Hazardous decisions : hazardous waste siting in the UK, the Netherlands, and Canada : institutions and discourses

where Jeremy Richardson, Albert Weale and Hugh Ward were excellent hosts at the Department of Government and Thomas Christiansen a very good roommate. Having included the UK as a country where decision processes were far less participatory (and thus ‘worse’ in my own view) than those in the Netherlands, I started doing my first interviews there, which were mainly intended to identify suitable case studies for research. But then I read a highly critical review of a book that had a similar topic as my study. The critique was that cases of hazardous waste siting cannot adequately be studied without understanding their national context. This made me decide to devote some attention to the legal context of hazardous waste siting in the three countries of interest (which is of course only a part of the national context) and its development through the years. The study of the UK system of environmental regulation and land use planning was not a simple issue, and I was warned various times (for instance by Andrew Blowers at the Open University) that the legislation was highly complex and easily misinterpreted. I felt personally touched by such warnings and decided that I should perhaps approach the UK system a bit less as an evil empire and maybe be a bit more ‘objective’ in my appraisals. "The managerial thinker argues that environmental disputes should be solved by expert managers. The pluralist rejects debate and emphasizes the clash of interests. The communitarian, on the other hand, thinks that environmental problems need to be solved by local communities. Each of these lines of thinking ('discourses') emphasizes different institutions for decision making, sometimes democratic, sometimes not. Each discourse stresses a different set of arguments to legitimize a decision and contains wildly varying assumptions, for instance regarding the role of ordinary citizens in environmental issues." Hercules, Leviathan or Promotheus?....Pages 1-31 Knowledge, competition or dialogue?....Pages 33-80 Hazardous decisions....Pages 81-164 The UK: Political control with the benefits of judicial authority?....Pages 165-244 The Netherlands: participation through the court system....Pages 245-312 Canada: Community-based siting....Pages 313-390 Comparison of case studies....Pages 391-449 Summary and conclusions....Pages 451-477 This book is about taking good environmental decisions.