Strategic issues for facility provision: a re-examination of the NIMBY phenomenon

The conflict between the provision of facilities that provide public service and the community responses to those facilities is of crucial concern to those planning and managing such facilities. The NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) phenomenon exemplifies a community response to the provision of facilities intended to provide public service. The facilities may be provided either by government or the private sector. This paper uses content analysis to examine the language used in the public domain from a recent NIMBY case in Melbourne, Victoria and the NIMBY literature. The NIMBY literature contains approaches that treat the responses to facilities as reasoned and rational, the result of ignorance, or are irrational and selfish. A re-examination of the language used shows that this is a limited interpretation of the responses. The public domain language from the local newspaper provides a case study of the, particularly, community responses to the issue of facility provision. A number of response modes are possible, however, the language used in both instances suggests that affective responses are a dominant response mode. An understanding of affective responses to facility provision is important to providers of such facilities and the strategic management of their processes in planning for and providing service facilities.