Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Resource Economics

Dissertation of Alexander Perez Carmona

Ex ante Institutional Alignments to NIMBY Problems: The siting of sanitary landfills in Colombia

Start: April 07
End: June 13

The core idea of the project is to analyze the determinants that led five communities in Colombia to oppose successfully the siting of final waste disposal facilities such like sanitary landfills. The analysis includes their interactions with environmental administrators, project developers and other actors that have been relevant in the conflicts within and outside the legal frame provided by the environmental legislation. Collective action against projects beneficial for the society at large but opposed by communities which bear the costs is known in the literature as the not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) syndrome. However, collective action does not emerge spontaneously when a community is facing a perceived threat. What are the organizational features binding protesters? Do politics, economical issues and ideology play a role by opposing a landfill siting? Do violent groups interfere in the landfill siting efforts of the government? They are some of the questions that this project addresses. The analytic strategy is based on the case study approach and the techniques of the grounded theory methodology. The methods of data collection are semi structure face-to-face interviews, focus group interviews and the revision of documentary data. The own developed concepts will be compared with those of the NIMBY literature.

Researcher: Perez Carmona, Alexander

Advisors: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Konrad Hagedorn and Dr. Volker Beckmann

Funding: Deutscher Akademischer Auslandsdienst (DAAD)


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