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The public opinion literature examining the role of proximity and not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) attitudes in people's judgments about energy projects has come to inconclusive findings. We argue that these mixed results are due to vast differences and significant limitations in research designs, which we mitigate through a large study (n  = 16,200) of Americans' attitudes toward energy projects. Our approach examines a diverse set of energy projects in development, explicitly compares the attitudes of individuals living in the vicinity of projects with those farther away, and includes the careful measurement of the NIMBY concept. The analyses show little evidence that proximity in general or NIMBY objections in particular are important determinants of project support. Instead, other factors are more important, including perceptions of local environmental quality, risk orientation, concern about climate change, and trust in energy companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research on local siting conflicts are primarily about environmental threats. Following a boom during the two last decades of the 1900s, research on community opposition to the establishment of human services is a shrinking field with inadequate articulation and comparisons of various approaches. The aim of this research review is to critically scrutinize the first wave of research on local protests against human services and expose and contrast later approaches in order to lay the necessary groundwork for synthesis attempts. The first wave approach is characterized by its far-reaching generalization claims; all local protests against perceived social threats were seen as instances of Not In My Back Yard protests and as a function of general, hierarchically arranged attitudes toward client groups. By contrast, in later attempts to shed light upon neighbourhood protests, real life protests against the establishment of human services - not general attitudinal data - are focused upon. But the degree of contextualizing varies greatly within this more protest-centred research. The indirect approach is based on data that are collected in interviews with human service administrators and concern the extent and duration of neighbors' protests, while in the direct approach the protests are studied as such, and especially issues having to do with the local protests' ability to generate public support. In this article, the alternatives to the first wave of research on siting conflicts have been demonstrated for the first time and contrasted with each other. This is a necessary requirement and a first step for efforts to provide the syntheses that this research area so sorely needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bird populations are influenced by many environmental factors at both large and small scales. Our study evaluated the influences of regional climate and land-use variables on the Northern Harrier (Circus cyaneus), Black Tern (Childonias niger), and Marsh Wren [Cistothorus palustris) in the prairie potholes of the upper Midwest of the United States. These species were chosen because their diverse hábitat preference represent the spectrum of hábitat conditions present in the Prairie Potholes, ranging from open prairies to dense cattail marshes. We evaluated land-use covariates at three logarithmic spatial scales (1,000 ha, 10,000 ha, and 100,000 ha) and constructed models a priori using information from published hábitat associations and climatic influences. The strongest influences on the abundance of each of the three species were the percentage of wetland area across all three spatial scales and precipitation in the year preceding that when bird surveys were conducted. Even among scales ranging over three orders of magnitude the influence of spatial scale was small, as models with the same variables expressed at different scales were often in the best model subset. Examination of the effects of large-scale environmental variables on wetland birds elucidated relationships overlooked in many smaller-scale studies, such as the influences of climate and hábitat variables at landscape scales. Given the spatial variation in the abundance of our focal species within the prairie potholes, our model predictions are especially useful for targeting locations, such as northeastern South Dakota and central North Dakota, where management and conservation efforts would be optimally beneficial. This modeling approach can also be applied to other species and geographic areas to focus landscape conservation efforts and subsequent small-scale studies, especially in constrained economic climates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "Proximity, NIMBYism, and Public Support for Energy Infrastructure", written by David M. Konisky, Stephen Ansolabehere, and Sanya Carley, published in the Summer 2020 edition of the journal, is presented.

The article focuses on the report "The NIMBY Phenomenon: Listening to Community Residents' Concerns About Developing Housing for Deinstitutionalized People." It deals with NIMBY (not in my back yard) phenomenon. Using a naturalistic paradigm, the report gives interesting findings from the well-designed study based on actual cases of community opposition toward group homes in three Canadian communities. Although the NIMBY is as old and common a phenomenon as the history of most treatment and rehabilitation facilities in residential areas, the strength of this study is that it primarily focuses on community residents' viewpoints and perspectives. The study findings suggest several important implications for social work practitioners and social planners in the health care services field. In this study, the research design, data gathering technique, analytical and reconstructive scheme are extremely well done. However, there seems to be a lack of clarity in the case selection process.

As a social worker living in a fragile inner-city neighborhood, the author have acquired personal knowledge of the not-in-my-backyard process. Her experience involved the plans of three social services agencies that wanted to locate in or near her neighborhood. One plan was that of a city agency recommending a 100-bed detoxification center, one was a private corporation proposing a residential treatment program for 18 to 24 convicted juvenile offenders, and the third was a nationwide nonprofit agency wanting to develop a 160-bed homeless shelter. During the presentations from the three agencies, not one agency acknowledged even the remotest possibility of any negative impact on the neighborhood if their facility were to be located there. Even worse, the information presented about their programs and client populations was distorted and in some instances dishonest. Many large cities are ringed with inner-city slums, reducing the quality of life for all residents and the amount of money available to the city for needed services and social programs.