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If the group intent on introducing the project wishes to pursue a conciliatory (nonregulatory-based) strategy, it has several options for attempting to win community-based support. These include education (television, radio, public meetings, mailings, and leafleting campaigns), the creation of community advisory boards, and making concessions. The concessions can include modification of the project's design and the inclusion of programs to benefit the neighborhood. However, voluntary cooperation is unlikely to succeed alone, given the transaction costs discussed earlier.

As a result, an alternative strategy for those wishing to implement NIMBY projects is to seek regulatory protection, typically from the state, that can bypass local politics and opposition. States have developed a variety of regulations that can be sorted by how hierarchical and interventionist they are. The effectiveness of each of these approaches depends on the context, especially the local political regime, and on the nature of the NIMBY project. For example, a hazardous waste siting will usually be implemented only if there is a highly hierarchical regulatory regime in place. Yet the presence of such a regime does not guarantee success, and indeed the project may fail if it triggers civil disobedience.

Among the least hierarchical regulations are those that are information enhancing and designed to produce a full exchange of data between the parties involved. Among the most important are environmental impact statements (EISs), which show the likely effect of a project on the local physical and natural environment (e.g., population size, traffic, air quality, sewage facilities). The 1969 National Environmental Policy Act requires an EIS under many circumstances, and numerous states have passed analogous legislation. Other information-enhancing regulations are determination of need statements, which obligate a project's developers to demonstrate why the project is needed (at the proposed site). Information-enhancing regulations may ease a project's acceptance by reassuring residents about a project's likely impact. On the other hand, they may hamper a project's acceptance by providing data with which opponents can discredit it.

More hierarchical and interventionist are process-enhancing regulations, which influence the mechanisms by which the parties involved negotiate. Such regulations may call for the creation of specific local committees intended to ensure the representation of parties affected by a proposed facility. Other regulations may stipulate public participation measures, which are designed to allow broad public involvement (e.g., public representatives on siting and oversight boards), and still other regulations may include negotiation and arbitration regulations, which provide a further framework to the negotiations between developers and community representatives (e.g., by specifying the timing of negotiations, by imposing penalties for refusing to negotiate in good faith, and by setting up dispute resolution mechanisms such as binding arbitration). These process-enhancing regulations seek to reduce certain transaction costs (e.g., by specifying who will represent the community). On the other hand, by introducing extra layers into the process, they may slow down and even be detrimental to the project's acceptance. Even with these process-enhancing regulations, the main decision-making authority remains in the hands of the developer and the local negotiating parties.

The most hierarchical category of siting regulations gives the state broad powers to preempt negotiations between developers and the local siting committee or to overturn decisions made at the local level. These measures--administrative controls--substitute state mandates for local decision making. Examples include state overrides, which give a state agency the authority to veto decisions made at the local level; state preemptive authority, whereby specific state agencies may make siting decisions themselves; and state inventories and ownership, whereby state officials may inventory, and even buy, suitable sites and then enter directly into negotiations with potential developers.

Another approach taken with some success by supporters of certain NIMBY projects has been to appeal to the civil rights of the project's direct beneficiaries. For example, in 1989 the Illinois legislature obligated every home rule municipality to address the local need for group homes. Broadly helpful here have been the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which broadens the scope of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include the disabled; and the Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1989, giving the handicapped the protection of Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (the Fair Housing Act), which outlaws housing discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, and national origin. The latter has been interpreted to prohibit discrimination against the developmentally and physically disabled (e.g., recovering alcoholics, the mentally disabled, people with AIDS).

References:

1) Dear, Michael. 1992. "Understanding and Overcoming the NIMBY Syndrome." Journal of the American Planning Association 58:288-300.

2) Richman, Barak D. and Christopher Boerner. 2006. "A Transaction Cost Economizing Approach to Regulation: Understanding the NIMBY Problem and Improving Regulatory Responses." Yale Journal on Regulation 23:29-76.

3) Robinson, Gail. 2001. "Not in My Backyard." Gotham Gazette, April 30.

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