NIMBY and the Civic Good

Abstract

Policy scholars dedicated to efficient urban and industrial planning have long tried to understand the “NIMBY syndrome” in order to overcome local resistance to controversial land uses. However, environmental policy scholars have begun to rethink the NIMBY syndrome, arguing that the concept is authority‐centered and reduces land‐use disputes to a moral struggle between rational/civic‐minded planners and irrational/self‐interested opponents. After describing a struggle over locating homeless services in Seattle, this paper extends this larger critique to disputes over human service facilities and argues that the NIMBY syndrome framework fails to capture the political and ethical complexities of locating human services. A conclusion examines how critical sociologists can still critique imbalances of political–economic power in the planning process without deploying the NIMBY syndrome nomenclature.