Interdisciplinary Urban Sociology of Municipal Waste Transfer Station Siting Compensation Offers and Household Refusal in Accra's Peri-Urban Wards: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Offer Thresholds

Municipal waste transfer stations impose localized disamenities on host communities, and compensation offers are the principal instrument through which siting authorities seek consent. Yet refusal persists even where offers appear generous, and the threshold at which households accept or reject remains poorly theorized. The framework specifies how offer levels, household characteristics, and neighbourhood context interact to produce refusal, and it formalizes the conditions under which a regression discontinuity approach can identify threshold effects. Refusal is not simply a function of offer magnitude but reflects a calculative judgment shaped by perceived procedural injustice, social comparison, and the credibility of enforcement. It proposes that the threshold concept offers a more precise analytical entry point than conventional willingness-to-accept models, and it derives testable propositions about how thresholds vary across household types and siting contexts. The contribution is a theoretically grounded, empirically implementable framework that reframes compensation refusal as a threshold phenomenon amenable to causal identification, with implications for siting policy and for the sociology of urban infrastructure conflict.