Explaining Participation in Local Opposition: A Case of Lignite Mining in North Bohemia

We analyze a case of local opposition to lignite mining in North Bohemia – a region with large open-pit mining sites. Mining activities in the region have been accompanied by energy production and industry, creating a devastated landscape and environmental degradation. An opposition to lignite mining activities formed as early as in 1980’s and culminated soon after fall of Iron Curtain in 1991 when territorial limits restricting the mining activities were set by a governmental decree. These boundaries have been challenged ever since, instigating a formation of an environmental movement opposing breaching of the territorial limits. The movement was depicted as a case of “Not-In-My-Back-Yard” (NIMBY) syndrome in public discourse. However, most of the literature on local opposition distances itself from the NIMBY framework which is based on a “paradox” that while a certain project or technology is in principle supported by the majority of the population, its proposed realization is often strongly opposed by local residents. This “social gap” is explained as a result of individually rational actions where individual costs substantially overweight individual benefits which leads to a collective suboptimal outcome. Besides the NIMBY framework, there is a number of approaches that take into account a wide variety of factors that extend beyond the rationalist perspective and explain local opposition as a result of a complex interplay of various context-dependent factors and tend to stress non-individual levels of explanation. We build on this research while focusing on the role of social networks as mobilization structures while taking into account information exchange and long-term cooperation ties. The paper aims to explore attribute and relational factors that drive individual participation in local opposition through an application of autologistic actor attribute modeling.