This study examined the factors affecting public acceptance of the designation of areas in the Recycling Demonstration Project for Soil Generated from Decontamination Activities. The designated areas are requested to receive the soil collected after the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. This introduces what typically known as a Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) issue, which dominates around the inequitable allocation of a given burden and hinders the building of consensus. This study assumed that allocating the burden to multiple locations instead of only one location would increase acceptance. An experiment was conducted which presented a scenario manipulating the burden allocation amongst a sample of adults requited from all over Japan. The results revealed that participants who were allocated to the multiple-locations condition evaluated the situation as having less inequity, fewer risks and stigma, and a fairer procedure, as well as being more acceptable than those who were allocated to the one-place condition.

Measures of sustainability-related participatory programs vary according to social and cultural contexts. Thus, this study proposed a stepwise participatory program in which stakeholders and randomly chosen citizens (citizen panels) were repeatedly and sequentially involved, and the citizen panels discharged discrete functions through all the planning stages. Procedural and outcome fairness was focal to the evaluation of the participatory program because these criteria are widely deemed essential for public acceptance. Evaluation by nonparticipants was imperative because of the limited number of participants, but sustainability plans affect and mandate the cooperation of the general public. Therefore, this study undertaken during the revision of the city of Sapporo’s environmental master plan compared evaluations of nonparticipants with those of participants from three stages of the stepwise participatory program applying backcasting scenario workshops. A two-wave mailout survey was administered to test two hypotheses: (a) workshop participants would evaluate the acceptance, process, outcome, and antecedent factors more positively than nonparticipants, and (b) procedural fairness and evaluation of expected outcomes would affect acceptance. The results supported these hypotheses. Procedural fairness was associated with acceptance most robustly and consistently. The study’s primary contribution to the extant literature entails accumulating empirical evidence on stepwise participatory programs.

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Getting back to daily lives from the difficult-to-return zone and cog nitive g aps reg arding the rem oved soil

This study aims to demonstrate the significance of the discussion under the "veil of ignorance" in building consensus about the Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) issue. The Siting for a Contaminated Waste Landfill Game simulating conflicts related to the site selection of a contaminated waste landfill created by the accident at Fukushima nuclear power plant was developed with the veil of ignorance implemented as the prevailing social structure. The game involves two types of players: mayors, who are aware of the interests of their regions but can only engage in discussion; and citizens, who are unaware of the specific concerns of their regions (i.e., under the veil of ignorance) but are tasked with engaging in discussions and making the final decision. The transformations in the ideas of the players were examined through this game relating to building consensus. Ten games were conducted, and no unfair decisions were discerned under the veil of ignorance. A qualitative analysis of the open-ended questions revealed that a) the participants focused on fair viewpoints and avoided obsessions with regional interests after the discussion, and b) the diversity of actors and the multiple value dimensions were consistently emphasized before and after the discussion. Hence, this study succeeded in demonstrating that by participating in discussions under the veil of ignorance, the participants were able to form a shared recognition of the multiple-decision process, which the involvement of a diversity of actors and values was crucial for the formation of a consensus on the NIMBY issue.