Coping with the “NIMBY Syndrome”: political issues related to the building of big infrastructures in liberal democracy countries

A typical feature of the modernization process, in every country and epoch, is the building of big infrastructures for industrial purposes, for example power plants, chemical factories, hazardous-waste treatment facilities, or related to the transport industry, such as railways, highways or airports. These facilities are crucial for social and economic development but present heavy externalities on the environment in terms of pollution, noise and waste disposal. While they are useful for a whole region or even for a whole country, their impact is very localized, so that only few local communities have to carry the burden for everybody. The people living around the places where these infrastructures are active, or where their building is planned, therefore, very often organize and perform protest activities against them and try to make pressure on the political decision-makers, using different actions and tools from a wide “repertoire of contention”, as in the words of C. Tilly. The aim of this article, starting from the presentation of recent data about the situation of these issues in Italy at the end of 2018 (Blanchetti-Seminario 2018), is to discuss their social and political consequences in liberal democracy countries, focusing in particular on the so-called “NIMBY syndrome” (Mazmanian – Morell 1990), its development and the strategies elaborated by public and private actors to cope with it.