Abstract
The power imbalance between local governments, who act in the interest of a wider territory, and local communities, who want to protect local amenities, can lead to environmental conflicts. In 2020, a small coastal community in Aotearoa–New Zealand gained national media attention when opposing a municipal landfill siting in its local environment. The landfill application triggered a stakeholder engagement process, leading to extensive documentation before it eventually proceeded. A growing number of local resistance case studies use descriptive methods to highlight the socioeconomic issues of siting landfills in rural areas. However, measures of stakeholder efforts, costs and power are missing. By applying stakeholder analysis, we map out stakeholder evolvement over time, provide estimates of volunteer hours and financial costs, and devise an index to visualise the power imbalance. We identify government agencies, the semi-private sector, NGOs, the regional Indigenous tribe and the Local community as stakeholder groups. The Local community invested 2,871 volunteer hours and raised NZD48,000 to cover expert and legal representation, while government agencies spent NZD5.7 m. We calculate the numerical index of stakeholder power by the number of " paid " pages by law firms and consultancies as a percentage of total stakeholder documentation submitted during statutory processes. Based on the index value, we sketch stakeholders in an interest-power matrix, showing that governmental agencies rank highest at 89-90% of " paid " pages, while the local community emerges as the lowest-power stakeholder with 38%, and other stakeholders falling in-between. Our study provides a first step to measure the costs of environmental conflict and power imbalances.