Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Michiel Köhne
(Wageningen University)
Elisabet Rasch (Wageningen University)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Landscapes, resources and value
- Location:
- Old Arts-129 (Theatre B)
- Start time:
- 4 December, 2015 at
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
We invite ethnographic research on the politics of resistance against fracking from the communities' point of view, linking it with themes as economic policies, energy battles, social movements and citizenship. We also invite papers that explore a more action-oriented research on this topic.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores ideas and practices of community resistance in relation to and against fracking. In many countries around the World governments together with industrial partners promote the extraction of unconventional gas, considering this a way of 'development'. However, although the use of fracking has huge consequences for inhabitants in the area and their livelihood strategies and access to land, they have often not been involved in the decision making processes about whether and where to frack.
As the use of fracking has increased, so have environmentalist concerns over dangers of pollution and the postponement of energy transition. In many countries (The Netherlands, England, Australia, the USA, Romania, South Africa, to name a few) citizens have organised against fracking. They build up their arguments around environmental issues, as well as issues of citizenship. Proponents of fracking consider unconventional gas a safe and profitable energy source. Both proponents and opponents make extensive use of different sources and forms of information and knowledge to build up their argument.
We invite ethnographic research papers on the politics of resistance against fracking from the point of view of communities. We invite papers that explore this rural development-fracking nexus, linking it with themes as economic policies, energy battles, social movements and citizenship, framing and legitimating discourses, property rights issues and the 'disasterisation' of fracking. We are also interested in papers that explore the role that social scientist can play here. Does this problematic call for more action-oriented research and how can we envision this?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Muhammad Makki (Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining )
Paper short abstract:
This paper explains that the root causes of conflict run deeper than a focus on environmental impacts associated with CSG project development. It is in fact a struggle against stigmatisation that has a history that pre-dates the CSG development.
Paper long abstract:
The crossover of two competing industries, agriculture and CSG, has put the rural Western Downs of Queensland under a great deal of socio-economic and environmental pressure and led to significant controversy. The rural subdivisions of Tara have become the centre of conflict as the residents have fiercely resisted CSG development since 2009. This paper follows the emergence and transformation of the CSG conflict in the community of Tara from 2009 to 2014, including the formation of the "Lock the Gate" movement.
This research demonstrates that what has been perceived in the media and simplistically labelled as a conflict driven by the environmental impacts of CSG is far more complex. Rather than using an environmental lens, this research rather takes a social identity perspective, which has yielded counterintuitive findings. The study reveals that the conflict dramatically escalated because the CSG industry became entangled with the stigmatised identity of 'Blockies', as the residents of 'Blocks' within the Tara subdivisions are called. The 'anti-CSG Blockies' took issue with CSG as a mean to manage, dissolve and negotiate the stigma attached with the label Blockie that socially excluded, discriminated, and marked them as devalued since the subdivisions were established in 1980s. Behind the nexus between the Tara subdivision-based anti-CSG groups and the Lock the Gate movement, no shared encoded meanings or objectives exist. The Blockies' convergence with the movement was merely commensal in nature, which thus provided the rejected self with a positive reference point for being evaluated through the movement's identity.
Michiel Köhne (Wageningen University) Elisabet Rasch (Wageningen University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses how inhabitants of the Noordoostpolder (NL) produce knowledge to empower their citizenship in the contestation of fracking. On the basis of qualitative ethnographic fieldwork we analyse how this knowledge production is both place based and related to identity formation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses the specifics of how inhabitants of the Noordoostpolder in The Netherlands produce knowledge to empower their citizenship in the contestation of fracking. The Noordoostpolder is a rural municipality in The Netherlands where negotiations over exploratory drilling is currently taking place.
Knowledge plays a central role in fracking negotiations among state institutions, fracking companies and involved communities. Not only do people frame experiences of disempowerment vis-à-vis energy politics in terms of lack of accessible knowledge. Also, citizens often voice distrust towards the ways governments and companies manage information about fracking. To counter this, the production of knowledge about fracking is used as an important element of resistance, or act of citizenship.
On the basis of qualitative ethnographic fieldwork we analyse how knowledge production is used in Noordoostpolder citizenship. The paper discusses how local knowledge production is both place based and related to identity formation. Protestors use knowledge production as a form of resistance while at the same time claiming it as a right. We will analyse what the production of knowledge means in the Noordoostpolder and how this shapes ways of resisting fracking.
Martin Espig (AgResearch)
Paper short abstract:
An unprecedented unconventional gas boom along Australia’s east coast has led to a variety of community responses. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork with resisting non-protest groups, I explore the negotiations between knowledge and ignorance claims in responding to projects’ risks and impacts.
Paper long abstract:
The rapid development of unconventional gas reserves along Australia's east coast has led to significant challenges for local regional and rural communities. Especially the unprecedented gas boom in the state of Queensland caused a variety of community responses from embracing economic benefits to active civil disobedience. In this paper I critically explore this multitude of responses following ongoing ethnographic fieldwork with communities in the states' Western Downs region. In doing so I stress the importance of avoiding oversimplified conceptualisations of 'the rural community' in relation to responses to large-scale resource developments, which has also methodological and moral implications for the social researcher's role.
I draw on data generated at the move from the projects' construction into the operations phase. At this stage, some of the initial protest and civil disobedience movements have disappeared, but efforts of members of affected communities to cope with or resist the industry's progression are ongoing. Focusing on these less activist voices, I introduce cases of residents and local groups that refuse being classified as protester. Trying to avoid de-legitimisation, these groups are rather attempting to be recognised actors within the decision-making process, which leads to continuing negotiations over valid knowledge claims and ascriptions of ignorance. I conceptualise these often unequal epistemic dynamics through a critical utilisation of Nico Stehr's concept of 'knowledgeability' (a bundle of enabling competencies). In positioning knowledge within an interactional and processual framework, I explore the contemporary citizens' position within the resulting politics of knowledge in the context of complex techno-scientific controversies.
Hanabeth Luke (Southern Cross University) Bill Boyd (Southern Cross University) David Lloyd (Bradford University)
Paper short abstract:
Perceptions of the unconventional gas industry in the Northern Rivers region (NSW) are explored using a mixed-methods framework. A microcosm of value-systems is used to inform a model of community-policy relationships.
Paper long abstract:
Competing demands upon the provision of natural resources are highlighted by the global expansion of the unconventional oil and gas industry. This rapid growth has provoked research not only in the physical sciences, but also in multidisciplinary projects at the nexus of rural development, risk perception and social dynamics. Taking a mixed-methods approach, this study contributes empirical data by focusing upon impacts upon social systems, from an individual to a regional scale in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, Australia. Frameworks used incorporate social identity and democracy to examine dynamics occurring in affected communities. A microcosm of shifting value-systems is explained, where aspirations for economic prosperity clash with concerns around long-term sustainability. The study documents social responses over a four-year period, examining motivations behind an expanding social movement that has had tangible socio-political impacts, including the withdrawal of social license for regional gas industry developments. Finally, the data explored in this study is used to create a model to illustrate the relationship between community, policy and politics.