Linda Soneryd

Transboundary Risk Governance

Governing environmental risk, particularly large-scale transboundary risks associated with climate change and pollution, is one of the most pressing problems facing society.This book focuses on a set of key questions relating to environmental regulation: How are activities regulated in a fragmented world - a world of nation states, regulators, domestic and international law and political contests - and one in which a range of actors, such as governments, corporations and NGOs act in order to influence regulations in specific policy areas? How are complex and trans-boundary environmental issues managed? What role does expert knowledge play in regulating this kind of issues? What give rules authority? In short, how do actors try to render an issue governable?Drawing on regulation theory, discourse theory and science and technology studies, and employing original research, the authors analyse the regulation of four kinds of complex and trans-boundary environmental issues: oil protection in the Baltic Sea, mobile phones and radiation protection, climate change adaptation and genetically modified crops. The outcomes include insights for policymakers, regulators and researchers into how dominant frames are constructed, legitimate actors are configured and authority is established. This in turn exposes the conditions for, and possibility of, developing regulation, making authoritative rules and shaping relevant knowledge in order to govern complex environmental risks.

Making Transboundary Risks Governable: Reducing Complexity, Constructing Spatial Identity, and Ascribing Capabilities

Environmental problems that cross national borders are attracting increasing public and political attention; regulating them involves coordinating the goals and activities of various governments, which often presupposes simplifying and standardizing complex knowledge, and finding ways to manage uncertainty. This article explores how transboundary environmental problems are dealt with to render complex issues governable. By discussing oil pollution in the Baltic Sea and the gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, we elucidate how boundaries are negotiated to make issues governable. Three processes are found to be particularly relevant to how involved actors render complex issues governable: complexity reduction, construction of a spatial identity for an issue, and ascription of capabilities to new or old actor constellations. We conclude that such regulation is always provisional, implying that existing regulation is always open for negotiation and criticism.

Transport infrastructure investment and environmental impact assessment in Sweden: public involvement or exclusion?

In this paper we discuss whether environmental impact assessment (EIA) can serve as an arena for including citizens in the decisionmaking process. Through a case study of a proposed extension of a regional airport in Sweden, the role of EIA, and to what degree different actors and arguments influenced the decision, is analysed. It is found that there are serious problems concerning public participation when it comes to projects which extend beyond the local level and which play an important part in the regional economy. In these cases there is a risk, despite the aims of EIA, that the process will be characterised by public exclusion rather than by public involvement.

Green governmentality and responsibilization: new forms of governance and responses to ‘consumer responsibility’

An extensive literature examines political or green consumption, attending to how people make sense of their consumption relative to norms of individual responsibility and pro-environmental behaviour. Similarly, a small but growing literature addresses green governmentality, focusing on new governance forms and responsibilization processes. These two strands seldom meet, resulting in poor understanding of the links between consumption governance and people’s sense-making and actions relative to the moral imperative of being ‘responsible consumers’. We address this weakness by juxtaposing these two strands of literature, improving our understanding of the processes of responsibilization and some of their consequences. We argue that, to understand the effects of this form of governance, we must realize that subjects are not inevitably positioned and predetermined by a hegemonic discourse. At the same time, we must acknowledge that responsibilization processes give rise to compliance and to a range of ambivalences and forms of resistance.

Knowledge, power and control—studying environmental regulation in late modernity

Abstract At the same time as increased demands for standardization and control occur within the environmental field, regulation is being confronted by tendencies towards contextualization and fragmentation. This paper examines the question of how these seemingly opposing tendencies can be understood. The aim of this paper is to develop an approach for the study of risk regulation in contemporary society. Four elements are stressed as vital to consider when approaching environmental regulation: (i) the varying roles of science and expertise in regulation; (ii) the decisive role of intentional actors and regulatory organizations; (iii) the decisive but not exclusive role of the nation-state; and (iv) regulation as a process in which knowledge, risk and public concerns are constructed. In conclusion, the paper states that even if regulation is currently dispersed, the concepts of knowledge, power and control are still central to the study of environmental regulation.

Noise and newts : public engagement in the UK and Sweden

Abstract There are many incentives to improve public participation involvement in Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and public inquiries not least because the conflicts arising from protests against new developments are practical problems that need to be solved. This paper addresses the ambition of promoting public participation in EIA. In doing this, it illustrates how legal or quasi-legal processes, such as EIA and public inquiries facilitate or restrain public involvement. Two cases of airport developments are compared: the EIA process for the planned extension of the airport in Orebro, Sweden and the public inquiry process for the planned extension of the airport in Manchester, UK. The concluding section discusses how the requirement to achieve efficient public involvement could be met.

'Power' is that which remains to be explained: dispelling the ominous dark matter of critical planning studies

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the development of new theoretical and methodological resources for analysing power dynamics in planning studies. Our overarching aim is to demystify the concept of ‘power’ and what it purports to be describing, making those practices grouped under this label more tangible and, hence, also more readily contestable. Investigating how the effects we label as power are produced, instead of using ‘power’ as an all-covering explanation of societal events, demands a conceptualization of power as the outcome of social processes rather than as a causal variable behind them. An empirical study of a referendum regarding a major urban development in a Swedish suburban municipality illustrates how strong assumptions regarding the dominance of, for example, pre-existing powerful actor-constellations or purely economic relations are not always very helpful, highlighting the need for more acute attentiveness to the micro-physics of power.

Shared Practice and Converging Views in Nuclear Waste Management: Long-Term Relations between Implementer and Regulator in Sweden

The international relevance of learning from nuclear waste management in Sweden cannot be underestimated as the planning process for the final disposal of spent nuclear fuel in Sweden has been underway for more than thirty years. During this time the same types of actors—private, public, and NGO representatives—and even the same individuals have interacted with each other throughout. Based on a review of the implementers Research, Development and Demonstration programmes (RD&Ds) of methods for the management and disposal of nuclear waste and interviews with representatives of the implementer, regulator, and NGOs, this paper analyses the outcomes of these long-term interactions. It then discusses the potentially serious problems this creates in relation to knowledge production in the planning and environmental impact assessment process and problems now the regulator is set to review the final application. The tendency of the values and priorities of implementer and regulator to converge over time, due to sustained social interaction, is a new phenomenon, which could not only impede the safety of nuclear waste management, but also risks occurring in other countries embarking on similar long-term processes.

Politics as a struggle over definition — two case studies

In our modern society the production of material welfare causes new kinds of ecological problems. This paper investigates the decision-making process in two cases which are characterised by complex technology and dependence upon science. These cases have implementation on a local level, but are of wider interest. The consequences of the facilities are defined in different ways by different actors at different levels (the national, regional, and the local level). The question is what kind of problems that are generated in relation to these new kinds of ecological problems and how they are handled within present political structures. The findings raise questions about the problem of limited political accountability and tensions between different policy levels. By way of conclusion there is a need for new forms of political responsibility that can respond to the new types of problems that arise in our time.

The legitimization of concern: A flexible framework for investigating the enactment of stakeholders in environmental planning and governance processes

From the 1990s and onwards, environmental planning and governance has undergone a broad participatory turn. This paper focuses on one specific aspect of participatory processes and the concrete arrangements through which they are carried out, more specifically: how such processes always come to enact some actors as ‘legitimately concerned’ stakeholders and others not. Such investigations bring into focus context-specific effects of inclusion and exclusion as well as de/legitimization of specific actors and concerns. We propose a flexible framework for untangling the various components which in different ways influence the fine-grained power dynamics at play in such events, particularly focusing on the enactments of stakeholders that result from the situated interplay of rationales and infrastructures for participation. The guiding ambitions for the framework is for it to be applicable to a broad range of subfields of environmental planning and governance while avoiding the analytical risks of strong normative commitments from the outset regarding whether participation per se is good or bad, and offering some novel insights into the investigated cases. Throughout the paper, we utilize two case studies, from urban planning and fisheries management, to test the analytical productivity of the proposed framework while also searching for cues for the further development of the framework itself.