Environmental conflicts management and production facilities location

Traditional decision making processes applied to facilities location often generates the “NIMBY” (Not In My BackYard) syndrome, so that local communities express strong opposition to some projects, in consequence of their supposed or real environmental impact. A lot of papers published on the matter were case studies, trying to identify key factors influencing the positive or negative conclusion of the environmental conflict. Those cases mainly refer to potentially unpleasant facilities such as roadways, waste treatment facilities, power plants, etc. Many factors indicate that some problems arising from social and environmental acceptability of a facility could also involve some categories of industrial production plants. In this paper, the authors report the main evidence in literature on this topic and identify the problems and the possible strategies involved in the siting process of a potentially unwanted facility that could also apply to the case of a production plant.