A sustainable solution to promote interest-based municipal solid waste management

With urban populations growing and consumption patterns changing, municipal solid waste (MSW) management has become an important issue of growing global concern (Marshall and Farahbakhsh, 2013). Additionally, greenhouse gas emissions related to waste have been recognized as a major contributor to global warming (Ren et al. 2022).

The “garbage besieged city” has become a major challenge for many cities in China due to rapid urbanization. According to the 2020 China Urban‒Rural Construction Statistical Yearbook, the amount of solid waste in county towns was 68.71 million tons in 2019, while the amount in cities was 241.08 million tons. Since 2014, the amount of municipal solid waste in China has increased by approximately 7% annually. A large amount of domestic waste demonstrates the significance of MSW management as one of the most important axes of sustainable development (Akbarpour Shirazi et al. 2016).

The methods for processing municipal waste include recycling, landfilling, composting, and incineration. Incineration is a safe, efficient, and cost-effective treatment procedure that has become the most common way to dispose of domestic waste in many developed countries. However, protests against waste-to-energy incinerators have been documented in a number of countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Greece, and France. Although China’s waste incineration industry has entered the era of “Blue Incineration 3.0”, some cities still suffer from the “NIMBY dilemma”. NIMBY means that citizens oppose the siting of facilities in their neighbourhoods for self-interested and parochial reasons (Esaiasson 2014). Since the first case opposing the MSW incineration plant in Beijing in 2006, China has witnessed numerous NIMBY movements in not only large cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen but also small and medium-sized cities. Unfortunately, most cases have ended with the victory of the opponents. The literature on China’s NIMBY is mainly explanatory, focusing on the discussion of the causes of failure (Yu et al. 2022). Therefore, MSW management has become one of the most critical public policy issues challenging state and local governments (Pinha and Sagawa 2020).

In fact, the NIMBY conflicts caused by anti-incinerator campaigns embody the social conflict of street-style collective action in China. Research on how the country responds to social unrest is abundant. At the theoretical level, it is widely assumed that centralized states tend to use repression to suffocate social conflicts that threaten regime stability (Zhan 2020). In practice, China’s social and political stability is rigid, with obvious campaign governance and organizational regulation. Specifically, local governments rely on their authority and institutional resource advantages, such as local forces, to suppress conflicts. However, outright suppression carries risks. On the one hand, it damages regime legitimacy and may fuel more resistance (Cai 2010). On the other hand, incinerator plants are public services that local governments must provide, and crude repression is not conducive as it has brought effects of demonstration of resistance to other areas. In recent years, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has put forward a policy path for the modernization of the national governance system and capacity, advocating the replacement of traditional government with governance. It remains an interesting research question to observe how the CPC-led government chooses to deal with social conflict. Unlike Western democracies that incorporate long-term popular struggles into political groupings through institutional mechanisms, the Chinese government uses more informal means such as compromise, repression, and financial incentives to discourage collective protests. In many cases of NIMBY conflicts in China, governments’ informal manners of dealing with protests are obviously not conducive to the sustainability of MSW management. Therefore, it is theoretically interesting to study how the Chinese local governments effectively deal with the NIMBY conflict in MSW management because it can enrich the theory of social conflict. On the other hand, this research is also necessary as it may provide useful cases for other similar scenarios.

With this in mind, we examine the local-governments’ sustainable solutions to MSW management using examples of successful cases of the NIMBY dilemma of waste incineration station construction. We chose Chinese cases for this study because, first, “stability maintenance politics” is the core characteristic of the country’s governance model. Therefore, it is of great theoretical significance to observe strategies to cope with resistance in the new era. Second, the existing studies on MSW management in China have all selected “destructive” cases, that is, they have studied the causes, processes, and solutions of the protests. All of the cases in this paper are “successful” cases, which ranged from NIMBY to YIMBY. YIMBY is a contrarian view formed in opposition to NIMBY (Brunes et al. 2020), meaning that the surrounding residents are willing to share their spaces with these facilities. This means that governments have changed their traditional conflict management strategies based on repression to seek sustainable solutions. We do not claim that the cases reported here represent the full spectrum of MSW management in China. However, these cases illuminate broader patterns of protest politics and local governance that have emerged in Chinese society.

The core question of this paper is what measures China, whose political system is different from that of Western democratic countries, should take to deal with the NIMBY attitude towards incineration stations to ensure the sustainable development of MSW management. In particular, the suppression of popular resistance has been abandoned by most modern countries in the world. We aim to answer the following three research questions:

RQ1: What conditions have prompted the Chinese government to adopt sustainable solutions to achieve the goal of effective MSW management?

RQ2: What is the critical conditions for sustainable solutions of MSW management?

RQ3: What does the sustainable solution of MSW management mean to the regime of China?

The present article is expected to contribute to the extant literature in several ways. First of all, the encompassing interest is embedded in the framework of social conflict theory; therefore, it expands the scope of social conflict theory and provides a theoretical reference for MSW management. Second, unlike previous studies that have taken NIMBY cases as the study objects, we attempt to expand the research content by comparing and analysing the configurations of YIMBY cases, discovering the “commonality” and “individuality” of MSW management. Last but not least, based on selected cases, social network analysis is used to break through the text interpretation of traditional qualitative analysis to a certain extent and this method can reveal the status and trend of MSW management more accurately.

The emerging circular economy provides a zero-waste management model through integrated waste recycling and technological digitization (Kurniawan et al. 2021). It can not only eliminate the adverse environmental and social impacts of MSW’s irresponsible or systematic waste disposal but also bring economic benefits to drive the sustainable development of MSW management (Thomas and Soren 2020). MSW management plays a vital role in the drive towards achieving sustainable development (Ikhlayel, 2018).

A large amount of literature has already examined the barriers to the implementation of MSW management. According to Asefi et al. (2020), pre-2000 studies identified deficiencies present in previous models developed in MSW management, such as greater emphasis on economic efficiency and ecological management, neglect of community and social welfare and inadequate understanding of the MSW management decision process from a multistakeholder perspective. Bui et al. (2020) identified some barriers to achieving sustainability in solid waste management, such as a lack of sufficient funds and hazardous waste. Developing countries are adopting policies to reduce the negative impacts of large amounts of waste generated by accelerated industrialization and rapid urbanization. However, a lack of regulations and supervision, ineffective management, insufficient funds and limited infrastructure, a lack of public participation, and inconvenient recycling facilities are the dominant barriers to MSW management in China (Xiao et al. 2018; Kumar and Dixit 2018; Conke 2018; Negash et al. 2021; Bui et al. 2022). In the study of Ma and Hipel (2016), the authors critically evaluated the published literature on the social dimensions of MSW management.

Recovering energy from waste is an important strategy to achieve MSW management. The combination of incineration with landfilling is the most popular approach for MSW treatment worldwide. An incineration system can maximize the benefits of renewable energy, and the generated electricity and heat can neutralize the energy demanded by the plant. To this extent, processes that transform waste into energy can provide renewable energy and make MSW management more sustainable (Tan et al. 2015). Although waste in developed countries is used as a resource for energy production, in developing countries, the collection, transportation and disposal of waste are still current issues. Many barriers, such as inadequate waste recovery and disposal methods, are obstacles to the development of waste to energy (Chand Malav et al. 2020). In many developing countries, governments have strengthened various environmental regulatory policies to restrain environmental pollution (Wang et al. 2023), and the main obstacle is attributed to the public’s lack of confidence and psychological acceptance.

There are still a few disadvantages of incineration, such as a high investment system, air pollution, additional costs incurred to overcome air pollution, and harmful furan and dioxin emissions (Majhi and Muhammad 2022). Since the earliest days of an identifiable environmental justice movement, waste management has been a focus of concern, both for grassroots protests (Stephens et al. 2001; Agyeman and Evans 2004) and for the empirical study of the systematic sociospatial distribution of facilities (Walker et al. 2003) and ensuing policy conflicts (Petts 2004). The construction of incineration stations in China often leads to a NIMBY movement. Since first proposed by O’Hare in 1987, numerous academic studies have focused on the NIMBY phenomena, looking at it from the viewpoints of facility sitting (Liu et al. 2022), breakthroughs in dilemmas, public movements (Cao 2022), and social acceptance (Lundheim et al. 2022). NIMBY is a reaction to the spatial asymmetry in the distribution of costs and benefits arising (Pelekasi et al. 2012).

The incineration protest movement in China has been concentrated in the first 15 years of the 21st century. NIMBY projects, such as waste incinerators, landfills, and substations, always incite public resistance and social conflicts (Dai et al. 2022). These cases illuminate broader patterns of protest politics that have emerged in Chinese society. The most common cases are the postponed construction of the Beijing Liulitun waste incineration power plant project in 2007, the site dispute of the Guangzhou Panyu in 2009 and the Hubei Xiantao in 2016 (Yang et al. 2018). In China, NIMBY movements have been described as rules-based activism and advocacy for better environmental governance (Johnson 2014). Most NIMBY movements stop when the projects are relocated to other places that are more remote and less populated.

Relevant studies have also analysed the current status and importance of public participation. Public participation is essential to solving NIMBY conflicts (Zhao et al. 2022). Public participation and trust in administrative decision-making are crucial for getting beyond NIMBY opposition to foster public support and achieve successful siting agreements (Krause et al. 2014). On this foundation, societal autonomy and government governance should collaborate to share power and responsibility for sustainable public governance.

The biggest empirical gap in the literature on such protests and outcomes is research on Asian societies, particularly China, where incinerator projects have provoked some recent collective protests. Only a few studies have examined the tactics of popular resistance or the Chinese regime’s suppression of protest (Cai 2008; Zhan 2020). However, we find that as the state of China continues to modernize, the government has increasingly turned to sustainable methods rather than repression to respond to protests. This change represents a breakthrough that has received less attention in the English literature.

Chinese authorities currently face the struggle of “being besieged by waste” and of “maintaining stability” (Lin and Xie 2019). The literature is always critical, focused on the attribution analysis of NIMBY conflicts, movements, and dilemmas. However, this is still insufficient to explain the current phenomenon of NIMBY. First, there are some cases of breakthrough NIMBY, but the explanation of theoretical research is not sufficient. There are only a few case-specific studies, so it is difficult to obtain a convincing proposal framework. Follow from that, the positive studies of YIMBY cases have also failed to break out of the confines of the existing NIMBY conflict research paradigm, resulting in little theoretical distinction between the constructive path and the critical path. Finally, with reference to unwanted consequences of facilities, the siting literature identifies several negative externalities: health concerns, environmental concerns, place attachment, and property value concerns (Dokshin 2020; Whittemore and BenDor 2019). The main foundation of the NIMBY syndrome is community residents’ perception of an imbalance between the benefits community residents will receive from the facility and the cost they will bear (Chung and Kim 2009). This means that it is necessary to develop an analytical framework on interests, including not only the community residents but also the government and firms. Consequently, it is still a worthy research topic to go beyond the NIMBY dilemma and to research the decision-making process of NIMBY facilities. This research can fill this gap.

There is still a lack of clarity regarding the barriers to the integration of MSW, involving multiple stakeholders and their responsibilities. Thus, academia does not provide a clear view of the barriers and critical success factors for sustainability and integration in MSW management. Another missing link in the existing narrative is the discussion about the nature of local governments’ actions. How do various actors construct “beyond NIMBY strategies” to realize their interest demands? Under what conditions would NIMBY movements transform from street mobilization into policy negotiation in a centralization regime? These two questions are related to two processes—one to create the possibility of encompassing interests from Olson and the other to potentially transform the movement from street mobilization to policy formulation.

In this paper, we propose a framework that aims to better characterize encompassing interests. This framework is based on the analysis of three types of interest that can be enhanced through the decision-making process: political incentives, social responsibility, and community development. The combination of these interests constitutes what we call an encompassing interest.

Research methods

Textual analysis and social network analysis were adopted in this research to set up a framework for converting NIMBY to YIMBY in the process of MSW management. To study the core problem of this paper, we establish a theoretical model for the transformation of MSW incineration projects from NIMBY to YIMBY. For this, a multivariable dynamic coupling process is required, and different local governments may take different actions in response to diverse circumstances and achieve different results.

The social network analysis method is adopted in this paper because it can effectively provide a framework for content mining and visual analysis based on lexical co-occurrence association. By extracting the subject words and their co-occurrence relationships from the text of the case news report and analysing the subject words and the correlation structure among the words, the community structure and evolution context of the content theme are visualized. In this way, we can obtain the connotation hidden in the content of the case to reflect the main direction, key areas, advancement, and future trends of NIMBY conflict governance caused by MSW management in recent years. First, the collected case texts are pre-processed to tag subject words, determine high-frequency words and detect burst words. Subsequenetly, the co-occurrence network of the topic vocabulary is constructed, and the analysis results of the network index, community division and visualization are obtained. In addition, from the perspective of theme distribution and correlation network structure, the position, function, and role of each word in the whole network and the overall connotation of the content are visually displayed to understand and explain the characteristics and regularities of sustainable MSW management.

Case selection

This article selects cases based on the following criteria: (1) The issue involving the waste incineration project has sparked significant public concern. The project was successfully relaunched, rather than choosing another location. (2) The relaunched project includes a complete life cycle process, that is, group protests, overcoming hurdles, and successful operations. In accordance with the case selection criteria, four common cases are selected for this article (in Table 1).

We chose these cases for three reasons: plentiful documentation on each case is available on websites and in local or national media; they demonstrate a range of successful strategies even in a centralized political system normally intolerant of opposition to government policies; and they can be used to test the explanations by Cai (2010) for the evolution of protest politics in China.

Data collection

This research employs the chosen cases as the key phrases and extracts relevant in-depth reports and reporter observations from mainstream media such as “People’s Daily”, “Guangming Daily”, “Nanfang Daily”, “Nanfang Weekend”, “Hubei Daily”, and “Xinhua Daily”. After careful study and comparison, 11 of the 36 relevant papers acquired for this article were eventually retained, forming approximately 40,000 words in Chinese text materials. UCINET 6.5 was used to edit, encode, and statistically analyse the build frequency data in our research.

It should be noted that the case of Beijing Chaoyang with three related news reports from official media was reserved for the robustness test. The case of Beijing Chaoyang follows the same case selection criteria. The purpose of this case is to test the robustness of the conclusion using the same method but with different materials, so it will appear until in robustness test.

The three fundamental components of our textual analysis are key actor extraction, social network analysis and subgroup construction. Key actor extraction is used to mine relevant concepts. Social network analysis is applied to research the relationships of actors in the networks. Subgroup construction is utilized to integrate and refine the main community networks.

Key actor extraction

This is the in-depth analysis of collected raw data and the identification of concepts and categories of findings for the purpose of displaying data categories. To maintain the objectivity of our research, it is vital to retain as many of the original terms that can be used as coding in the open coding process as possible. By continuously comparing, classifying, and generalizing relevant data, 69 key actors were obtained in this study.

Social network analysis

This study used social network analysis and selected UCINET 6.5 as the main analytical tool. Social network analysis is a method commonly used in sociology to analyse social actors and their relationships. This method expresses complex social networks through diagrams or matrices and uses mathematical tools such as graph theory and algebraic models, as well as software such as UCINET, to achieve quantitative analysis of social network relationships and the interaction among actors.

Network centrality is an indicator of the power and influence of agents in the network. There are three forms of centrality, namely, degree centrality, closeness centrality and betweenness centrality. The calculation of degree centrality sums all the relationships of the actors in the network, and this value is used to measure the influence of actors in the network. Closeness centrality is a measure of the centrality of an actor based on the distance of related actors. This means that the closer an actor is to the rest of the network, the higher the closeness centrality. The calculation formula is \(C_i = \left[ {\mathop {\sum}\nolimits_{j = 1}^n {d_{ij}} } \right]^{ - 1}\), where \(C_i\) is the closeness centrality of actor i and \(d_{ij}\) is the distance from i to j. Betweenness centrality is a measure of the actor’s ability to act as a medium in the network. The calculation formula is \(C_b(n_i) = \mathop {\sum}\nolimits_j^n {\mathop {\sum}\nolimits_k^n {g_{ik}} } (n_i)/g_{jk}\), where \(C_b\left( {n_i} \right)\) represents the betweenness centrality of actor i in a network with \(n\) actors. \(g_{ik}\left( {n_i} \right)\) represents the number of shortcuts passing through i between actors \(k\) and \(j \,\cdot\, g_{ik}\) represents the number of shortcuts between actors k and j, where \(k \,\ne\, j \,\ne\, i\) and \(j \,<\, k\).

The specific variable selection summary is shown in Table 2 below.

Subgroup construction

Subgroups are formed by considering how an actor interacts with another actor. Essentially, the decomposed text data is integrated through one or more clues. In this research, to define the characteristics of story development, we refined the main subgroups with high generalization by combining categories. Our research focuses on the solution to the NIMBY dilemma. The subgroups abstracted from related dilemma breakthroughs are refined into three main categories: project planning-adjustment, project decision-making, and project building-operation. The exact link is depicted in Table 3.

This article used 8 as the threshold for high-frequency word screening and merged the words below the threshold into their synonyms or superordinate words. A total of 69 words were obtained for subsequent analysis. Statistical analysis revealed that the total frequency of 69 words reached 64%, indicating that the actors represented by these words are the key to transitioning from NIMBY to YIMBY. Then, using 69 key actors to construct a co-word matrix, 513 actual relationship numbers were formed, and three subgroups were extracted, as shown in Table 4. In the subgroup of “Project Planning -Adjustment”, there are 17 key actors and 47 ties among them, the \(C_a\) is 28.2. In the subgroup of “Project Decision-Making”, there are 34 key actors and 324 ties among them, the \(C_a\) is 38.9. In the subgroup of “Project Building-Operation”, there are 18 key actors and 142 ties among them, the \(C_a\) is 33.9. By comparing these data, it can be found that “Project Decision-Making” played a much more important role.

Regarding the average degree, the values of the three subgroups are relatively balanced, indicating that the work of transitioning from NIMBY to YIMBY requires the joint promotion of three aspects. However, the average degree of project decision-making is the highest, which indicates the importance of this subgroup in MSW incineration plants in recent years.

On the other hand, the network indicators of vocabulary illustrate its position, function, and role in the network (see Table 5). Construction, sharing, communication, mechanism, economic benefits, and understanding appear in the top 10 list of degree centrality and closeness centrality. These factors have been the focus of recent years and have a strong impact on other factors. At the same time, the list of betweenness centrality shows that most of the above words play a certain role as a “bridge” in the entire network. That is, when there are intersections or interactions between influencing factors, the above vocabulary cohesion or coordination is required to a large extent.

As shown in Table 5, “Construction” ranks first among the key actors, whose \(C_d\) is 59, \(C_i\) is 88.312, and \(C_b\) is 26.841. These indicators are far higher than other key actors, which means that in the text of news reports, “Construction” appears most frequently and has the highest correlation with other elements. “Understanding” ranks sixth on the list of key factors, whose \(C_d\) is 29, \(C_i\) is 62.963, and \(C_b\) is 4.596. It is noteworthy that the betweenness centrality of “Understanding” is lower than “Construction” but higher than others. As a bridge, “Understanding” has a strong interactive ability to intervene and control the information transmission of other actors. In other words, many actors need to pass information through it. This is because only based on “Understanding” can other elements be continuously advanced.

These words express three basic principles for the transition from NIMBY to YIMBY. One is the role of government departments; that is, public risk communication under the intervention of political parties can be better implemented. The second is to adhere to the development concept of benefit sharing, and for the facilities to provide feedback to surrounding residents. The third is transparency and openness in the process of facility construction.

For local government leaders, the “garbage besieged city” is a problem that must be solved. Especially after the emergence of mass incidents, the effects of the demonstration of people’s protests have a major impact, and ex situ rehabilitation is quite likely to trigger a new round of NIMBY conflicts. In this respect, in situ rebuilding is a pragmatic option. In China, local government officials generally possess exceptional organizational mobilization and resource allocation capabilities, and the interests of the public are typically better served when a project attains “top-level project” status. In our case, the municipal government of Hangzhou allocated 1000 mu of land and approximately 2.1 billion yuan of special funds to meet the development needs of surrounding communities. In Chaonan, an ecological compensation strategy of “whoever suffers should be compensated by the offenders” was promoted so that the nearby village could earn approximately 5 million yuan annually. These amendments to the original planning documents reflect the local government’s commitment to promoting MSW incineration projects.

Robustness test

The above analysis concludes that key actors positively and significantly impact MSW incineration projects. When local authorities adopt these actions, resistance behaviour from residents will decrease, while constructive behaviour will increase. To verify the robustness of the results, by encoding three reserved reports about Chaoyang in Beijing in the same way, the results show that no new concepts and categories appeared, nor were any new logical relationships found. This indicates that the text information encoded above has fully accommodated the relevant concepts and categories. Therefore, the mechanism model of MSW management constructed in this article has passed the saturation test, which further shows that the previous conclusion is stable.

This article visually displays the influencing factors and network structure of incineration projects from NIMBY to YIMBY in the process of MSW management. Deeply revealing the hidden connotations of the four cases shows a sustainable way to promote MSW management. The main directions, key areas, and future trends of China’s NIMBY governance in recent years have been clearly revealed. The results of this study, to a certain extent, break through the traditional qualitative analysis of text interpretation. Another very important point is that this article demonstrates that in a centralized regime, nonoppressive methods can still be adopted to effectively respond to resistance through the behaviour choices of China’s local authorities in dealing with NIMBY conflicts.

Conclusions

The first conclusion is that the encompassing interests formed by local governments, neighbouring communities, and operating enterprises in MSW incineration projects reconstruct the incentive mechanism for breaking through from NIMBY to YIMBY. The concept of encompassing interests, which causes people to care about the long-term stable growth of the whole society, comes from Mancur Olson (1965). In Olson’s theoretical framework, “selected incentives” are the motive mechanism for interest groups to escape the collective action dilemma. In contrast to Olson’s pessimistic perspective on the general results of government actions, this study demonstrates that formal organizational authority is the basis for encompassing the interests of MSW incineration projects. After the occurrence of NIMBY conflict, which has caused enormous social costs, much more effort is needed to successfully achieve the restoration of the original site. From our cases, project decision-making as a subgroup has the most nodes and the most complex social network structure, which means that the cost of revising decisions is extremely high. Most of the existing research have provided countermeasures for risk resolution from the perspective of conflict, but this article focuses on policy improvement when conflicts arise, which may be more valuable than “public acceptance in the possible sites” (He et al. 2021).

Next, the study has shown that the government has played a greater role than the market in the MSW management process in China. The cases from China show the effective operation from market failure to government intervention. This means that in the field of China’s environment, the government’s macro policies and intervention behaviours are some of the very important influencing factors. Wang et al. (2023) also shows new evidence to prove the impact of political connections on firm pollution in China. We do not deny the positive significance of the market in the waste management process because the construction and operation of incineration stations depend on market-based firms. However, based on our cases, the early planning of incineration stations, negotiations with surrounding interest groups, and operational supervision are far beyond the ability of firms. The government plays a role in two aspects of this issue. First, the authorities are the representatives of public interests, and incineration stations are a very important public facility for MSW management, so the government has the obligation to provide such facilities for residents. Second, the Chinese government belongs to the category of strong government and has the ability to allocate resources to solve public conflicts. Therefore, it can be found that the successful construction of incineration stations is based on the redistribution of interests, including ensuring the employment of surrounding residents, introducing industries, and constructing convenient facilities.

This leads to the third conclusion, which is why the government takes a redistributive approach based on interests. It is widely assumed that states, especially authoritarian states, more often forcefully repress resistance (Davenport and Christian 1995). However, we find that local authorities do not repress resistance. Instead, they generously hand out social security benefits and share industrial achievements with surrounding residents to appease aggrieved citizens. From the structure of the social network among the actors, we find that China’s local authorities have adopted governance approaches to deal with social conflicts, which finally successfully promoted the effective management of MSW. Why should the Communist-led government take a soft approach to the conflict rather than a tough one? On the one hand, with the development of the internet, tough repression will be widely spread through the network, seriously affecting China’s national image, which has a serious impact on the promotion of local officials. On the other hand, China has increasingly strengthened the construction of law in recent years, and there are many cases in which local governments have become the target of lawsuits. Although maintaining stability is still one of the important tasks of local authorities, how to handle the relationship with the public has also become an important proposition for local officials. Fundamentally, these behaviours are still based on interests, and it cannot be denied that this represents major progress in Chinese society. How to make order from chaos (Shen and Wang 2023) is a difficult question for any regime worldwide. China’s local authorities have adopted interest-based approaches to deal with conflicts, and the government has a strong capacity, which is a result of what are still the core values of a culture that is millennia old. As a result, scholars have been trying to construct a narrative logic for Chinese stories.

Policy recommendations

The results of this study also have implications for policy recommendations. On the one hand, the government can provide background and policy advantages to promote MSW management. In addition to green finance policies such as fiscal funds and tax relief for incineration stations, it can provide strong support in terms of communication with the public and construction planning to encourage firms to enter MSW management earlier. Nevertheless, sustainable MSW management would require an integrated approach to designing and implementing management activities from source to landfill site that would link and engage all stakeholders. This study indicates that the financing of MSW management would depend on the effective management of MSW. Hence, local authorities should build a bridge between incineration stations and surrounding residents. In this way, sustainable measures based on interests are the result of the mutual game of many parties.

On the other hand, China’s waste incineration technology has been well developed, but the economic and social problems it faces in the process of building waste incineration stations and the strategies to solve them can provide experience for other countries. Unplanned settlements, poor infrastructure, inadequate resources and capacities, and low levels of awareness among municipal residents are making MSW management even more complex. Many developing countries, such as India and South Africa, do not have advanced waste-to-energy facilities or systems to operate to their full potential of utilizing energy from waste (Dlamini et al. 2019). Even in developed countries, a series of protests against NIMBY projects have taken place in the UK (Kirkman and Voulvoulis 2017), Japan (Uji et al. 2021), and Korea (Kim et al. 2013). In this sense, the conflict resolution methods based on encompassing interests presented in our cases can provide a good reference for other countries for sustainable and integrated MSW management, which has become an issue of growing global concern.

Limitations

First, as the core of textual analysis, researchers should have the ability to extract concepts and categories from massive amounts of data. Obviously, it is difficult to be value neutral because it is closely related to the researcher’s worldview, position, and circumstances. For instance, different researchers will present different results about the key actors consolidated into 3 subgroups. Another limitation is, the analysis of vocabulary and its co-occurrence relationship is only a perspective for text content mining. This perspective cannot incorporate more features of vocabulary, sentences, and other content into the analysis category. This may lead to situations where the deep connotation of the transition from neighbour avoidance to neighbour acceptance may not be effectively recognized, thereby reducing the reliability of the study. How to adopt more effective research methods to draw more scientific and accurate conclusions may still be deeply explored. All these factors will be further improved in the future.

Despite these limitations, the paper contributes to the literature in the sense that it provides a profile of policy improvement when conflicts arise in the process of MSW management. Additionally, the cases illustrate the current levels of emphasis on the topic. The cases also provide a framework proposal for the construction of MSW incineration plants.