Structural Constraints and Pluralist Contradictions in Hazardous Waste Regulation

Abstract

Local community opposition constitutes the single greatest hurdle to the siting of hazardous waste facilities in the United States. Conventional explanations of its causes focus on questions of risk and equity; that is, on outcomes of facility siting. In this focus it is assumed that hazardous waste management is synonymous with facility siting, when siting is in fact only one of many possible answers to the management problem. Rather than ask why local communities oppose facility sitings, it is asked how the waste management problem gets defined as a siting problem in the first place, and how public participation in the siting process is postponed until it is defined around a specific location. The analysis shifts the focus from siting outcomes to the fundamental structure of hazardous waste regulatory policy. A strong claim is asserted: that the basic assumptions of hazardous waste regulation define the hazardous waste problem as a locational problem confronting the state, rather than an investment problem for capital, and that local opposition to hazardous waste facility siting is a reaction against these basic assumptions. Local opposition to facility siting is explained in terms of the structural constraints that dispose the state to define management problems as siting problems and to arbitrate the siting disputes by means of interest-group conflict. This explanation, in turn, helps to clarify the conceptual and practical relationship between state structure and political process by disclosing the ways that pluralist democracy helps the state to manage politics in a way that sustains the basic assumptions that structure its relation to capital.