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- 1. The importance of talking to YOU about complex environmental issues: Insights from research with the public on, low carbon transitions, and climate engineering Dr Karen Parkhill (Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Environment Department, University of York). karen.parkhill@york.ac.uk @DrKAParkhill www.energywelfareproject.org @energywelfare Presentation given at: University of York, Environment Public Lectures. Tuesday 15th November 2016.
- 2. Acknowledgements • Dr Catherine Butler (University of Exeter) • Prof Nick Pidgeon, Dr Nem Vaughan, Dr Adam Corner. • All public/stakeholder participants.
- 3. The importance of talking to YOU about complex environmental issues • Publics as scientific citizens – different insights • Publics not as decision-makers but part of the decision-making process – Case Study of Climate Engineering. • Publics as part of reflexive governance – Case Study of Welfare, Employment & Energy Demand. • Final thoughts.
- 4. Why do (/should) we engage with publics? ❌To legitimise technological choices. ❌To prevent or close down public contestation To open up & give ‘broader attention to the full range of potentially viable choices’ (Stirling, 2007, p. 293).
- 5. Why do (/should) we engage with publics? ‘What is lacking is not just knowledge to fill the gaps but also processes and methods to elicit what the public wants, and to use what is already known. To bring these dimensions out of the shadows and into the dynamics of democratic debate, they must first be made concrete and tangible’ (Jasanoff, 2003 p. 240) • Stop privileging scientific knowledge above all else – recognise the value of different knowledges.
- 6. ‘Energy systems are more than collections of fuels and technologies. Energy consumption profoundly affects everything from how individuals work, play, socialize, and eat to how industries cluster, how cities and economies grow, and how nations conduct their foreign affairs’ (Laird, 2013, pp. 150- 151).
- 7. CASE STUDY 1: PUBLICS PART OF THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS
- 8. Geoengineering Definition “deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change” (Royal Society, 2009: 1). (Lenton & Vaughan, 2009)
- 9. Geoengineering research in the UK Two projects funded from EPSRC/NERC Geoengineering – IAGP (Oct 2010 – Feb 2015) – SPICE (Oct 2010 – March 2013)
- 10. Aims of SPICE
- 12. Responsible Innovation? • Dimensions of RI – Anticipatory – describing & analysing (un)intended impacts – Reflective – ethically reflecting on narratives of expectation & the social transformation these might bring – Deliberative – opening up visions/impacts etc. to others, inviting & listening to wider perspectives – Responsive – using reflexivity to influence the direction & pace of the innovation process
- 13. The Test-bed & STAGEGATE • October 2011 • June 2011 STAGEGATE – Expert panel – 5 criteria “mechanisms had been identified to understand public and stakeholder views regarding the predicted applications and impacts” (Macnaghten & Owen, 2011: 479).Macnaghten & Owen, 2011
- 14. Methods • Case site areas: – 3 x pilots Cardiff – 3 x main (Norwich, Nottingham, Cardiff) • Reconvened workshop format – 1.5 days • Sample (n=32) – Diverse sample: gender, age, ethnicity, SEG, educational level
- 15. Numerous ‘Scientific’ Insights Offered Methodology & Justification Will it add CO2/cause pollution? How can your track the particles and what they do? How will the site be chosen& criteria used to assess? Methodology & Justification How will it affect wavelengths of light? What effect will the full- scale have on other countries? What impacts will it cause? Knowledge Limitations To what extent can you upscale findings from 1kn-20km? How will this address the wider risks of SA? Governance & Communication How will the results be shared with other countries? Who’s accountable if things do go wrong? Who would be in control of the full-scale project?
- 16. Limited input due to complexity of ‘extraordinary’ tech? William – No we need to do this [investigate geoengineering] but the answers I think are a bit – well they’re beyond me anyway. Frank – Yeah, I don’t think the answers can be done by a layman. That’s gonna take someone more intelligent than me to sort it out. (Norwich)
- 17. Limited input due to early stage of development? ‘Participants also questioned if, given the emergent stage that most geoengineering techniques are at, it was even worthwhile for them to take part in deliberations. They struggled with understanding what help their ruminations could be when the techniques are likely to radically change throughout the development process. Such struggles were indicative that, at times, participants would get “lost” in the details of a technique. Once brought back to broader dimensions (such as intentionality, responsibility, governance, impacts, ethics, and so forth), most participants seemed comparatively more comfortable deliberating’ (Parkhill et al., 2011: 233).
- 18. The need for engagement to develop/maintain trust Cath: I think you’d wanna know about the safety of it. That would be the main concern; why didn’t they tell us that? That type of thing… … Gwen: Yeah, it’s like a conspiracy theorists dream isn’t it? Cath: Yes. Gwen: What were they really pumping into the atmosphere? Cath: Yeah, so if it was only fresh water why didn’t they tell us? (Cardiff)
- 19. Limited input: Accountability • Worried about being held accountable if things go wrong. Meredith: I wouldn’t wanna be asked. I wouldn’t wanna have any involvement in it. I wouldn’t wanna have an opinion on it. What if they done like a ballot vote and 80% decided yeah and something went wrong? I don’t wanna be to blame if it goes wrong. Morgan: It could cause conflict as well especially if we were asked. (Cardiff).
- 20. Limited input but still some input • Despite difficulties, most participants did feel that publics should be engaged with on a continual basis.
- 21. CASE STUDY 2: ILLUMINATING POLICY INTERCONNECTIONS/IMPLICATIONS
- 22. Welfare, Employment and Energy Demand Examining Tensions and Opportunities in the Delivery of Demand Reduction Dr Catherine Butler Dr Karen Parkhill Dr Karen Bickerstaff Professor Gordon Walker
- 23. Project background The role of government objectives, investments and ways of providing shapes our need for energy (e.g. Bourdieu, 1990; Shove, 2004; Hand et al. 2005; Butler et al. 2014). Energy demand is not just about energy policies. Tensions between energy demand reduction and wider social goals being addressed in other policy areas.
- 24. Project overview • Focus on welfare and employment policy and the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) as the main policy body with responsibilities in this area. • Synergies and conflicts between welfare policy and energy demand issues (e.g. improving poor quality housing; welfare reforms). • Examine implications of welfare and employment policy : – Our energy needs – Our daily lives
- 25. Department for Work and Pensions • Created in 2001 (merging of department of social security and policy groups from department of education and employment) • Secretary of State – Damian Green (MP Ashford) • Whitehall’s ‘highest-spending’ department 170bn - Austerity • Main responsibilities: Pensions and ageing society, poverty and social justice, welfare reform ‘Bedroom tax’ Benefits to all working age people (inclu.) reduced Pension age raised
- 26. Energy Demand Reduction– 50% relative to 2011 by 2050 Reduce energy vulnerabilities – i.e. reduce fuel poverty Fuel poor if lower than average income, and higher than average fuel cost Previous 10% definition – target was to eradicate by 2016 LIHC – ‘It is not a problem that can be eradicated in any meaningful way...’ (DECC, 2013)
- 27. Project Methods Document analysis (2015 ongoing) Policy and stakeholder in-depth qualitative interviews – national to local scales (2015-2016) Three UK case study areas: Biographical interviews with people directly impacted by welfare policy (Oct 2016 – March 2017)
- 28. Policy framings, aims, & potential consequences Austerity Worklessness Individual Deficits Scope for reshaping policy agendas “Work is undeniably the best and most sustainable route out of poverty.” (DWP Reducing Poverty Indicators, Entrenched Worklessness, 2014) Growth of zero hours contracts? Working for free as benefits spent travelling to work experience? Increased digitalisation? Creating new vulnerabilities? Constituting needs for energy? “Your work coach may refer you to these schemes… you may do work experience to add some career history to your CV.” (Back to Work Schemes, 2014)
- 29. The Policy Problem & Solution: Worklessness ‘Entrenched worklessness can leave children without a role model and contribute to and compound problems experienced by adults: mental health problems are more common among people who are out of work than those in employment,whilst large numbers of those claiming benefit experience problematic drug and alcohol use or have a history of offending. Work is undeniably the best and most sustainable route out of poverty.’ (DWP Reducing Poverty Indicators, Entrenched Worklessness, 2014)
- 30. Exacerbating/Developing New Vulnerabilities “I think there are potentially the problems that spring to mind that the people are likely to be experiencing are that it generally means for most people a reduction in their income. The fact that it’s [Universal Credit] paid monthly will be a huge shock for many people who have only ever budgeted weekly or perhaps fortnightly, that it’s only paid to one member of the household.” (Interviewee – policy stakeholder).
- 31. Exacerbating/Developing New Vulnerabilities “I think changes in employment patterns generally is quite interesting. I think we saw changes with the recession to the structure of a lot of people’s employment. Unemployment didn’t fall that much after 2008 but we’ve seen a lot more people in insecure work, zero hours contracts, it’s been in the news a lot that there’s been a growth in temporary work and agency work, and particularly self-employment as [colleague] said. That might mean that if people are in less secure employment they end up travelling further maybe. It might mean working patterns over the working day are changing, or over the week.” (Interviewee – policy stakeholder)
- 32. “Yes. Obviously the big change over to universal benefit, the caps, the reduction, the below inflation level increases in benefit. These are all things that we are aware of and it’s probably our frontline staff who are more acutely aware of those who are dealing with fuel debt. A lot of the work we’ve been doing with foodbanks over the last year mean that we’re aware of what’s happened to people when they’ve had benefit sanctions where they’ve had changes in payments and just how fragile household budgets are and just how fragile some household economies are when they can’t take even a two week delay in receiving benefits. They have nothing to fall back on.“ (Interviewee – policy stakeholder) Exacerbating/Developing New Vulnerabilities
- 33. “they’ll (DWP) produce impact reports on each of the policies, sometimes you have to read between the lines, they’re sometimes a bit… when I first looked at the impact report on disabled people and I thought, “this doesn't seem right, I’ve worked out how much Universal Credit is going to affect disabled people and some people are going to be hugely worse off and yet they’re saying there’s no impact”, and then I noticed this tiny little reference underneath, “we haven't taken into account support for disabled people”, I thought how do you decide there’s no impact because you haven't taken into account the policy? “ (Interviewee Policy Delivery) Exacerbating/Developing New Vulnerabilities
- 34. Issues with Policy Evaluations “…all the different evaluation projects that were happening to look at specific issues. This tends to happen in isolation effectively with research, because people get so focussed on the one specific thing that they’re looking at, but there was no overarching of bringing them all together” (Interviewee – policy stakeholder).
- 35. Need for Reflexive Governance • It is through talking to publics that: – expected and unexpected (positive and negative) implications of policies revealed. – Recognise new vulnerabilities and new forms of marginalisation. – Interconnections between policy areas are particularly illuminated.
- 36. Final Thoughts • Publics are more than capable of engaging with complex science. • Scientific citizens (Irwin, 1995), philosophers, moralisers, governors, regulators, ethicists, and much more. • Offer new/different insights and perspectives. • Just a call for: more research? evidenced-based policy, based on research?
Editor's Notes
- Includes a diverse range of putative technologies that have been proposed for manipulating the climate in response to anthropogenic activity. They are subject to a great deal of scientific uncertainty with the risks and benefits poorly understood.
- In collaboration with Karen Parkhill, Karen Bickerstaff and Gordon (Walker)
- Hand et al. (2005), for instance, highlight the role of state interventions associated with influencing processes of social practice change toward daily showering. They refer both to explicit forms of influence, such as government programmes of instruction and advice, and more subtle forms of cultural and social dominance that embed specific understandings of hygiene, health, and self (see Miller and Rose, 2008). Bourdieu (1990) highlights the role of the state in shaping family practices. He points to housing and planning policy (the size and number of rooms in houses), legal structures pertaining to marriage, inheritance and names, family benefits, and social statistics or other representations of family that serve to reproduce particular forms of practice associated with family life. While Bourdieu takes the family as his example, such analytic scrutiny can be applied to multiple other forms of social practice and, ultimately, to understanding how it is that energy intensive ways of life are reproduced through wider governance processes and policies that extend far beyond energy policy per se. Or in my own research I’ve highlighted how policies aimed at creating flexible workers and employment conditions have contributed to the constitution of particular forms of mobility as people increasingly form connections to multiple places (and crucially people in place) through their life course Such forms of influence on practice are historically and socially rooted and not the product of singular distinct policies that are necessarily designed to institute particular forms of practice. They are, however, pervasive in their effects and examining policy in this way can bring insights that orient one differently to thinking about the creation of new policy and its potential outcomes. The implications are clear: to effectively unravel, and ultimately reconfigure, the constitution of demand we must attend to a broad sweep of policies that extend beyond what is currently recognised as energy policy. But if we thinking about energy use in this way as constituted through multiple policies– it brings to light a further set of complexities and potential challenges associated with reducing demand – which is that there are likely to be tensions between energy demand reduction and wider social goals that are being addressed (or aiming to be addressed) in other policy areas - for example, social justice, health and wellbeing-
- Welfare and employment policy can be identified as a critical non-energy policy area where its central goals are likely to have implications for energy demand and where it is possible to observe areas of policy synergy and identify points of conflict. To illustrate its significance for research on this topic, DWP’s aims associated with reducing poverty and improving social justice involve policies which both align and conflict with demand reduction goals. On the one hand, improving poor quality housing and addressing fuel poverty seem to be examples of congruency. Although evidence indicates that even here such synergies may in fact be problematic to achieve given that lower income households tend to take back energy savings in improved comfort levels (e.g. see Milne and Boardman, 2000). On the other hand, the observable tendency, in the UK at least, for significantly lower levels of demand to be characteristic of lifestyles classified as ‘highly deprived’ and vice versa (Druckman and Jackson, 2008: 3184), means that addressing poverty within the current socio-economic system is likely to increase demand. A further example of this kind of complexity can be identified in relation to welfare reform. Recent analysis has highlighted how the major welfare reforms currently underway are likely to negatively impact vulnerable groups (i.e. people with disabilities) in terms of fuel poverty (Snell et al., 2014). This means that although reforms may reduce energy demand they will do so at the expense of social justice and poverty reduction aims. These policies and others delivered through the DWP can be seen to have an important role in constructing conceptions of need and entitlement (e.g. the need for heat for the elderly in particular– the winter fuel payment), reproducing particular (temporal) patterns of demand, and constituting consumption patterns (e.g. through work and employment policies – which I’ll focus on today) To what extent do w&e policies contribute to reducing, increasing or reinforcing existing (temporal) patterns of demand? And how could policy in this area be reformulated to help meet energy demand reduction goals? And what tensions emerge in efforts to do this?
- So just to give a bit of background on the department and it’s policies - it was created in 2001 under the Labour Government– merging of two departments signals a change in the framing of welfare –from social security to worklessness- bringing employment together with benefits DWP is the biggest public service delivery department in the UK with responsibility for policies addressing employment, welfare (including poverty reduction), UK economic development, pensions, and ageing (DWP, 2014). DWP policy responsibilities – more on that later Examining historical and future framings of welfare policy but focus today on current DWP policy – I’ve been collating data to analyse welfare debates back to the 1980s and identify in particular any intersections with energy policy – but at present I’m focusing on DWP and post-2010 with a forward looking element drawing on the Conservative party manifesto (so forward looking) and proposed policies prior to the 2015 election – as well as looking back and forward in time I am also looking at counter narratives and key debates around energy policy but again for today’s purposes I’ll just focusing on unpacking elements of Government policy since 2010…
- Document analysis – speeches, reports, strategy documents, presentations, websites… Interviews are building understanding of the current policy context as well as experiences of developing and delivering policy, in welfare and employment policy, and energy policy, plus areas where there are connections e.g. Ofgem vulnerable customers, corporate social responsibility activities of energy firms – Building up a picture of welfare and employment policy and examining what the implications are for energy demand in terms of continuities and/or disruption Reflection on energy demand implications
- If we take the issue of poverty and look at how its problematised through DWP policy – poverty positioned as a problem of worklesness and (as elsewhere in government) this is further problematised as issue of individual deficits And worklessness is a problem of individuals and families personal abilities or failures to get into work – lack of training (rather than structural of cultural), lack of trying to get a job, laziness/fecklessness – deserving and undeserving poor – has a long history and is not only propagated (or challenged) through government but also through media and a whole range of governing institutions and discourses that shape or delimit what’s possible (or desirable) within policy This creates space for policies like fit for work assessments and schemes, sanctions, work coaches and other forms of policy that are targeted at addressing individual deficits Problems of welfare dependency could equally be framed to include other structural and systemic issues, including access to work and workplaces, and issues associated with mobilities and travelling or moving to areas where workplaces are situated. To take this further applying a lens of low carbon transition, they might be configured to challenge existing arrangements that contribute toward needs for mobilities for work, such as the separation between workplaces and homes and the social organisation of working practices more generally. By opening ways of understanding social problems it becomes possible to see and reimagine different possibilities for policy that more fundamentally challenge current structures pertaining to working patterns and forms of organisation that re-create high dependency on energy (e.g. in terms of mobilities). So this is to highlight how particular aspects of social life come to be problematised in ways that delimit and shape the possibilities for policy and practice – but if we think cross sectorally we can bring into view issues in how different departments problematise issues in ways that create tensions
- And such impact assessments are not purely scientific but are often political in nature – quote - So this means that impact assessments can be political objects further limiting the ways that policy impact comes to be thought about and considered reflexively within governing institutions.
- Now I want to talk a bit about technologies of government and how these operate to delimit what counts as evidence and what can be governed How boundaries are constructed and why? So we saw boundaries being constructed in the ways that different departments problematise issues but there are also boundaries related to departmental financing and policy evaluation practices – as well as different departmental cultures – so for example because energy policy is liberalised DECC largely relies on market mechanisms to deliver its policy ends. This first quote here concerns financiing and issues concerning what gets excluded if you are focused on what can be measured in particular ways – i.e. economic assessments – this quote they’re talking about the challenges of considering particular kinds of benefit from policies within departmental terms – though this is a challenge – these kinds of health benefits are to some extent calculable but the point is that anything non-calculable is liable to get excluded from consideration… The second quote concerns policy impact evaluations – within UK government they adopt various ideas of policy impact assessment but these in their own way operate to narrow what counts as evidence - Theory of Change (Twigger-Ross et al. 2015)