The pitfalls of implementing Host Community Compensation: A power balance perspective

Siting national infrastructure is a challenge for planning institutions due to recurrent low public acceptance and opposition by civil society. The use of Host community compensation (HCC) presents a possible solution for this challenge. HCC is compensation that a developer provides to a community in return for the siting of infrastructure. Yet, despite wide support for HCC, many such initiatives seem to fail. Those that do manage to have a good start in reaching an agreement suffer from neglected implementation. This study examines the factors that affect the willingness of stakeholders to suggest, accept and later implement the use of HCC. The study argues that HCC is a continual process which should be implemented against the backdrop of changing interests and power balances between stakeholders. The evolving power balance between stakeholders is argued to critically influence the acceptability of HCC and its implementation. By examining a 40-year-long case of HCC along the Israeli coast, the study suggests that the power balance fluctuates along the years as a function of external variables such as resource scarcity and internal factors such as stakeholders' cohesion, leadership and skills. Different power balance settings yield different settings of willingness to offer, accept or implement HCC, each with its own HCC institutional design. However, once HCC is formed and designed, path dependency makes it much harder for civil society to repair a flawed HCC architecture.