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Fighting the Pipe: neo-liberal governance and barriers to effective communityparticipation in energy infrastructure planning
Christopher Groves, Max Munday, and Natalia Yakovleva
Abstract
Development of effective participatory mechanisms within infrastructure planninggovernance has been dependent on how far the outputs of participatory processes have animpact upon strategic policy priorities. However, neoliberal modes of governance arech
aracterised by “recentralisation” within arms
-length regulatory bodies and privatecorporations. Tensions between participatory governance and re-centralisation areexemplified by the relationship between energy privatisation and energy infrastructureplanning. This study examines these tensions using a case study of a critical infrastructureproject in the UK, the South Wales Gas Pipeline. Findings confirm arguments in the literaturethat siting conflicts often centre on policy issues as much as local concerns. The study revealsthat the neoliberal recentralisation of some governance functions exacerbates such conflicts.It argues although new efforts to secure effective participation in neoliberal regimes arenecessary, they will face obstacles in the form of risk-based governance structures, asexemplified by the privatised energy sector.
Keywords
Infrastructure planning, participatory governance, pipelines, planning cascade, privatisation.
Introduction
The heart of conflicts over the siting of nationally-important infrastructure is often seen as aclash between not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) local interests and national policy. It has alsobeen argued, however, that siting conflicts over such infrastructure often act as condensationpoints for wider concerns, which can
“cross scale” from
the interests of a specific communityto connect with national and even international issues
–
such as mitigating climate change,
protecting indigenous peoples‟ rights
and so on (see Owens 2004). As a result, participatoryplanning may be seen as more than just a means of improving
procedural
fairness, asemphasised by some commentators (e.g. Gross 2007). By linking siting proposals to broaderpolitical priorities, genuinely effective participation has a substantive dimension, exemplifiedby the case of the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline in Canada (Gamble 1978). Nonetheless,Owens (2004) and Cowell and Owens (2006) have pointed, in the UK context, to how acountervailing
“streamlining”
tendency in land-use planning can close down opportunities forparticipatory decision-making, reducing siting decisions to a trade-off between national needand local interests. In this paper, we explore how such trade-offs, and conflicts driven bythem, are the product of forms of governance which characterise neo-liberal societies, withthe aid of a major energy infrastructure case study from the UK (the South Wales GasPipeline, or SWGP). Our argument is that, while participatory decision-making has madeinroads into governance within contemporary societies, the
de
centralisation of powerassociated with neoliberalism (and in our case study, with energy privatisation in particular)brings with it a distributed
re
-centralisation of decision-making. Such re-centralisation mayintensify
“streamlining” tendencies within planning governance, and
can preventparticipatory mechanisms from taking forms which achieve either procedural fairness or trueeffectiveness, i.e. substantive impact. We show that, in line with significant recent literature,that substantive issues often form the focus of planning conflicts. We also suggest that, basedon our case study, how the power to shape the policy priorities that drive infrastructure
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development is distributed may be among these issues. The paper is structured as follows.First, it examines the literature in order to argue that the effectiveness of participatory
mechanisms is dependent on whether they allow “second
-
order” reflection on
the policies andpurposes which drive infrastructure development. Second, it shows how this mode of
“substantive” participation stands in tension with
risk-based modes of neo-liberal governanceexemplified by the privatised national energy network in the UK. Third, the paper exploresthe history of the SWGP project and investigates how community groups engaged with theplanning process, before discussing how this case can help us understand the tensionsbetween the drive for more participation, and the re-centralisation of governance. We showhow, although the Pipeline was built under a planning regime that has been superseded in theUK following the 2008 Planning Act, the issues it raises are perhaps even more significantunder the new regime.
Background
Participatory governance
Since the 1970s, land-use planning has seen a variety of experiments with participatory
processes as an alternative to the classic technocratic model of “decide
-announce-defend
”,
often associated with a
“high modernist” model of government
(Scott 1998). Simultaneously,the emergence of neo-liberal forms of economic governance during the same period graduallytransformed the relationship between the state and society. Increasingly, the state became afacilitator of development rather than its agent. The privatisation of public utilities in manysocieties since the 1980s has consolidated this new role. However, as has been observed in
the case of the UK, this new form of state may have “its own utopian projects quite asambitious”
as those of high modernism (Moran 2007 p. 6). The need for society to be legibleto
an administrative “centre” did no
t decrease. Indeed, it
increased
proportionate to thedegree to which administrative responsibilities are re-distributed and more and moreactivities become subject to audit and measurement. Further, the auditing gaze does notsimply survey the present. It also takes on a new temporal aspect by seeking to render the
future more legible, through “risk thinking”
(Rose 1999).A new focus on participation, along with
“risk thinking”
, represent two tendencies within abroad stream of governance reform that flowed through the 1960s to the 1990s (Walls et al.2005, pp. 641-643). On the one hand, greater participation is seen as a means both of enhancing the ability to anticipate perhaps overlooked negative outcomes of action, and of also
improving the legitimacy of governance by balancing the “privatisation” of governancewith greater involvement of “stakeholders” in decisions.
On the other, the internalisation of risk thinking as a discourse of quantification and auditing within organisations became a wayof creating another model of legitimacy for governance. The tense relationship between thesetwo tendencies is important for understanding how infrastructure planning has evolved underneoliberalism.In what follows, we set out, in more detail, key features of the two tendencies in relation toplanning. With respect to participatory governance, it has been argued that it may improvedecision making with regard to the potential social and environmental impacts of infrastructure development (Ward 2001). Participatory processes may marshal a morecomprehensive and inclusive evidence base that draws on a variety of perspectives includinglocal knowledge. In this sense, they can be instrumentally useful. They may, however, bepreferred on account of
justice
. By allowing more perspectives on a proposal to be included,they can enhance
distributive
and
procedural
justice (Gross 2007). They may also enable
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greater
recognition
of historical injustices, including e.g. local accumulations of pollutinginfrastructure that stigmatize particular places and communities (Walker 2009). To beeffective in serving these three purposes, participation should ideally be early, whenalternatives are still open; be inclusive and feature two-way communication; allow access tokey information; offer genuine opportunities to influence or even veto decisions; take intoaccount the diverse values of participants; and be transparent (Bond et al. 2004). However,participation may be effective in another sense by allowing public reflection on substantiveissues
–
including what kind of society participants wish to inhabit, questions of “nationalinterest”, and other matters
. In this way, participation around planning concerns at local andregional scales can provide an arena for focused reflection on the assumed purposes of national strategies (Cowell and Owens 2006, 2011).Consequently, participation can embody reflexivity in an expanded sense, even if it takes
place “downstream” of strategic decisions
. If a piece of infrastructure is a kind of solution toa problem, then participatory governance may, by including more perspectives, enable theproblem itself to be examined, along with the ways in which it has been framed
as
a problem.In this way, whether participation is effective or not depends on how far it enacts second-order reflexivity towards both means and presupposed ends. Substantively effectiveparticipation may be imagined as creating a feedback loop (Rough 2011), which begins withan examination of localised impacts, benefits and risks associated with a given proposal.Widening participation in examining these illuminates, in turn, considerations which maylead to a critique and re-framing of the policy problem to which the planning proposalappears as a viable solution. In this way, local planning conflicts can lead to modifications in
assumed definitions of the “national interest”
, even if they do not end in consensus (Owens2004).
Risk thinking, power and energy infrastructure planning under neoliberalism
We now turn to the second of the aforementioned tendencies, i.e. the internalisation of risk thinking within governance as a legitimatory discourse, and how this shapes the distributionof power in planning. The relationship between this tendency and the evolution of
participation as a form of “second
-
order reflexivity” is often conflictual. The tension here
derives from the opposed logics of power which characterise the two tendencies. Whereeffective participation demands dispersed power (Ward 2001), embodied in institutionalizedprocesses that drive critical scrutiny of policy problems as well as solutions, neo-liberalenrolment of private companies and other governance actors
de
centralises whilesimultaneously
re
centralising
. The creation of new “centres of calculation” (e.g. privatised
energy utilities, industry regulators) is accompanied by the need to render the field in whichthey operate legible to government, both in the present and with a view to its projectedfutures
–
requirements in which risk thinking plays a significant role. In the next section, wewill explore the internalisation of risk thinking within
the UK‟s planning regime
in relation toenergy privatisation, and how risk knowledge and power are linked.As noted at the beginning of the previous section, the neo-liberal state can be viewed asevolving, in some respects, out of the high-modernist state. The high-modernist state evolveda set of tools for transforming an uncertain future into a meaningful parameter of planning,
one that could be both “told” and “tamed”
(Adam and Groves 2007). State bureaucraciesdeveloped quantitative criteria for measuring the success or failure of policies, depoliticizingdecision making in the process and recreating the domain of politics in a way amenable tobureaucratic management (Rose 1999, pp. 198-199). Representing the future in terms of risk,
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Fighting the Pipe: neo-liberal governance and barriers to effective community participation in energy infrastructure planning
The importance of democratic public participation in the planning process – particularly where “critical” energy infrastructure is involved – is important for two main reasons: (1) it enhances the quality of planning decisions by ensuring that…
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