proposals that have appeared in the research on siting, ordered from most top-down and centralized to more shared-power, distributed approaches. While we have grouped the approaches separately, the proposals share multiple traits. All of them can be informed by the lessons from the environmental justice literature to varying degrees, and each proposal has potential for increasing both legitimacy and distributive justice.

Top-down approaches

These might be considered more of a baseline or a ‘straw man’ for comparison rather than an actual proposal because few writers advocate for centralized decision-making. Munton (1996) describes or Decide and Defend or “DAD” as the practice where industries make decisions, work with governments, and then announce their plans to communities. While community input may be accommodated, as in the federal permitting and municipal land use processes we outlined earlier, collaboration occurs primarily as a means to defuse opposition. The research on community opposition from the 1980s onwards suggests that industrygovernment coalitions have not been successful with locating facilities using this method (Mazmanian and Morrell 1992; Munton 1996).

Industry is not the only sector associated with top-down approaches. The Dutch central governments’ frustration with community opposition to projects designed to heighten sustainability, such as high-speed rail, generated an ‘override’ policy that pushed projects forward even with community opposition (Wolnick 1994). The response to this ‘override’ policy was negative. Similarly, a recent ballot box initiative in California proposed reducing the public participation requirements associated with the state’s most well-established environmental quality laws in order to speed up the development of new renewable energy projects. The initiative failed.

The consensus from the literature on siting seems to be that top-down approaches do not perform well resolving controversial land use changes. However, the history of civil rights in the US suggest that some top-down approaches, such as federal leadership with the Voter’s Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act, have required lower levels of government to extend equal treatment to social and democratic minorities. As a result, top-down approaches

may be a means to guide the cumulative distributive consequences of fragmented land use decisions and overcome local government capture or inertia in development decisions.

Criteria-based planning approaches

These approaches try to engage communities in planning at the regional scale before particular siting decisions are made. Once the parties involved agree that action is necessary, then they move forward on site selection using criteria upon which the parties have agreed prior to selecting a site. Planning approaches include the widely cited Facility Siting Credo and New York City’s Fair Share Facility Charter (MIT Hazardous Substances Management Program et al. 1990a and 1990b; Gabor 1996; Weisberg 1993). In the Credo, conflict negotiation experts rely on a distributed model that uses multiple facilities instead of one, large-scale facility and compensation to those locations with facilities. Communities that have a concentration of facilities are already protected somewhat in the Credo, as a means to address regional distributive equity.

By planning at a regional, state, or federal level the criteria-based approaches open up more potential sites for consideration. Collaboration with communities occurs prior to final selection. If these approaches occur over the long-term, then it may be possible to build in all of the lessons from the environmental justice research into the planning process. Communities of color could receive protection in the criteria, and siting decisions could be tied to neighborhood approval. Further, plans for community development and improving the appearance and operations of existing facilities in order to address poverty, unemployment, and environmental degradation could also be treated as a prerequisite to allowing new sites.

Trading, auction, and ‘fair share’ approaches

Trading approaches allow for neighborhoods to make choices about land uses. With trading, neighborhoods are given a certain number of credits or bids that they can use to ‘buy out’ of being a site for an unwanted land use. These approaches address the problem where some neighborhoods, politically powerful and well-connected, can again and again shift the costs of urban facilities, such as freeways or waste sites, on those less influential in local politics. With trading, all must share in hosting facilities that serve public needs. The obligation to take a ‘fair share’ of unwanted land uses occurs within a negotiation whereby community members can express their preferences for what they want to most avoid while having to shoulder some responsibility for the waste and problems they produce.

Mazmanian and Morrell (1992) discuss a YIMBY proposal that was developed in the state of California. YIMBY stands for Yes In My Backyard. The YIMBY proposal created county-level accountability for wastes generated within the county. Counties would not necessarily responsible for managing their own wastes within their borders, but they were, responsible for either developing local sites or negotiating with waste disposal facilities elsewhere. The county-level responsibility provided an incentive for county governments to pursue waste reduction programs in facing the costs of exporting waste or having to site a facility locally. However, the YIMBY process in California eroded during implementation, and the resulting policies undercut the original intent (Morrell 1996).

These auction, trading, and negotiating systems, like planning approaches, could be modified to include some additional environmental justice provisions. The auctions and ttrading could be designed with protections for communities of color and for places which already have local nuisance facilities. The auctions could also, like the criteria approaches, incorporate

requirements for long-term community development to address poverty and environmental degradation before a neighborhood is required to enter a ‘fair share’ auction.

We found no examples of auction or trading systems implemented within metropolitan regions in the U.S.

Compensation approaches

The Credo also advises compensation for local communities that host facilities. Utilitarian or welfare-based theories of justice hold that for those who benefit from a project can compensate those who lose out such that they become indifferent to the project. Environmental justice researchers vary considerably in their views regarding compensation (Schweitzer, forthcoming). For some, compensation is coercive in the same manner as Bullard’s ‘environmental blackmail.’ Communities that are impoverished may be more likely to agree to unwanted land uses than more affluent communities that have had systematic underinvestment in parks, community facilities, or other types of public benefits offered in compensation (Gleeson 1996). Empirical research on compensation for nuclear siting in Japan confirms that low-income residents are more likely to accept compensation than are their higher income counterparts (Lesbirel 2003).

Nonetheless, some environmental justice advocates do support communities’ efforts to secure compensation and reparations for past injustices. In a policy environment where few other sources of revenue or support for impoverished jurisdictions are available, compensation may be one means of redistributing resources and, in the case of reparations, recognizing past injustice (Collin and Collin 2005). Compensation for existing regional facilities-a lease almost-could provide funds to improve urban environments surrounding those facilities as a way to address existing environmental problems.

These compensation, planning and trading approaches all increase the opportunities for cross-sectoral collaboration in land management. Each entails forming consensus about some aspect of the environmental or NIMBY conflict. An early evaluation of the Facility Siting Credo found that consensus-seeking required that governments and project developers work to build trust among community residents and that, in turn, trust-building enabled the landfill siting in Maricopa County, Arizona and Minneapolis, Minnesota (Kunreuther, Fitzgerald, and Aarts 1993). For compensation, we have to build agreements on whether and what compensation is acceptable or merited by a particular proposal. Trading or auction approaches prompt a community decision-making process about what to use credits for. In a similar vein, criteriabased approaches attempt to create consensus on criteria, which can include collaboration on alternative strategies for waste reduction rather than building.

Voluntary approaches

Voluntary or bottom-up approaches, modified to address distributional problems, may create a better arena for collaboration, than planning approaches that select sites, even if the selection process is collaborative. Throughout the 1980s, the numbers for large facility development demonstrated that ‘successes’ for facility owners were rare. Out of the 81 applications for Federal permits between 1980 and 1987, only six went all the way to operation (Kunreuther et al. 1993). As a result, voluntary approaches in the 1990s emerged as a means to discover community preferences in favor of a facility and compensation packages. There are multiple cases of voluntary processes undertaken in Canada, whereby local governments volunteer to host a development in return for the economic development and compensation (Rabe 1991).

Drawing on the lessons from the environmental justice activism, it can be hard to establish the legitimacy of these voluntary processes given the extreme poverty in some jurisdictions. Refusing to allow impoverished jurisdictions to volunteer because of poverty implies paternalism and a violation of community’s autonomy. But ignoring how poverty, uneven geographic distributions of job opportunity, and social exclusion can reinforce the cycle of environmental degradation and poverty. Long-term community development to address poverty, inequality, and environmental problems offers one solution, but community development may take time. Expecting community members to hold out for proposals that serve outsiders’ sensibilities when they are in need now also has consequences for community autonomy. In that case, one answer may be to require sustainable and green design of all facilities that go up for voluntary community bids.

Voluntary approaches also do not necessarily prevent inequitable regional distributions from emerging over time. With the Canadian approach, volunteering jurisdictions had to prepare bids. In those cases, it might be possible to vet for distributive equity across regions when evaluating bids.

Shared power and binding approaches

Shared power approaches promote a formal and authoritative shift in power among local governments, project developers and local communities. Community members’ formal approval is required with these proposals, and thus communities can enjoin the actions of other members in decision-making without having to sue.

A few jurisdictions have pursued voting on land use changes. San Diego, California has voted on new development, as a means to bring direct democracy to residential growth decisions (Gerber and Phillips 2004). Local residents in Buan, Korea, also were able to bring the issue of a

nuclear waste facility to a local vote to demonstrate to national officials that the locality did not want the facility (Kim and Cho 2004).

Voting has thus far occurred within existing jurisdictions, although a special district designed to protect communities of color could also incorporate voting. Sociologist Robert Bullard, one of the most well-respected scholars of environmental justice, argued in the early 1990s that top-down approaches could be inverted by ‘shifting the burden of proof.’ His approach entails a twofold test of legitimacy for siting decisions based on community members’ views of facility’s costs and benefits and their views on the location’s overall fairness. Rather than requiring that community members prove that a project harms them (i.e., protecting landowner property rights), project sponsors should have to convince neighborhood residents, not elected officials, that the project will be beneficial before a permit or a variance is granted. In addition, the burden would not be on communities to demonstrate that siting decision is unfair. Instead, the project’s proponents should have to establish the fairness of the location to neighborhood residents in order to secure their approval. This aspect of the approach allows community members to evaluate how individual project proposals fit within regional equity.

In another proposal designed specifically to address environmental injustice, Hunold and Young (1998) proposed an inclusionary model that incorporates many of the elements proposed by Bullard and planning approaches such as the Credo. The Hunold and Young proposal requires that governments and project sponsors set aside resources directly for community members to support the deliberation. Whatever governments and industry spend on analyses justifying the project, communities are to be given equal amounts to sponsor counterstudies conducted by firms and experts of their choosing. In the same way that planners and engineers are paid to promote and evaluate projects, community members who take their time and energy to fight the

project should receive payment for their work and participation. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency currently does provide for some grant funding that communities may apply for and use for these purposes, but the process is competitive rather than automatic.

Hunold and Young also argue that those from the community who participate should not be ‘consultation elites’ but should be legitimately from the neighborhood. Finally, these participants should hold binding power over the decisions. Without a full consensus, no action is taken and once consensus is reached, the parties are obligated to stand by all parts of the agreement.

Both the Bullard (1993) and Hunold and Young (1998) approaches stress neighborhood autonomy and representation. However, their approaches do not really differentiate between communities of color and more affluent communities, and all these authors assume that communities will weigh their environmental interests equally with their economic interests, and that they will successfully negotiate. The same critique of voluntary approaches, therefore, applies here: communities who are desperate for growth and compensation may be more likely to approve facilities than affluent places, who can simply reject proposal after proposal while exporting their waste elsewhere. However, the veto power granted to neighborhood groups with these proposals may enable communities to command much more in terms of good design and environmental sensitivity.

REBUILDING COLLABORATION AND LEGITIMACY

Environmental justice research and activism has helped urban planners and public managers understand socio-spatial inequality. These inequalities, now widely acknowledged, affect the legitimacy of federal, state, and local institutions that have failed to prevent at best or at worst contributed to existing maldistributions of environmental quality. We have also argued

that environmental degradation contributes to the long-term impoverishment of communities, as opportunities for economic growth in the United States have increasingly gone to places rich in environmental and urban amenities. Finally, social and democratic minorities, such as ethnic groups, in the US and in metropolitan areas internationally are residentially segregated from other groups (Dawkins 2004). The residential segregation tends to make social and democratic minority groups “spatial” minorities as well, living in neighborhoods isolated within larger regions. These neighborhoods and places have their own histories and hold their own unique sets of nonmonetary resources for members of oppressed groups.

Based on these lessons, we have argued for a socio-spatial approach that recognizes the neighborhoods occupied by social and democratic minorities along three major dimensions:
a) formal administrative recognition of geographic homeplaces for marginalized groups within cities and regions, such as with special districts;
b) long-term community development and environmental improvements in recognition of the role that poverty and social exclusion play in coercing marginalized social minorities even in well-intended collaborative decisions about development, and finally,
c) an understanding of how each collaboration about individual projects and facilities contributes to a larger urban and regional landscape that represents one aspect of distributive justice.

Incorporating these into facility siting decisions can increase the legitimacy of institutional attempts at collaboration with communities who have faced discrimination.

We presented multiple approaches that have been proposed and, in some cases, implemented in the United States, Canada, and Europe. These include top-down methods, volunteering, and formal community veto powers and neighborhood. All of these methods can

contribute to collaborating with communities. However, the joint or shared power approaches promise the most significant steps toward social and political inclusion during siting decisions. Yet even the shared powers approaches can be hampered by existing maldistributions of resources and opportunities at the neighborhood level.

Collaborations with communities of color in the US occur within the legacy of police and mob violence, discrimination, and environmental destruction (Sandercock 1998). Without longterm commitments to changing opportunities, environments and institutional relationships, little will stop the dialectical and reinforcing relationship between socio-spatial patterns of poverty, social exclusion, and subsequent social and economic disadvantage in political representation. IN order to forge effective collaborations about facility siting, public management must recognize that communities come to collaborations from very different and unequal positions and collaborate with respect for the intimate connection between history, culture and homeplace.

Figure 1. Contemporary formal governance structure-US Toxics

Table 1. Proposals for facility siting

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