Locational Conflict (NIMBY)

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C. Gorter and P. Nijkamp

Locational Conflict (NIMBY)

Locational conflict arises when individuals or groupsbelieving themselves to be negatively affected expressopposition to a locational or siting decision made byothers. As an expression of protest or oppositionwithin the public sphere, locational conflict representsa political manifestation of a geographical conflictover locational decision-making. Conflict may beinitiated by the siting or locational designation of afacility, activity or land use believed by an affectedparty to be noxious, hazardous, undesirable, stigma-tizing, or unwanted for any of myriad other reasons.Such targets of conflict have been dubbed locallyunwanted land uses, or LULUs, by Popper (1985).

NIMBY, an acronym for Not In My Backyard, is acolloquial expression of locational conflict, articulat-ing the sentiment that certain activities, facilities orland uses should be located elsewhere (not in mybackyard) because of real or perceived negative effectsof the sited activity on the surrounding area.NIMBYism, often referred to as the NIMBY syn-drome, refers to the common or widespread opposi-tion to change in one’s surroundings associated withthe introduction of an activity or land use thought tobring negative consequences. The term NIMBY isoften used, by extension, to refer both to individuals orgroups that habitually or expectedly oppose change inthe local environment and to the unwanted land use orfacility to be sited. In common usage, NIMBYismpejoratively connotes a reactionary parochialismbased on self-interested, and thus possibly biased,perceptions. Locational conflict, in contrast, embraces

a broader range of perspectives encompassing struc-tural and systemic as well as perceptual causes andallowing for conflict to be liberating rather than simplyreactionary in certain circumstances. This range ofapproaches, their conceptual origins, and means ofconflict resolution are examined in this article, afterdescribing the spatial and temporal dimensions oflocational conflict.

1. Spatial and Temporal Dimensions

The relatively site-specific character of locationalconflict differentiates it from relatively a-spatial formsof political expression such as social movements,protest movements, and even geopolitical territorial orjurisdictional conflicts. Individual sites of locationalconflict, however, may seek coalitions with conflictparticipants in other locations to form aggregate socialor protest movements covering wide geographicregions. Local advocacy groups in the USA andelsewhere, opposed to the siting of environmentallyhazardouswaste treatment facilities, for example, havebecome adept at forming broad-based coalitionsseeking to alter regulatory provisions governing wasteproduction, treatment, and disposal at regional andnational scales.

Inherently geographic, locational conflict andNIMBYism are frequently manifested at the localscale of the immediate neighborhood or district inwhich deleterious effects of a proposed facility oractivity are concentrated and experienced. If oneconceptualizes the negative effects as an externalitygenerated by the proposed facility (e.g., the smoke andparticulates expelled through a factory’s smokestackand falling on the surrounding neighborhood), thenthose effects can be mapped onto a spatial externalityfield defining the area of impact (Cox and Johnston1982). Locational conflict is often relatively local inscale since such externality effects usually attenuatesharply with distance. Conflict also becomes manifestat larger spatial scales, often depending on geographi-cal circumstances of adjacency or propinquity. Aproposal to site a noxious facility near a municipal orregional border, for example, may generate locationalconflict between the abutting jurisdictions. Proposalsto site solid waste disposal facilities that will acceptwaste from multiple jurisdictions often generate oppo-sition to the importation of waste from distantlocations, expanding the conflict over a sizable area.Locational conflict has similarly emerged at thenational scale over proposals to export hazardouswaste from western industrialized nations to less-developed countries and over the migration of noxiouseffects, such as air or water pollution, across in-ternational boundaries. Concerns over the worldwideeffects of climate change attributed to material prac-tices in high-consumption nations can be understoodas locational conflict at the global scale.

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Locational conflict is not a uniquely recent phenom-enon nor one exclusively associated with highly indus-trialized societies. Analysis of newspaper accounts oflocational conflicts in nineteenth-century Worcester,Massachusetts (Meyer and Brown 1989) found thatthe frequency of reported conflicts on a per capitabasis was essentially the same in Worcester in the1870s as occurred in the 1970s in Vancouver, BritishColumbia (Ley and Mercer 1980), London, Ontario(Janelle 1977), and Columbus, Ohio (Cox andMcCarthy 1980). The location of rendering plants,slaughter houses, and saloons generated protest in thenineteenth century, while waste incinerators, homelessshelters, and low-cost housing frequently motivatedopposition in the late twentieth century. A vexing newproblem for local officials is the location of cellulartelephone towers, which are sometimes disguisedinside church steeples or building cupolas to avoidprotests over visual blight. In general, however, whilethe targets of conflict have changed to reflect changesin technology, economic activity, and society at large,the intensity of conflict was no less virulent a hundredyears ago than it is today.

The perceptual basis of locational conflict exhibitsboth change and continuity over time. Newly industri-alizing cities of the nineteenth century provided acontext in which proximity to the coal smoke andpollution emitted by mills and factories was perceivedas beneficial, no doubt due to an association withsteady employment and economic prosperity (Meyerand Brown 1989). In contrast, public awareness of thehealth hazards of industrial activity is one of the mostfrequent sources of locational conflict today. A com-mon focus of protest in 1870s Worcester were themillponds which, despite their obvious economicimportance, were thought to generate ‘miasma,’ be-lieved to be a disease-bearing atmospheric poisonproduced by decaying organic matter (Meyer andBrown 1989). The parallel to today’s conflicts oversitingwaste incinerators is striking. Both themillpondsthen and the incinerators noware considered necessaryadjuncts to essential economic activity but both wereand are also perceived to present risks to health andthe environment. Both, consequently, are said toproduce the NIMBY syndrome: yes, society needs thefacility – but Not In My Backyard.

2. Antecedents and Conceptual Approaches

Formal analysis of locational conflict by Americangeographers began in the early 1970s as an extensionof classical economic location theory. Classicaltheories of industrial and residential location presen-ted a model of locational choice by autonomous units(firms or households) seeking to maximize individualutility functions within budget constraints. Politicalgeographers such as Kevin Cox and his students atOhio State University challenged the assumption of

autonomous locational decision-making by recogniz-ing that individual utilities are not independent of theexternality effects produced by the locational decisionsof others (Cox and McCarthy 1980). Conflict ensueswhen the utility of a locational choice is diminished bythe negative externalities generated by the locationalchoices of others. This extension of traditional lo-cation theory shifted analysis away from individuallocational choice towards a focus on the manipulationof the spatial distribution of externalities, that is, onattempts to exclude negative externalities and attractpositive ones. While classical location theory addres-sed individual locational decision-making within aframework of economic rationality, locational conflicttheory examines collective strategies for the protectionand enhancement of neighborhood quality within aframework of collective political action. As a result,the focus of analysis moved from the economic to thepolitical arena, from individual choice to collectiveaction, and from locational decision-making to loca-tional conflict as a politics of turf.

The view of locational conflict as turf politics,however, retains an axiomatic assumption of tra-ditional location theory. The central assumption inthis behavioral approach is that conflict arises when alocational decision perceived as beneficial by some isperceived negatively by others. While focus has shiftedto collective action, the impetus for political engage-ment still resides in the individual’s perception ofpositive or negative consequences associated with aproposed locational decision. The active agent is theautonomous individual whose behavior is guided by aunique calculus of perception, whether locationalconflict is situated within an individual choice frame-work of conflicting utilities or in the pluralist politicsof neighborhood change.

Situated at the level of conflicting perceptions, thebehavioral approach to locational conflict rarelyconsiders why changes occur in local areas such thatconflict arises over their perceived positive or negativeconsequences. A structuralist approach views loca-tional conflicts as symptomatic of fundamental con-tradictions situated within the basic structure ofsociety. Locational conflicts, in this view, are merelysurface manifestations of deep-seated conflicts in-herent in the extant system of social organization (Coxand McCarthy 1980). Within a structural mode ofexplanation, negative externalities are not viewedsimply as evidence of market imperfections subject tocorrection but rather are understood as necessary andinevitable consequences of class relations within theprocess of capital accumulation.

Identifying the particular structural contradictionsthat become manifest as locational conflict, however,is itself a subject of conflict and disagreement. In oneview, the inherent contradiction between labor andcapital generates contradictory orientations to neigh-borhoods, such that labor’s attachment to place basedon the neighborhood’s use value conflicts with capi-

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tal’s investment interest based on the neighborhood’sexchange value. Locational conflict, in this frame-work, arises from the fundamental antagonism be-tween labor and capital with respect to neighborhoodchange. In another view, locational conflict is situatedwithin the incessant competition between factions ofcapital, and results when the expansionary interests ofmobile capital conflict with the exclusionary interestsof capital already fixed in place (Plotkin 1987). Forexample, existing investors seeking to exclude po-tential new competitors may resist a shopping centerdeveloper’s search for new investment sites. Bridgingthese two approaches is a third view in which labor’sattachment to neighborhood erects a barrier to con-tinued accumulation of capital. In response, capitalencourages long-running societal processes—thehomogenization of space, pervasive ideologies ofmaterialism and consumerism, media manipulationand mass education, and increasing residential mo-bility, among other contributing factors—whichsucceed in transforming neighborhoods from com-munities into commodities and, consequently, trans-forming labor’s attachment to community into anorientation based on protecting neighborhood ex-change value (Cox 1981). Now locational conflictoccurs when the exchange value interests of capitaland labor fail to coincide as, for example, when a landdeveloper’s proposal for a shopping center generatestraffic and pollution that threaten to reduce the resalevalue of surrounding homes.

More recently, a post-structuralist approach hasemerged that situates locational conflict within theantagonistic discursive or representational strategiesof contending groups vying for control over the use ofspace, where such control is an expression of politicalpower. Rejecting the view of space as simply acontainer for action, this approach, influenced by thework of Lefebvre (1991) and others, considers thesocial and political process through which the meaningand use of space are constructed in particular in-stances. Now locational conflict is not primarily aboutthe spatial distribution of activities or land uses nor isit simply about contrasting preferences for variousactivities in particular locations. Rather, locationalconflict is symbolic conflict over the social distributionof power to assign meaning and uses to space (Mitchell1992). Locational conflict symbolizes contention overwhose values have standing within the political processand whose values, therefore, become expressed in thelandscape. Recursively, control over the use of spacesymbolically constitutes the controlling group as alegitimate actor within the broader political process.Establishment of a squatter settlement within anaffluent residential neighborhood despite the opposi-tion of existing residents, for example, provides a sitefor housing impoverished families. Also, and perhapsmore importantly, it discursively represents squatterfamilies as legitimate occupants of space and, there-fore, legitimate participants in the political process.

The evolution of locational conflict theory fromclassical to behavioral, to structural, and post-struc-tural formulations parallels theoretical developmentsin the field of geography as a whole. Underlying eachof these theoretical positions is a set of often in-commensurate assumptions regarding the relativeautonomy of individual actors, the primacy of marketprocesses, the nature of the public interest, and therespective roles of structure and agency in creatinggeographic landscapes. In addition, the various theor-etical understandings of locational conflict point tosubstantially different routes for its amelioration orresolution. A behavioral model of conflict based oncontrasting perceptions suggests that resolution isattainable through public information and educationdesigned to bring perceptions into agreement. A modelof conflict based on the unequal spatial distribution ofnegative externalities suggests the use of compensationto equalize outcomes. Understanding conflict as symp-tomatic of deep underlying structural relations re-quires the elimination of structural contradictions. Afocus on locational conflict as the symbolic expressionof rights to create the meaning of space requires thedeconstruction of opposing claims and their recon-struction in more equitable forms. Far from beingmerely an academic exercise, one’s theoretical ap-proach to locational conflict implicates significantlydifferent avenues for its resolution, as discussed in thefollowing section.

3. Resol�ing Locational Conflict

The contentious character of locational conflict hasgenerated considerable debate over the interventionstrategies conducive to its resolution. Approaches tointervention differ according to their proponents’understanding of the sources and dynamics of conflict,as described above, and according to their focus on thevarying perspectives of conflict participants. Methodsof resolving conflict distinguish between community-centered, user-centered, and state-centered ap-proaches (Takahashi 1998 and DeVerteuil 2000).

3.1 Community-centered Approaches

Community-centered approaches focus on communityopposition to a proposed facility siting. Depending onthe characteristics of the community and, in part, onthe perspective of the analyst, local opposition can beinterpreted as exclusionary parochialism or as con-stitutionally protected freedom of speech and dissent(Takahashi 1998). Those taking the latter perspectivepoint to instances in which poor or politically margin-alized communities succeed in preventing the siting ofan environmentally hazardous or otherwise noxiousfacility and consider that conflict has been resolvedthrough defeat of the siting proposal (Heiman 1990).

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More frequently, and especially when phrased in theNIMBY characterization, locational conflict is viewedas a shortsighted and parochial expression of self-interest that prevents achievement of the greater publicgood. Their proponents present the facilities whosesiting generates locational conflict as both necessaryand beneficial for society. A mobile society needshighways and airports. Consumers expect convenientaccess to shopping. Production of wastes is an in-evitable by-product of a consumer society and requiressafe and reliable disposal capacity. New prison con-struction keeps dangerous criminals off the streets andprevents prison overcrowding.

From this vantage point, conflict over siting pro-posals poses a barrier to attainment of the public goodand requires a strategy to overcome, elude, or defuseopposition in order to allow the siting to go forward.Some professional associations of land and real estatedevelopers offer guidelines and training to assist theirmembers to negotiate the hazards of communityopposition to proposed developments. Such strategiescounsel facility proponents to anticipate opposition,solicit statements of support from potential allies,marshal expert testimony for public presentation,demonstrate the anticipated benefits of the proposedscheme, utilize formal appeals procedures, and thelike.

Compensation of affected parties is a central prem-ise within the community-centered approach. Iflocational conflict arises from the unequal spatialdistributionofnegativeexternalitiescreatedbythesitedfacility, then conflict can be resolved through com-pensation of those bearing a disproportionate share ofcosts. The theory of compensation assumes that costsare susceptible to translation into a single monetarymetric and that a fair system can be devised foridentifying affected parties and distributing payment.Such a system is difficult to devise in practice, however.It is difficult to distinguish between payment ascompensation of costs and as inducement to acceptcosts, and communities often reject compensation assynonymous with a bribe. It is relatively easy tocompensate for direct costs associated with a newlysited facility, such as additional emergency responseequipment, but it is more difficult to assess a value forindirect costs such as stigmatization or economicgrowth foregone when potential investors avoid prox-imity to a noxious facility. There is disagreement as towhether costs should be compensated at an equal levelin an impoverished and an affluent community. Onpurely economic grounds, the impoverished com-munity can receive less compensation because poorpeople are satisfied at a relatively lower cost but thisconclusion can easily be challenged on ethical grounds.Compensation as a means of resolving locationalconflict is problematic for these and other reasons.

Some practitioners adopting the community-cen-tered approach choose siting strategies based on equityconsiderations. Such strategies typically distinguish

between the goals of procedural equity in decision-making and distributional equity in outcomes. Ap-proaches based on distributive justice assume thenecessity of the facilities in question and seek toachieve a fair distribution, where the primary criterionof fairness is to avoid neighborhood concentrations ofunwanted facilities. One such method is to devise apoint system for desirable and undesirable facilities(parks and libraries in the former category, forexample, and waste incinerators and sewage treatmentplants in the latter) and to equalize points acrossneighborhoods or political jurisdictions. Localitiesmight be encouraged to opt for an undesirable facilityso as to qualify for a desirable one under this system ormight be disqualified from obtaining a beneficialfacility due to insufficient points for hosting undesir-able ones. The obvious difficulty in assigning pointsto facility types, however, has prevented this systemfrom being implemented in practice. New York city’slegislatively mandated fair share process for distribut-ing unwanted city facilities across neighborhoodssimilarly has been abandoned in practice due todifficulties of implementation.

Community-centered approaches based on proce-dural justice argue that public opposition is mobilizednot only by unwanted siting outcomes but also byperceived unfairness in the decision-making process.At a minimum, the procedural solution takes the formof a mandated hearing within a public review orpermitting process. The public hearing has beencriticized as a means of facilitating public partici-pation, however, on the grounds that it is rarely morethan advisory and that important decisions, such asthe need for the facility, have usually been taken priorto the hearing. More detailed procedural approachesstress the importance of community consultation earlyin the siting process, inclusion of all stakeholders innegotiations, and the opportunity for sites to withdrawfrom consideration at any time. The most fullydeveloped approach within this framework allowslocalities to volunteer themselves as sites for con-troversial facilities, subject to specified siting criteriaand in return for generous compensation. This ap-proach elides difficult ethical questions, however, iflocalities volunteer for controversial facilities notthrough choice but due to a lack of alternative meansof economic survival.

3.2 User-centered Approaches

The user-centered approach usually applies to conflictover social service facility location. This approachmoves beyond the perspectives of siting proponentsand opponents and considers the perspective of facilityusers who often experience extreme poverty and�orphysical, social, or mental disability as a barrier toaccess to needed services (Takahashi 1998). Omissionof the users’ perspective in community-centered

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approaches both reflects and contributes to theirstigmatization. While equity in community-centeredapproaches focuses on community participation infacility siting decisions, equity in the user-centeredapproach is concerned with facilitating access toneeded facilities on the part of service-dependentclients. Residents and users of homeless shelters, drugor alcohol rehabilitation centers, domestic violenceshelters, group homes, and similar facilities are oftendependent on multiple services and benefit fromservice clustering that other community residents viewas an undue concentration of unwanted facilities.

Social service providers choose from two divergentstrategies in countering local opposition (Dear 1992).The collaborative approach seeks to establish a part-nership between the service provider and the hostcommunity through public outreach and educationaimed at improving awareness, tolerance, and ac-ceptance. The autonomous approach considers accessto needed services to be a civil right of facility usersand relies on legislative and judicial protections tooverride community opposition.

3.3 State-centered Approaches

The state-centered approach to locational conflictreformulates the traditional question of locationalconflict—‘Why is the community opposed to thisfacility?’—and asks instead: ‘Why is the state seekingto site this facility in this community?’ (Lake andDisch 1992). This rephrased question problematizesthe assumption, shared by community- and user-centered approaches, that facilities are needed bysociety. In the state-centered approach, controversialfacilities are understood as needed by capital seekingto externalize costs as a competitive strategy and as anexpedient solution for the state seeking to facilitatecapital accumulation while maintaining legitimationof the capital-labor relationship (Lake 1993).

Facility siting in this context constitutes a particularproblem-solving strategy that is instrumental for thestate. By providing a locational solution to a problemof industrial production (waste production or home-lessness, for example), facility siting allows productionand capital accumulation to continue relatively unim-peded while concentrating costs on host communities.The decision to concentrate costs on communitiesrather than on capital reflects a political calculationthat it is preferable for the state to confront localizedpolitical conflict than to risk a challenge to the capital-state relation. The siting strategy deflects politicalconflict away from a potentially daunting challenge tothe capital-state relation and into a relatively benigndebate over the merits of alternative facility locations(Lake and Disch 1992).

According to the state-centered approach, the rootof locational conflict is situated not in the conse-

quences of hosting a controversial facility but rather ina regulatory approach that inexorably leads to facilitysiting as a policy solution that concentrates costs onhost communities. To the extent that this is the case,the resolution of conflict requires a restructuring ofpolicy assumptions and policy solutions throughpolitical debate, redirecting costs from host com-munities back on to capital, and avoiding the emerg-ence of conflict at its source rather than seeking toameliorate its occurrence after the fact.

4. Future Directions: Ethical and Social JusticeIssues

Recent locational conflict scholarship has increasinglyintersected with the literature of environmental racismand environmental justice. This coalescence emergesfrom a common conceptual focus on equity and on thedistinction between distributive and proceduralequity, in particular. Influenced in part by devel-opment of the state-centered approach, locationalconflict scholarship is increasingly shifting attentionfrom siting outcomes to examine political and struc-tural influences on the siting process. This shift closelyparallels a redirection within environmental justicescholarship from a focus on distributional equity,concerned with the concentration of environmentalburdens in disempowered communities, to a focus onprocedural equity, concerned with democratic par-ticipation in the gamut of prior decisions affecting theproduction of burdens and benefits to be distributed(Lake 1996). Recent environmental justice literatureexplicitly seeks to relinquish its narrow focus oninequity in facility siting, emphasizing instead thepervasive inequity in the broad socio-spatial processescreating geographic landscapes (Pulido 2000). Thechallenge for these increasingly combined spheres ofscholarship is to expand understanding of theseprocesses and to inform the design of institutionalstructures that expand community participation intheir operation.

See also: Behavioral Geography; Citizen Participa-tion; Environmental Justice; Global EnvironmentalChange: Human Dimensions; Location Theory

Bibliography

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Cox K, Johnston R 1982 Conflict, politics and the urban scene:a conceptual framework. In: Cox K, Johnston R (eds.)Conflict, Politics and the Urban Scene. St. Martin’s Press, NewYork

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Cox K, McCarthy J 1980 Neighborhood activism in theAmerican city: behavioral relationships and evaluation. UrbanGeography 1: 22–38

Dear M 1992 Understanding and overcoming the NIMBYsyndrome. Journal of the American Planning Association 58:288–300

DeVerteuil G 2000 Reconsidering the legacy of urban publicfacility location theory in human geography. Progress inHuman Geography 24: 47–96

Heiman M 1990 From ‘Not in My Backyard’ to ‘Not inAnybody’s Backyard!’ Grassroots challenge to hazardouswaste facility siting. Journal of the American Planning As-sociation 56: 359–62

Janelle D 1977 Structural dimensions in the geography oflocational conflict. Canadian Geographer 21: 311–28

Lake R 1993 Rethinking NIMBY. Journal of the AmericanPlanning Association 59: 87–93

Lake R 1996 Volunteers, NIMBYs and environmental justice:dilemmas of democratic practice. Antipode 28: 160–74

Lake R, Disch L 1992 Structural constraints and pluralistcontradictions in hazardous waste regulation. En�ironmentand Planning, A 24: 663–81

Lefebvre H 1991 The Production of Space. Basil Blackwell,Oxford, UK

Ley D, Mercer J 1980 Locational conflict and the politics ofconsumption. Economic Geography 56: 89–109

Meyer W, Brown M 1989 Locational conflict in a nineteenth-century city. Political Geography Quarterly 8: 107–22

Mitchell D 1992 Iconography and locational conflict from theunderside: Free speech, People’s Park, and the politics ofhomelessness in Berkeley, California. Political Geography 11:152–69

Plotkin S 1987 Property, policy and politics: towards a theory ofurban land-use conflict. International Journal of Urban andRegional Research 11: 382–403

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R. W. Lake

Locke, John (1632–1704)

1. Life and Writings

Hegel perhaps excepted, John Locke is the mosteminent philosopher of the Western world to haveaddressed himself to political and social issues. Indeedhis standing as the great thinker amongst Englishspeakers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesgave to his writings on such issues, the theories ofpolitics, toleration, economics and education, a stand-ing which they would not have commanded even whentaken together. And yet the famous Essay ConcerningHuman Understanding (1975) scarcely provided a

general intellectual framework for his theories onindividual topics. The action of his mind was like thatof the beam of a searchlight shining through thedarkness on individual objects but with no linkagemade between them or any reflection back from objectto source.

John Locke the man can be taken as the archetypeof the English country gentleman turned intellectual.He was the first born of the two sons of a lawyer whofought for the Parliament against King Charles I whenJohn was a teenager. The family had a small landedestate in the county of Somerset and Locke was bornon August 29 1632 in the village of Wrington, thoughthe family seat was at Belluton some ten miles away.He inherited the family properties and his father’smodest position within the community of gentry of thecounty. He was an absentee landlord, except for briefintervals, for most of his life. This was because hisfather designed him for a scholarly career, not all thatunusual for the gentry but exceptional for an heir(Laslett 1948).

Locke’s father set his sights high for his son, whoseoutstanding intelligence must have been evident fromthe beginning. In 1647 he sent him to WestminsterSchool, the best in the country, and thereafter, in 1652,to the college of Christ Church in Oxford, where hewent on to take office as a teacher between 1658 and1684. Locke never married, and insisted that he wouldhave liked to have lived his whole life there as abachelor don. However, it proved otherwise, andwithin a decade he found himself for much of his timein London at the center of national politics, in theentourage of one of the great political magnates of thetime, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury,who was then in high office but subsequently becameleader of the movement of opposition to the successionto the throne of the Catholic James, brother of thechildless Charles II, the Exclusion campaign, as it iscalled. The explanation for this transmogrification,which left his position at Christ Church unaffected,was that Locke had taken up medicine so that he couldcontinue his academic career without becoming apriest. In 1666, on a visit to Oxford, the invalidedShaftesbury met Locke who performed upon his bodyone of the medical miracles of that age which saved hislife. It was as a medical adviser of Shaftesbury, not asan academic, that Locke took up and pursued hiscareer as a writer on the theory of knowledge, and onwhat we now recognize as social scientific subjects.Two Treatises of Go�ernment, also published in 1690,was composed while Locke acted as what a closefriend called ‘assistant pen’ to Shaftesbury in the early1680s during the Exclusion campaign. The CatholicJames nevertheless became James II in 1685.

A now outmoded interpretation of Two Treatisesperceives it as the subsequent rationalization of the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688�9; it is nowaccepted that the author’s intention was to justify arevolution yet to be brought about by Shaftesbury and

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Locational Conflict (NIMBY)