NIMBY has long being grasped by social scientists and planners as an intractable social dilemma. The overall purpose of this study was to build an integrated political-economic NIMBY model. The constitutive elements of the model were (1) the existing wealth of theoretical insights, and (2) the empirical material collected and analyzed. For the first constitutive element a theoretical review of the notion of waste from the view point of Environmental and Ecological Economics were offered. The notion of negative externality is the one upon which waste, and the effects of its treatment by means of landfills, was sought for. Belonging to the first constitutive element was also the treatment of economic theory concerning social conflict. The second constitutive element of the NIMBY model was the data collected and analyzed from five case studies in Colombia. This study followed the multi-case study strategy, in which semi-structured interviews and the revision of documentary records were carried out. The analysis was done following the instructions of the Grounded Theory Methodology. The first NIMBY model contains not only concepts describing motives of opposition, such as soft and hard reasons, but also processes such as the one leading to the formation of the NIMBY Avant-Garde, the strategies of the community leaders, and their interactions with the strategies of the project proponent. Finally, an upgraded NIMBY model was accomplished by means of integrating some theoretical aspects into it, such as the attributes of landfills in their economic, technical, and ethical dimensions, as well as the issue of power asymmetries.