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While environmental infrastructure is commonly understood as important, there are concerns about issues such as air, noise, and visual pollution, causing ‘Not In My Backyard’ (NIMBY) attitudes. NIMBY-ism can be overcome by minimizing or removing pollution and inviting residents and other stakeholders to enjoy multifaceted benefits of such environmental infrastructure projects. This can foster a new maxim coined as ‘W-NIMBY’ (Why Not In My Backyard?), which manifests in new infrastructure shaped by community needs and supports sustainability agendas. The present intelligence brief provides insights from Japanese cases into how to promote W-NIMBY-ism.
Technical summary
Environmental infrastructure is essential for the common good. Addressing sustainability crises and fostering environmental movements require accelerated deployment of environmental infrastructure. While such infrastructure is necessary, Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) attitudes have remained due to concerns such as air, water, and noise pollution. We present insights from three atypical cases in Japan and argue for the reimagination of the connection between affected residents and environmental infrastructure. The three facilities were designed to be multifunctional and open for the surrounding community to enjoy. We call for participatory approaches and multifunctional use of space that can account for the interests of affected and concerned citizens. Such a conceptualization can lead to ‘W-NIMBY’ (Why Not In My Backyard), manifesting new infrastructure that is shaped by community needs and supports sustainability agendas. Through such approaches, citizens may accept and even take pride in hosting the infrastructure. In this intelligence brief, we argue that refashioning environmental infrastructure provides broader access for local stakeholders and helps in building a connection between citizens and the environmental infrastructure. Through design approaches that foster W-NIMBY, implementation of environmental infrastructure could be accelerated while supporting community needs and the broader sustainability agenda.
Social media summary
Why Not In My Backyard? (W-NIMBY): the potential of design-driven environmental infrastructure to foster greater acceptance among host communities.
The Water Quality Act of 1987 ushered in a new era of clean water policy to the US. The Act stands today as the longest-lived example of national water quality policy. It included a then-revolutionary funding model for wastewater infrastructure - the Clean Water State Revolving Fund - which gave states much greater authority to allocate clean water infrastructure resources. Significant differences between states exist in terms of their ability to provide adequate resources for the program, as well as their ability (or willingness) to meet the wishes of Congress to serve environmental needs and communities. This book examines the patterns of state program resource distribution using case studies and analysis of state and national program data. This book is important for researchers from a range of disciplines, including water, environmental and infrastructure policy, federalism/intergovernmental relations, intergovernmental administration, and natural resource management, as well as policy makers and policy advocates.
The third chapter deals with the three centuries immediately preceding the colonial annexation of the region. These three decades and especially the 1890s and the early 1900s are characterised by rampant elephant hunting in the region. The onslaught on north-west Namibia's wildlife brings about massive changes of the social ecological system. Elephants are discussed here as primary landscape architects. Once they were eliminated from the system, human settlement and vegetation dynamics changed and paved the way for the repastoralisation of the region. The chapter also depicts how international interest in ivory, ravenous elephant hunters, and deprived local communities concur to prepare for major changes in the environmental infrastructures of the region.
This introductory chapter sketches the key research questions: How do changing social-ecological relations and an increasing impact of non-local actors impact the savannah landscape of north-western Namibia? The chapter links the contents of the book with three paradigms: new materialism, environmental history, and political ecology. The chapter also introduces the lead-concept environmental infrastructure and discusses its merits for the study of landscape transformations. The introductory chapter also discusses twenty years of research on north-western Namibia and Himba and Herero pastoralists.
The finalchapter summarises the key results of the study, critically reflects upon the merits and challenges of key concepts (environmental infrastrucure, environing, social-ecological system, etc.) and contemplates what this case study may contribute to the theoretical paradigm new materialism.
The southern African savannah landscape has been framed as an 'Arid Eden' in recent literature, as one of Africa's most sought after exotic tourism destinations by twenty-first century travellers, as a 'last frontier' by early twentieth-century travellers and as an ancient ancestral land by Namibia's Herero communities. In this 150-year history of the region, Michael Bollig looks at how this 'Arid Eden' came into being, how this 'last frontier' was construed, and how local pastoralists relate to the landscape. Putting the intricate and changing relations between humans, arid savannah grasslands and its co-evolving animal inhabitants at the centre of his analysis, this history of material relations, of power struggles between commercial hunters and wildlife, between wealthy cattle patrons and foraging clients, between established homesteads and recent migrants, conservationists and pastoralists. Finally, Bollig highlights how futures are being aspired to and planned for between the increasing challenges of climate change, global demands for cheap ores and quests for biodiversity conservation.
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