The power of protest in the EIA proceedings. Influence of local community on environmental decisions regarding intensive livestock operations - Example of Poland

Abstract

Planned intensive livestock operations (ILOs) are often the subject of protests from the local communities due to the possible negative impacts. Active participation of local people occurs at an early stage of investment process, i.e. environmental impact assessment (EIA). The aim of this paper is to reveal the strength of influence from the protesting residents on the environmental proceedings for intensive livestock operations, the knowledge that local people bring to the proceedings and whether - finally - environmental conditions are established, giving the green light to the investment. The results showed that the EIA in Poland mainly endorses technocratic rationality and does not include comprehensive assessment of social impact (SIA). Yet, owing to the opposition from the local inhabitants, who bring into the EIA procedure, concerning ILOs, their value-based and experiential knowledge, local authorities often refuse to establish the environmental conditions for the potential investors. In practice the opposition from the inhabitants leads to the broadening of the scope of SIA in the framework of EIA. This means, however, that the environmental procedures get more complex and controversial from the legal point of view. Ultimately, the majority of the analysed instances of ILO projects, against which the local inhabitants protested, got blocked at the procedural stage of EIA.