Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West

One of the most vexing problems for governments is building controversial facilities that serve the needs of all citizens but have adverse consequences for host communities. Policymakers must decide not only where to locate often unwanted projects but also what methods to use when interacting with opposition groups. In Site Fights, Daniel P. Aldrich gathers quantitative evidence from close to five hundred municipalities across Japan to show that planners deliberately seek out acquiescent and unorganized communities for such facilities in order to minimize conflict.

When protests arise over nuclear power plants, dams, and airports, agencies regularly rely on the coercive powers of the modern state, such as land expropriation and police repression. Only under pressure from civil society do policymakers move toward financial incentives and public relations campaigns. Through fieldwork and interviews with bureaucrats and activists, Aldrich illustrates these dynamics with case studies from Japan, France, and the United States. The incidents highlighted in Site Fights stress the importance of developing engaged civil society even in the absence of crisis, thereby making communities both less attractive to planners of controversial projects and more effective at resisting future threats.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent Book!

By CRB 22 NY "CRB 22" - February 13, 2008

It is rare to make an original contribution to such mature fields as social movements, state theory, and environmental politics, but Daniel Aldrich's comparative study of divisive facilities is one of the more satisfying books I have read in the past decade. Aldrich shows that states select communities with weak civil societies as sites for airports, dams, and nuclear reactors. Moreover, he shows that states develop their "toolkits" through their interaction with strong civil societies and move away from conventional coercive strategies. Playing both the "lion" and the "fox," strong societies foster sophisticated "machiavellian" state strategies that enable them to control contentious citizens.

The strength of Aldrich's argument comes out in his incisive analysis of variations across facility types and political contexts. The detailed studies of airports, dams, and nuclear reactors show that different facilities engender different political dynamics. Moreover, by... read more

Good work

By Jacob Yuroh Teshima "Jacob Y. Teshima" - May 5, 2012

The author has cool and objective eyes to observe the authentic pictures of Japan as she is. The work is excellent and his critique on Japanese society is fair. I expect his additional works to come.

Love it!

By Shirley Field - April 30, 2009

Daniel P. Aldrich's Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West is an extraordinarily comprehensive overview of the factors surrounding the placement of unwanted facilities in Japan and France, with some brief mention of conflicts that occurred in the United States. He focuses on three types of facilities in particular: dams, airports, and nuclear power plants. These facilities are both "public goods" and "public bads" in that they provide diffuse benefits to the majority of society in the form of clean drinking water, power, and transportation, but the create high costs that must be paid by a small, geographically isolated chunk of the population. His argument is a simple yet powerful one: civil society affects the placement of controversial facilities. He divides this argument into two main points. States handle initial conflict by avoiding areas with high levels of civil society and thus the most potential for resistance and, when encountering... read more