A Call for Clarity and a Review of the Empirical Evidence: Comment on Felman and Turner's ‘Why Not NIMBY?’

This response contributes to Feldman and Turner’s interesting discussion in two ways: firstly, it provides some clarity on the definition of the term ‘NIMBY’; and, secondly, it incorporates some of the actual empirical evidence of why people support and oppose renewable energy. Feldman and Turner’s paper is a welcome and valuable addition to the discussions on this topic. Support and opposition to renewable energy developments— particularly wind farms—has received extensive attention from across the social sciences. From the mid-1990s onwards, protests accompanying the development of wind farms attracted increasing interest. This early work tended to problematise opposition and sought ways to explain and overcome it. Since then—and particularly following the illuminating work of Maarten Wolsink in the Netherlands—academics have moved to more fully explore the reasons for support and protest. Rather than trying to remove opposition, the focus has been on the broader context in which people form their values and behaviors. Rather than decide whether protesters are NIMBYs or not, the focus has moved to how categorisations and accusations of NIMBYism are used in wind energy debates, and the effect of such accusations. This leads into the first point about the paper. While it is a useful discussion, it lacks clarity about the definition of the NIMBY claims and the claimants being considered. Feldman and Turner use the term NIMBY very loosely—at times to mean local people, at other times to include all forms of protest. This is not a merely pedantic point about language use. NIMBY is such a notorious and contested term that it cannot simply be used interchangeably for ‘opposition’ or ‘protest’ or any other phrase. Regardless of whether opposing a local development is ethical or not, the term NIMBY is not a neutral descriptor. Indeed, in her seminal and widely cited paper, Burningham (2000) argues that protesters being called ‘NIMBYs’ is a topic for academics to observe, not engage in themselves.