[site fights] Civil society capacity or jobs?

Moved from Great Tohoku Revival, 2011-7-4

In his book, Site Fights, Daniel Aldrich argues that "public bads" are sited where civil society is weakest, where local associations are least able to organize resistance. He blames Tokyo Electric Power's siting of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as an example. [p. 32]

However, there is a gap in his analysis. As a proxy for civil society capacity, Professor Aldrich uses the decline in employment in the primary sector between 1980 and 1995.

[Appendix 2, pp.200-201] I measured civil society capacity as the change in employment in the percentage of workers employed in the primary sector from 1980 through 1995. Fishermen and farmers constitute the bulk of employment in this sector (more than 98 percent), and their membership rates in associations and unions that regularly participate in siting procedures are close to 100 percent.

Professor Aldrich wants to measure the strength of civil associations and assumes that this strength is equivalent to employment share in industries with 100 percent association membership.

Professor Aldrich may simply be measuring the need for jobs. Although he writes that he finds little evidence that economic conditions determine siting outcomes [p. 28], his measure of civil society capacity itself uses an economic condition as a proxy.

In measuring employment share in the primary sector between 1980 and 1995, Professor Aldrich explicitly excludes mining. However, siting of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began in 1960 when Futaba, the town in which it was eventually sited, was "a backwater reeling from coal mining’s postwar decline" (Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times, 2011 April 2).

So Professor Aldrich's measure of civil society capacity may simply be a measure of unemployment stress.

Another odd aspect of Site Fights is that Professor Aldrich uses this independent variable measured between 1980 and 1995 to explain siting decisions that occurred decades earlier. I have always understood the definition of causality in the social sciences to require that the causing event occur before the caused event.