Although environmental infrastructure is a prerequisite facility for the life of urban community, it often causes lots of community conflicts with its facility location. Due to ever-serious problems of environmental pollution as time goes by, there ar...
Although environmental infrastructure is a prerequisite facility for the life of urban community, it often causes lots of community conflicts with its facility location. Due to ever-serious problems of environmental pollution as time goes by, there are rapidly increasing demands for the installation of facilities called environmental infrastructure including waste incinerator and landfill. Even though both waste incinerator and landfill are facilities required for our daily life, they have faced stronger resistance from local communities around their expected location. These environmental infrastructures, despite their advantages in creating salubrious environment for local communities, often cause conflicts of local interests, because local communities in the vicinity of those facilities are still concerned about living discomforts(e.g. malodor, noise, dust, etc), unreasonable exclusion of parties concerned in facility location, depreciation of real estate, inconsistency between benefits and cost, risk awareness and uncertainty. Long-term continuance of those conflicts would cause a waste of resources, which could have been otherwise used for more productive purpose, and result in side effects involving a considerable socioeconomic loss.
Based on actual conflict cases found in the course of selecting location of environmental infrastructure, the purpose of this study is to seek possible ways to relieve those conflicts and run the infrastructure cost-effectively by means of trouble-shooting mechanisms. This study focused on why the conflicts result from location of environmental infrastructure, why the conflicts are not relieved but evolve into legal disputes, which procedures the project principal shall take and go through to relieve the conflicts, and whether there is any positive result of efforts to relieve conflicts between major two parties concerned, i.e. local government and communities.
This study addressed fundamental causes of conflicts, trouble-shooting mechanisms and failure mechanisms by means of case analysis on actual location dispute cases in Korea(e.g. food waste recycling facilities in Bukgu district office, Ulsan; waste incinerator in Gunpo city; waste incinerator in Nowon-gu district, Seoul; waste incinerator in Jaecheon city; waste treatment plant extension project between Guri and Namyangju city) and foreign countries(e.g. waste incinerator in Brooklyn, NY, USA; Eau Claire Waste Landfill in Wis., USA; Wilsonville Waste Treatment Plant, IL, USA; Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, NH, USA; Port Bristol Reclamation Project, Avon, UK; waste incinerators in Japan). Based on these case analyses, this study exemplified the Clean Energy Park(Iryu- myeon, Chungju city, Chungbuk, Korea) to review associated problems in the course of selecting location of environmental infrastructure, deduce possible solutions, and suggest policy-level implications.
As a result, it is found that the aspect of conflict management should be considered as higher priority, although relieving conflicts is also important in regard to conflicts associated with location of environmental infrastructure. In past, conflicts in selecting location of environmental infrastructure were a hot potato. But now, situational conflicts upon or after selecting location are considered so much critical, which necessitates ongoing management of conflicts. The location of Clean Energy Park, a local environmental infrastructure in Chungju city, has potential ongoing effects on land use of Iryu-myeon area, and always involves local community's potential conflicts with the facility in terms of their life within influential area. Hence, this study came to a conclusion that it is requisite to build up a comprehensive conflict management system incorporating proactive prevention and responsive management.