ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses three questions: What is the landfill siting problem in the state of Rhode Island? To what extent does a case study of the landfill siting problem support Steven Kelman's view of separate domains for environmental values and public policy analysis? How does one teach a nitty-gritty case study on landfills and develop from it some more general ideas for public policy analysis? Kelman suggests that people may hold values in both the domain of environmental values and the domain of economic values, that there is a tension between the two domains, and that people switch between the two in a sequential way. The students were also sympathetic to the not in my back yard (NIMBY) cries from the poorer communities, which were in danger of having the site forced upon them. In a simple version of the story, we imagined that each citizen has NIMBY preferences and each legislator reflects the preferences of his or her town.
