Co-production of the shale gas publics in Poland and the negotiation of the state citizens relations (original) (raw)
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The paper examines shale gas development as a situation of resource exploration loaded with multiple uncertainties stemming not only from technology-generated unknowns but mainly from the unknowns about the volume of exploitable resource and about the ways in which shale gas industry will exist ‘locally’. By examining first information meetings organized by NGOs, companies and local authorities in Poland: Przywidz, Mikołajki Pomorskie and Żurawlów, the paper shows that uncertainty is built around three dimensions that are to be shared by communities and companies if exploration takes place: knowledge, space and time. Discussions around these three issues reveal knowledge deficits on all sides, contributing to the emergence of new areas of uncertainty and making any agreement difficult. By referring to the concept of ‘hybrid forums’, the analysis also shows how a gathering that is initially framed by the organizers as an ‘information meeting’ transforms into a ‘hybrid forum’ where new facts, values and identities emerge due to the confrontation of perspectives represented by heterogeneous stakeholders.
Framing shale gas for policy making in Poland
Despite enthusiasm about new gas reserves, shale gas has not come to Poland without controversies. This study examines how shale gas has been framed as a public issue by political and business elites, experts, local communities and civil society organizations. Through a frame analysis, we found three main frames about shale gas: shale gas as a novel economic resource, as a strategic resource for energy security, and as a threat. However, only the first two frames, proposed by political and business elites, have shaped the policy process. The third frame, constructed by local actors and civil society groups, has had minimal impact. We explain this exclusion drawing on the deficit model of risk communication. This approach reveals that Polish experts, and business and political actors, during their interactions with local groups, have framed proponents of the threat frame as “incompetent actors” effectively excluding the threat frame from policy processes.
Creating and debating energy citizenship. The case of shale gas in Poland
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Between 2011 and 2015, the perspective of shale gas extraction in Poland raised enthusiasm among political and business elites, and general public alike. However, in some cases, local opposition led to long-term mobilisations. When adequately contextualised, the brief “affair” with shale gas can be interpreted as a lesson in what we term “energy citizenship.” This chapter analyses the impact of shale gas exploration in the context of a local mobilisation around the drilling site of Żurawlów, in southeast Poland. We argue that a crucial basis for energy citizenship is actors’ engagement with production of lay expertise: it not only allowed actors to participate in broader debates on energy options but also resulted in new networks being established across different organisations and scales. In the conclusion, we reflect on the long-lasting effects of the anti-fracking mobilisation for the local activists, the broader Polish environmental movement and the representatives of public administration. For this reason, we use the results of a reflection workshop organised in 2017 in Warsaw. We argue that the workshop demonstrated how the emergence of energy citizenship was influenced by the residents’ interaction with NGOs and state institutions.
This paper analyses prospects for an institutional structure to govern and ensure environmentally sustainable exploration of unconventional (shale) gas in Poland. Shale gas developments in the United States (US) ignited a widespread policy and law debate in Europe about the prospects of emerging fuel. In Poland, the debate has developed particularly high expectations on both the Government and the Public’s side, ascribed to future exploration and production of unconventional gas from shale formations. To ensure a balance between energy security prerogatives and resource governance responsibilities, Warsaw has sought to organise a top-down approach to shale gas exploration in Poland with an enhanced role-playing of the Government and its respective Ministries, particularly the Ministry of Environment in absence of an Energy Ministry proper. What can be referred to as a state-centric model toward exploration of shale gas, the Polish case study evidences opportunities as well as challe...
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This article explores competing interpretive frames regarding shale gas in Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania. These countries face the choice of embracing shale gas as a potential revolutionizing domestic source of energy, against the backdrop of Russia serving as the dominant gas supplier. This makes them interesting cases for studying how policy narratives and discourses coalesce around a novel technology. The findings, which are based on sixty-six semistructured research interviews, point to differing and indeed competing frames, ranging from national security, environmental boons to economic sellout and authoritarianism, with different sets of institutions sharing those frames. This suggests that enhancing energy security by way of deploying novel energy technologies such as shale gas fracking is not simply a function of resource endowments and technological progress. Instead, it is the result of complex dynamics unfolding among social stake-holders and the related discursive processes, which eventually will determine whether-or not-shale gas will go global. Shale gas has changed the energy industry. The primary technical driver behind the "shale gas revolution" is a leap in technical innovation: hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" for short, coupled with horizontal drilling (Sovacool 2014a). These advances in technology allow exploitation of reserves trapped in deep-rock formations. Today, shale gas-both the largest source of and a popular term for unconventional hydrocarbons-represents some 45 percent of total US gas output (EIA 2014). Clearly, fracking technology is contested. It offers material benefits to the countries using the technology, in the shape of economic welfare, tax dollar income , or security gains in an energy world that has turned more volatile. However,
Poland, France and the shale gas revolution: environmental and economic concerns
According to a 2011 report by the International Energy Agency, the world is entering a “golden age of gas”. Undeniably, such claim has been prompted by the radical changes brought about by unconventional sources of gas to energy markets: in particular, this is the case for shale gas. American findings led to a transformation of the US market, and Europe too is starting to be affected by this phenomenon. My study investigates the public knowledge controversy regarding technologies used for shale gas exploitation (fracking) in Poland and France, two countries that adopted opposite strategies with respect to the exploitation of this non-conventional resource.
NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin, 2022
Between the second half of the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, the prospect of shale gas extraction in Europe at first prompted fervent political support, then met with local and national opposition, and was finally rendered moot by a global collapse in the oil price. In the Europe-wide protests against shale gas and the main technique employed to extract it, hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), counter-expertise played a crucial role. This kind of expertise is one of the main elements of “energy citizenship,” a concept recently developed in the field of energy humanities which describes the empowerment of citizens in decision-making processes related to energy issues. This paper provides a socio-historical analysis of the co-production of counter-expertise and energy citizenship in the two European countries endowed with the largest shale gas reserves: Poland and France. In my analysis, concerns over the disruption of the food-water-energy nexus due to possible pollution emer...
Energy Research and Social Science, 2019
Unlike conventional resources, unconventional gas (such as shale gas) is trapped in low permeability rock, from which it does not flow naturally. Hence, its extraction is costly and requires sophisticated technologies. Building on my ethnographic work in north-west England and south-east Poland, I explore people’s engagements with shale gas materialities to show how the category of an ‘unconventional resource’ – framed by geological and engineering sciences – has more than merely technical implications. Instead, it produces new sociotechnical relations by trying to remove itself from social entanglements. These attempts fail to contain the unruly forces of the subsurface and local impacts, bringing the alienating dynamics of resource-making into sharp relief. The irregularities of materials and infrastructural limits, integral to the socially dis-embedded ‘unconventionality’ of the developments, inadvertently turn shale gas projects into a site of the political.
In this policy ethnography we examine the discourse related to unconventional natural gas development in western Pennsylvania in order to illuminate expressions of political power in attempts to manufacture consent. We focus on the overlapping spheres of influence between the state and capital to dissect techniques of governance as they operate at the level of civil society. Data collection from fieldwork and discourse analysis, particularly focused on discourse about recent legislation to regulate the booming natural gas industry in Pennsylvania, reveals the ways in which industry proponents attempt to corral public opinion to the goal of extracting and amassing capital. We analyze how industry actors try to gain and draw from the authority and approval of the state in those efforts. In turn, the state uses its socially sanctioned authority to reframe water, land, air, community, health, and self around a paradigm that interprets those as sources of profit. This case study examines how, under neoliberalism, the state organizes knowledge on the topic of fracking such that the balance of power shifts further out of democratic reach. Dans cette étude ethnographique nous examinons le discours relatif au développement de gaz naturel non classique dans l'ouest de la Pennsylvanie, pour éclairer les expressions du pouvoir politique ne sont utilisées pour fabriquer un consensus. Nous nous concentrons sur les sphères d'influence entre l'Etat et le capital fait chevauchement, interroger les techniques de gouvernance car elles opèrent au niveau de la société civile. La collecte des données de travail sur le terrain et l'analyse du discours, en particulier l'accent sur le discours sur la récente législation pour réglementer l'industrie du gaz naturel en plein essor en Pennsylvanie, révèle la façon dont les promoteurs de l'industrie tentent d'encercler l'opinion publique à extraire et accumuler du capital. Nous analysons comment les acteurs de l'industrie essaient de gagner et de tirer de l'autorité et de l'approbation de l'État dans ces efforts. En contrepartie, l'État utilise son autorité, socialement sanctionnée, pour recadrer l'eau, la terre, l'air, la communauté, la santé, et la personne autour d'un paradigme fait interprète les choses comme des sources de profit. Cette étude de cas examine comment, sous le néolibéralisme, l'Etat organise les connaissances sur le sujet de la fracturation hydraulique comme l'a fait la balance du pouvoir va plus loin hors de contrôle démocratique. En esta etnografia politica examinamos el discurso relacionado con el desarrollo no convencional de gas natural en Pensilvania occidental con el fin de clarificar las expresiones de poder político en sus intentos por generar aprobación. Nos centramos en las esferas de influencia sobrepuestas entre el estado y capital para así diseccionar técnicas de gobernanza debido a que estas operan al nivel de la sociedad civil. Datos recogidos en trabajo de campo y análisis sobre el discurso, particularmente enfocado en el discurso sobre legislazion reciente para regular el auge de la industria de gas en Pensilvania, revela las maneras en las cuales los defensores de la industria intentan contener a la opinión publica con el objectivo de extraer y acumular capital. Analizamos como los actores de la industria tratan de ganar, y sacar de autoridad y aprobación al estado en estos esfuerzos. A su vez, el Estado usa su autoridad socialmente sancionada para replantearse a sí mismo al igual que la tierra, el agua, el aire, comunidad y la salud en torno a un paradigma que los interpreta como fuentes de lucro. Este caso estudio examina como bajo el neoliberalismo el Estado organiza la información en relación a fractura hidráulica para que el balance del poder se mueva aun mas afuera del alcance democrático.