Beyond the NIMBY Syndrome in Hazardous Waste Facility Siting: The Albertan Breakthrough and the Prospects For Cooperation in Canada and the United States

Abstract

The prospects for agreements in the siting of hazardous waste facilities in Canada and the United States would appear bleak given the repeated failures of the past decade. A variety of provincial and state siting approaches have been attempted, only to be thwarted regularly by local opposition. The most far–reaching exceptional case involves the siting of a comprehensive hazardous waste disposal facility in Alberta, Canada in the mid‐1980s. The Alberta approach to siting differed markedly from those of other provinces and states and in many respects met the conditions necessary for policy cooperation specified by the maturing institutionalist and game theoretic literatures on this topic. The Alberta siting agreement has already demonstrated shortcomings in the implementation phase and may not be easily transplanted to other subnational units of government. Nonetheless, it suggests that the Not‐In‐My‐Back‐Yard Syndrome so familiar in hazardous waste facility siting need not be an inevitability and that careful attention to key aspects of siting policy may facilitate cooperation.