Creating and debating energy citizenship. The case of shale gas in Poland (original) (raw)
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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...
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.
Co-production of the shale gas publics in Poland and the negotiation of the state citizens relations
A B S T R A C T The paper explores the emergence of different publics for shale gas issue along the development of exploration activities in Poland. Through the concept of co-production, it is argued that publics do not pre-exist socio-technical realities but that they are organized by various actors together with these realities. The paper argues that scaling is an important aspect of the co-production of publics as it helps to navigate among them and the issues they represent and govern them according to their scalar relevance: local, regional, national or international. As political realities, publics become important terrains within which relations between state and citizens are negotiated.
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.
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...
Energy Research & Social Science, 2016
This paper analyses how citizens (re)define their relation to the state in the contestation of hydraulic fracturing in the Noordoostpolder (the Netherlands) in the context of energy transition. It approaches citizenship as the negotiations between governments and citizens about in-and exclusion in decision-making processes and argues that these are also produced at the site of energy transition. It focuses on how residents of the Noordoostpolder construct their citizenship, resisting the advent of fracking in their environment while at the same time negotiating their own inclusion in decision-making processes. Our ethnographic material encompasses almost a year of these negotiations starting shortly after the announcement of the Noordoostpolder as a site for exploratory drilling, when people feel highly disempowered and excluded. We closely follow a process of gradual empowerment in the face of energy transition as inhabitants start to produce their own knowledge base and coalesce into unusual partnerships to negotiate their inclusion. Our main argument is that negotiations about hydraulic fracturing in relation to energy transition goes beyond energy issues. It is also -if not mostly -about who gets to decide on energy and land use.
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 a context of resource scarcity and political instability, new energy sources and technologies are being explored in many parts of the world and exploited in some. One of these new energy sources is shale gas and one of the countries seeking to decrease its energy dependence and increase its energy security is Poland which is largely dependent on gas and oil imports from Russia. This article presents the results of a thematic content analysis of articles reporting on shale gas/fracking published in Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita, two leading Polish newspapers, from 1 January 2010 to 31 December 2012. Findings suggest that in media reporting the geopolitical dimension of fracking overrides the technological/scientific dimension and that representations are overwhelmingly positive. Positive representations are bolstered through particular linguistic framings. It is argued that the Polish press has polarized the debate on fracking in a particular (positive) direction, which has silenced an open and constructive debate concerning energy policy in Poland and constructed criticism of fracking as counter-normative and “un-Polish.” The potential socio-political and policy implications of these media representations are discussed.
Visible and invisible. Nuclear Power, Shale gas and Wind Power in media discourses in Poland.
Widoczne i niewidoczne. Atom, łupki, wiatr w dyskursach medialnych wokół energetyki [“Visible and invisible. Nuclear, shale, and wind in media discourses on energy”] is an edited volume dedicated to the mechanisms of creation and functioning of media discourses on selected energy-related problems. The monograph attempts to diagnose the communicative dimension of the public sphere in terms of its operation as a space of deliberation, with particular consideration for mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion of social actors, topics and arguments. The individual chapters result from research dating from the 1980s (archive studies) up until 2014. In the selected periods, diverse media forms and various channels of mass communication were analysed. This produced rich and differentiated materials that at the same time demonstrated the dynamic of changes based on consistent tracking of the fields of nuclear and wind energy and shale gas. These types of energy were chosen deliberately, instead of coal, the most obvious form in Poland. At the beginning of the research, these areas represented technologies that were (in their different ways) innovative. Nuclear energy is perhaps the hardest to define in this way (many actors treat it is a technology of the past), but previously it had not been implemented in Poland. In recent years, it is – again – being taken into serious consideration as a solution that can meet the demands of future energy policy, ensuring stability of energy supplies, reinforcing the country’s energy independence and favouring reduction of CO2 emissions. In this sense it is innovative for the Polish energy system. Wind energy is the field of renewable energy represented most strongly in Poland, as well as the most recognised and most readily associated with ecology. As a result, although this type of energy has existed in Poland since the 1990s, in recent years even recording a significant increase in generating capacity (albeit still relatively low in comparison to leading European countries), it is treated as an alternative to “hard” yet “dirty” energy technologies based on fossil fuels (including uranium). Finally, shale gas is a new subject that appeared in the media discourse just two years before the beginning of the research, during which it became a hot topic in the media. Unlike the remaining two energy types, saddled with a certain history of discourses around which specific epistemic communities had developed and narrative tracks, types of argument and symbolic representations had formed, the choice of the topic of shale gas permitted an ongoing observation of all these processes. Since new media representations need to be anchored in the world of already existing meanings, it was also possible to track the networks with connections to foreign discourses or the traditions of the Polish gas industry. A further significant dimension was the positioning of shale gas compared to other energy sources, actors and their various interests. It is worth noting here that the objective of the analyses was not to assess the usefulness or risk of a given energy technology, but rather to reconstruct their media representations in the context of dynamically developing discourses. As such, the selected energy topics, as those which concern all citizens as well as their descendants, thus determine the future not only of their immediate environment, but also that of the region and the world. As those related to the key economic interests of various groups and entities, meanwhile, they become peculiar case studies of the way in which media discourses function in the contemporary public sphere. The main question is therefore about the way in which public policies are formed, presented and discussed in the media space, with particular attention given to the participation (and/or lack thereof) of diverse social actors in these processes. The book has two main parts. The purpose of Part One, comprising the first two chapters, is to present the theoretical and methodological premises. It shows the results of the conceptualisation work and explains how the research was organised. Owing to the diversity of this research, conducted in a number of stages using various methods, it is impossible to include all the analytical tools and detailed fragmentary reports (analysing a given topic in a specific media type) in the book. It therefore appears especially important to present the theoretical-methodological framework and main way of thinking about media discourses developed over the last three years. Part Two encompasses individual analyses of specific topics, and is characterised by greater diversity. This includes Chapter 3, Rafał Garpiel’s analysis of the nuclear energy discourse, Chapter 4, in which Maria Świątkiewicz-Mośny examines discourse on wind energy, and Chapter 5, in which Aleksandra Wagner tackles media discourse on shale energy. The logic in Chapter 6 is somewhat different. Wit Hubert uses data provided by the SentiOne group to analyse the specific nature of discourses developed in social media. The author therefore departs from presentation of thematic discourse in favour of outlining the medium – and specifically the discourses developed in the communication space as constituting new media. The reason for this was the conclusion drawn from the internet discourse analyses that were initially planned and the criterion of visibility of this that was adopted: that the sources are mostly institutional. The spectrum of analyses was expanded in a way that made it possible to consider discourses that were scattered and therefore less visible, yet no less significant for the developing argumentation structures and entering dynamic relations with the analysed expert discourse of professional websites and blogs. The monograph concludes with an attempt to summarise the individual authors’ analyses and observations. Aleksandra Wagner’s chapter “Media as a space of deliberation – the example of media discourse on selected energy topics. Summary” emphasises the significance of media discourses for the functioning of deliberative democracy, which puts inclusive debate based on exchange of arguments in a central position. Wagner also discusses the role that can be played by deliberation in social change – in this case energy transformation – and identifies the mechanisms safeguarding the status quo. By reconstructing the blank spaces on the map of the media discourses on the energy issues they researched, the authors of the monograph point out the insufficiencies of deliberative communication – exclusion and neglect, manipulation and reproduction of power. Key words: energy, media discourse, public sphere, deliberation, visibility, nuclear power station, shale gas, wind energy