16. Protest, property rights and hazardous waste: a reassessment Robert Cameron Mitchell and Richard T. Carson INTRODUCTION In 1986 we published an article on the hazardous waste siting dilemma in which we identified the ambiguity of property rights as an important factor underlying the failure of siting proposals to get a considered hearing. We proposed that if government clarified who holds the property right to a hazardous waste site by granting prospective host communities veto power, this would create the context for a meaningful decision process. A key part of our proposal was that the community decision should be based on the outcome of a referendum rather than a vote by elected officials. In this chapter we assess the contemporary relevance of our proposal by reviewing the siting experience of the last 15 years. The first section presents the text of our 1986 American Economics Review Papers and Proceedings paper. In the second section we discuss two examples of de facto property right shifts to an affected public along the lines of our proposal. We also present the economic rationale for discrepancies between the willingness-to-pay measure of economic welfare change and the large will- ingness-to-accept amounts demanded by the public in these cases. In the following section we review the subsequent siting experience as presented in the literature. Although this literature has largely ignored our property rights analysis, we find that referendums have played a significant role in the few successes in siting hazardous waste facilities during this period. We consider the implications of this finding in our conclusion. PROTEST, PROPERTY RIGHTS AND HAZARDOUS WASTE The ambiguity of existing property rights that govern the siting of hazardous waste facilities 1 is an important cause of the stalemate in siting these facilities. What is called for is a new approach to siting. We suggest a political market, 368 Robert Cameron Mitchell and Richard T. Carson - 9781843762935 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 12/12/2021 07:44:06AM via free access