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Leaks and Overflows: Two contrasting cases of hybrid participation in environmental governance

Linda Soneryd and Göran Sundqvist

Introduction: Waste and water

For more than four decades, final disposal of nuclear waste has been a controversial issue in Sweden. In 1977 the industry presented a multi-barrier technical concept, in which the waste is encapsulated in copper canisters, surrounded by bentonite clay and stored in deep bedrock. The research, development and demonstration process, including finding a proper site, has been led by the industry, reviewed by government authorities and from the start framed in a technocratic manner strictly focusing on calculations of risks and safety. In the mid-1990s, however, this approach was substantially transformed and subjected to a participatory turn, due to strong resistance from people who lived near the proposed disposal sites, local politicians and environmental organisations. All of this led to the substantial involvement of a new actor: the municipality. This resulted in a range of new activities, meetings and arenas for public discussion. Inhabitants in municipalities which voluntarily agreed to site investigations could learn about nuclear waste and proposed disposal methods in school, at the Christmas market and at exhibitions. Environmental organisations were active in the consultation process, raising demands for more transparency, and involved municipalities asked critical questions of the nuclear waste company about safety, responsibility and municipal benefits.

Water management is a policy area very different from nuclear waste management. In Sweden there is a long tradition of involving a broad set of local actors and users in water management. Local engagement has primarily taken place in local water organisations, which were already established in the 1950s. These organisations are composed of a variety of actors such as farmers, fishers and environmental organisations, and activities are organised for the general public, such as water walks and quizzes and other outdoor activities that combine information exchange and socialising. The local water organisations have been important for water management and have functioned as a reference group for the authorities having formal responsibility for water management.

In this chapter, we explore participation in the contrasting policy areas of water management and nuclear waste management. Both examples concern participatory politics in relation to natural resource management in Sweden, but they are also fundamentally different. Nuclear waste must be managed in a way that keeps it far from people and environments, while water flows through and near people, activities and environments. What these two cases seem to have in common is a focus on stimulating and enhancing citizen participation, but this participation comes in different mixes of old and new styles of governance expressed in specific democratic situations.

Our ambition in this chapter is to explore extended participation in relation to environmental governance. Extended participation is a longstanding topic within science and technology studies (STS). It is important to note, however, that STS supporters of extended participation have been accused of being indiscriminate and naïve. Alfred Moore (2010: 793) claims that the STS argument in favour of participation can be summarised in the formula: ‘the technical is political, the political should be democratic, and the democratic should be participatory’. In this allegedly naïve approach, there are no limits to the extension of participation; more voices are always better. Yet, in contrast to the approach identified by Moore, we find a more critical and almost cynical approach to extended participation among STS scholars, as participation procedures in practice often fall short of the ideal. Brian Wynne (2001), for instance, has vigorously criticised the frequently technocratic framing of participatory processes, which is a framing that is also found more generally when experts communicate with publics. This critical strand recognises the ways in which new participatory governance styles are often hijacked by old technocratic governance structures (Irwin 2006).

A productive way of going beyond the two stereotypes – the naïve, which indiscriminately embraces extended participation vs. the critical approach, which discards any effort to invite a broad set of participants – is to focus on the empirical situations in which participation processes play out. We have already mentioned that our two cases, water and nuclear waste management, differ in how they combine old and new styles of governance. Nuclear waste management started as a technocratically framed process, and then opened up to a more participatory style, whereas water management is characterised by a long tradition of local engagement. Our main argument in what follows is that an important contribution from STS is to engage with an open mind in empirical studies of how conflicts are managed through the extension of participation.

Our research into the nuclear waste case is based on many years of close ethnographic work, including participatory observation at public consultation meetings in municipalities subject to site investigations, interviews with key actors and document analysis (Sundqvist 2002; Soneryd and Lidskog 2008; Elam et al. 2010; Sundqvist 2014; Konopasec et al. 2018; Barthe et al. 2020). Our research on water management stems from a research project focusing on transboundary risk governance and participatory water governance in Sweden, in which we conducted interviews with local actors involved in water management, as well as participatory observation (Prutzer and Soneryd 2016; Soneryd 2015).

Analysis: Where are the conflicts, how are they opened up, why and for whom?

The authority and legitimacy of scientific governance cannot be taken for granted. This means to acknowledge, at least in principle, the possibility that established issue framings can be challenged, changed or replaced. Michel Callon’s (1998) conceptual pair of framing and overflows neatly captures this dynamic between established and challenged orders. We suggest that extended participation is needed for the management of controversial issues, assuming that conflicts imply issues characterised by overflows in relation to an established framing. This means that overflows can neither be contained nor managed by the established framework. But how do these conflicts which lead to overflows arise? How do they become problematic, and to whom? How do governing bodies respond, and how do they interpret problems as challenges to the established framework? In the following sections these questions are explored in relation to our two cases of water and nuclear waste.

Waste management: Interpreting overflows as leaks

During its more than 40 years of existence the Swedish solution to the nuclear waste problem, despite many conflicts associated with it, has achieved a position as a world-leading role model for geological disposal (Anshelm and Galis 2011). The key factor in nuclear waste management is safety, which gives experts a crucial role. Technical experts must assure that both the method and site for a repository are safe, and expert calculations of safety projecting very far into the future are needed. Swedish legislation demands that a final repository can be projected to be safe for 100,000 years. The response from the industry has been an expert-driven technical programme, which means that a technocratic framing has been dominating the issue since the 1970s.

By definition, technocracy means that issues are framed by experts and that this framing is also crucial for decision making. Framing is a way of simplifying and creating order in a complex world; some aspects of a problem are seen as relevant, while the framing excludes other aspects. If a narrow technical framing is agreed upon among experts and accepted by outsiders, no overflows arise. However, when objects that seem perfectly understood inside the laboratory and at the drawing board of a technical engineer are placed in new and perhaps more complex contexts, there is always a risk of overflows. Overflows are signs that the framing does not hold. Consequently, the original framing will be acknowledged, at least by some, as an inadequate simplification. As unintended consequences or externalities, overflows must be internalised by being explicitly recognised and taken care of if the project – for instance a nuclear waste technical programme – is to survive. In short, the frame has to be modified.

During the 1970s and 1980s the nuclear waste problem in Sweden was reduced to, or simplified as, a question of finding the best bedrock conditions for safe storage of the waste. However, the geophysical investigations, often including test drillings, encountered strong opposition in almost every location they were performed. A technocratic siting strategy – searching for the best bedrock in the nation – was not accepted by the people living at sites of potential interest, who had no influence on and almost no information about what happened in their home surroundings.

Massive local protests severely challenged the whole process, and the site investigations were stopped. The industry acknowledged that the technocratic approach did not work – something needed to be changed. As a reaction to the situation, the industry introduced local acceptability as a new guiding principle for repository siting, modifying the requirement of the geological barrier from ‘best bedrock’ to ‘good enough bedrock’ (Sundqvist 2002: 113f). Voluntariness and community ownership now became part of a new style of governance, coordinated by so-called ‘feasibility studies’, carried out by the industry in close cooperation with the local community to assess the suitability of potential sites – this ‘suitability’ including local acceptability. This has become the well-known and world-famous Swedish model for nuclear waste management (Sundqvist 2014). The reframing of the nuclear waste issue to include concerns for safety and local acceptability indicates that extending participation is an effective way of taking care of problematic issues (Callon et al. 2009: 32–33). Framing the siting of a final repository for nuclear waste as a purely technical issue is hard to maintain in the face of sustained local protests. Creating a space where a greater number of actors can express themselves becomes crucially important.

Extending participation is not a simple move. Governing bodies have an interest in maintaining the existing order and excluding actors that challenge it. Thus, we need to attend to how groups in charge draw boundaries between invited and uninvited participants, and how they attempt to avoid overflows by limiting participation. If governing bodies accept overflows, they have to reframe both the issue and who they consider relevant participants. With our nuclear waste case, we can nuance this spectrum of denial and acceptance: there is also the possibility for governing bodies to interpret overflows as leaks, which do not demand reframing but rather repair (Elam et al. 2010).

In 1992 the nuclear waste industry came up with a proposal to deal with overflows in practice. This was the so-called ‘feasibility studies’ – a new instrument for communicating with municipalities. All Swedish municipalities were at this time invited to take part in such studies, but take-up was low. After discussions with a few sparsely populated municipalities in the northern part of the country, which led to heated discussions between different groups and among inhabitants, the industry found it in its interest to only move forward with municipalities already hosting nuclear facilities and a few of their closest neighbours. In total, eight feasibility studies were carried out between 1993 and 2000. During these studies, the industry listened to the concerns of local people, politicians as well as lay people. As well as adopting an attentive attitude towards the municipalities subject to site investigations, local presence and communication, the industry also opened up its underground laboratory and performed full-scale public demonstrations of the technical concept. After the year 2000, the industry continued with site investigations at two sites and intensified local communication with the respective municipalities. This led to an internationally unique situation in which two municipalities, which were both already hosting nuclear facilities, were competing to host the waste (Sundqvist 2014: 2072).

Despite this radical change to both the technical concept and the siting process, which meant that the role of the geological barrier was reformulated, and the industry turned to a voluntary approach, the nuclear waste industry still did not acknowledge that the issue was as much a social problem as it was a technical one. A continued separation between technical and social issues remained: geological conditions and technical problems were left for the industry to deal with, while assessments of socio-economic consequences were considered by the industry to be ‘municipal concerns’ for the hosting municipality to handle (Svensk Kärnbränslehantering 1995: Ch.10).

Nevertheless, the turn towards voluntariness came to be seen as a world-renowned success story for the nuclear industry in Sweden. This opened up the siting process for the involvement of municipalities, but the multi-barrier system at the technical core of the situation never became an issue for deliberation. Municipal actors did not take part in the sensitive issue of adapting the assessment of the bedrock from ‘the best bedrock’ to a ‘good enough bedrock’ located in municipalities willing to host a waste repository. The feasibility studies became a tool for recognising the importance of the local community, a way of creating well-ordered surroundings for a technical programme that was in this way transformed from a controversial to an accepted project. The stepwise process initiated with the help of feasibility studies is firmly embedded in an old technocratic style of governance, which has even been strengthened by the new, added style of participatory governance.

What we learn from this case is that there are not just two options for how governing bodies can respond to overflows challenging a technocratic framing: denial or acceptance. The vigorous protests against test drilling at site investigations challenged the existing framing of the nuclear waste issue. But the challenge was not treated and responded to by the nuclear industry as overflows but rather as leaks that could be repaired and managed with a voluntary, participatory approach and a modified multi-barrier system, which downplayed the importance of the geological barrier. The multi-barrier concept was thus negotiated, but only internally by the nuclear industry itself, as the technical core remained non-negotiable to outsiders, despite public protests having been the catalysts for this change.

Nuclear waste management, in Sweden as in other countries, is historically characterised by a strong expert culture that is hard to destabilise even after overflows have occurred. The technocratic framing seems non-negotiable, even as parts of the issue are opened up to new participants. What remained non-negotiable in this case was the core of experts and a sharp boundary between invited and uninvited publics (cf. Welsh and Wynne 2013). Municipalities and local residents were invited through the new style of voluntariness and the principle of local acceptability, but nationally mobilised environmental groups drawing on alternative expertise were left outside. The industry intensified the communication with the concerned municipalities, who were invited for regular consultation meetings as well as to meetings between industry and government authorities. This made it possible for the municipalities to follow the progress of the project, and it gave them some access to the technical discussions. This was not the case for environmental organisations, who complained about this boundary-making. By attending to invited and uninvited publics, as well as to the distinctions made and upheld between technical and social elements of the process, we can study how overflows are managed. The concerns raised by external protesters were taken care of by the industry, who successfully transformed these into a question of acceptance or non-acceptance, and thereby circumvented extended participation in technical decision making (Sundqvist and Elam 2010).

In 2011, the nuclear industry handed in an application to the government to implement the suggested solution for a final repository. Responsible authorities assessed the application to have been completed by 2016. In 2018, however, the Swedish Environmental Court disapproved the project on the basis that uncertainties still prevailed (Swedish Land and Environmental Court 2018). Just as in 1979, doubts about whether the repository is safe enough still remain, even after the final decision was taken by the government in January 2022.

The nuclear waste case shows that there have been many opportunities for redrawing the boundaries of expertise, but thus far these have not been seized by the nuclear industry, as no outsiders have been invited to negotiate with the industry. However, due to the long delay in the planning and review process – a unique situation in Swedish environmental planning – this strategy of limiting participation can still be questioned. The possible corrosion of the copper canisters, the main reason for the Land and Environmental Court declining the application in 2018, is yet another example of overflows that challenge the entire framing of the issue.

We will now turn to our second example: water management. Since it is characterised by a long tradition of local participation, it can almost be seen as an opposing case in relation to the nuclear waste case.

Water management: An overflow of overflows

We have already asserted that extended participation is needed for the management of controversial issues. The reason for this is that conflicts indicate that there are issues and concerns that overflow an established framing. A narrow technical framing assumes that technical issues can be separated from social issues. When overflows are recognised, this also means that issues are recognised as hybrid – in other words, that the social and the technical are seen as inevitably intertwined. The support of a heterogeneous set of participants in the area of water management by European as well as national legislation means that issues related to water are at least to some extent recognised by regulatory institutions as hybrid issues, and thus not amenable to governance by technical experts alone. This recognition, however, does not imply that water issues are free from conflict. On the contrary, hybrid forums are usually the product of struggles and conflict. Callon et al. (2009: 154) argue that hybrid forums, even though they challenge established powers in the first place, if they are left alone risk reproducing patterns of power and leading to ‘the exclusion of the weakest’. So, what do the hybrid forums in water management look like, and do they manage to give voice to those who are hard to hear?

The overall purpose of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD), introduced in 2000, is ‘to protect European waters and achieve a good ecological status of all waters […] and to get citizens and stakeholder organisations actively involved in the water management process’ (Hammer et al. 2011: 211). In Sweden there is a tradition of active involvement of citizens and stakeholders in the local water organisations, gathering local people, the industry and farmers. Many of these local water organisations have existed on a voluntary basis since the 1950s. Today, there are more than 125 local water councils in Sweden that have their base in the old local water organisation. The water councils are expected to monitor and describe the water status, identify activities that affect water quality, contribute to identify goals, solve problems, support proposed actions and be a point of contact for the national Water Authority.

An important task for the water councils is to make other water users, decision makers and a wider public attentive to water issues. One small-scale farmer engaged in a water council, for instance, was particularly interested in the freshwater pearl mussel. These mussels can live to a great age. The oldest known example was found in Jokkmokk in northern Sweden and determined to be 256 years old. For the freshwater pearl mussel to reproduce it needs clear water, oxygenated, low in nutrients and with a stable pH value. Because of this, special measures are needed in order to get viable stocks of freshwater pearl mussels. In the river basins that this farmer was concerned with, there are no freshwater pearl mussels younger than 50 years old, indicating that the water is not of a standard that enables the reproduction of the mussel. Due to the farmer’s special interest in the mussel, the water council organised ‘water walks’ – public walks in a river area with a focus on the freshwater pearl mussel. Several water councils conduct inventories of the freshwater pearl mussel. Since it is intolerant of pollutants, its presence is seen as a good indicator of water quality. The mussel can even be seen as part of the hybrid collectives that take form through the work in water councils; such collectives could start with an engaged farmer, who applies for funding to enable an inventory of the mussel. The discovery of freshwater pearl mussels in a river basin can motivate further measures such as making sure that there are fish to serve as hosts for the mussel larvae. In addition, water walks can be arranged so that the collective grows to include local citizens who then learn about the mussel and its importance for other species, as well as the fact that Sweden has the richest viable freshwater pearl mussel population in Europe.

One could say that these hybrid forums are successfully giving voice to a threatened species and that the local activities are potentially increasing its chances of survival by improving the quality of the water. However, this is a continuous struggle with uncertain outcomes. There are many uncertainties and potential threats: some threats are connected to agricultural or industrial activities that are environmental damaging – thus, activities performed by the very same actors that are represented in a water council; another threat is the frailty of the water councils themselves.

Farmers are often targeted by water quality improving measures, since their cooperation must be secured in order to minimise pollution from farming activities. Structural liming is an issue that has been organised collectively among farmers in a water council. Structural liming is a widespread agricultural method to reduce eutrophication (excessive richness of nutrients) of water sources by spreading structural lime on fields after harvesting. An engaged small-scale farmer, who was also the chair of a water council, applied for funding to organise collective structural liming among farmers. She tells us how she negotiated with a company to reduce the price of structural lime, and to speed up its delivery and spread. She advertised in the local newspaper and organised a field excursion and expert information on structural liming. Yet this points to a weakness of the water councils: almost all work in these councils is initiated by unpaid labour undertaken on a voluntary basis.

The examples above – the survival of the freshwater pearl mussel and eutrophication – illustrate water councils both attending to problems and initiating the measures to deal with them. To some extent, these practices align with the EU WFD policy that water management should be open for people to influence the outcome of plans and working processes, improve decision making, create awareness of environmental issues and increase acceptance of and commitment towards the mooted plans.

The participatory approach encouraged by the WFD is framed both through an instrumental value – namely, the aim to ensure effective implementation and achievement of the environmental objectives of water management – and a substantial value, which is that local actors should collaborate in order to improve water quality in the area. The effectiveness of the water councils is tenuous, however. They seem to be hybrid forums that to a great extent are left alone, and thus are examples of distributed responsibility without any centrally coordinated efforts to ensure or balance their powers to act. Our fieldwork indicates that there is a feeling among local water council members that the position of the councils is weak, with too few resources and engaged actors. A vision of the water councils as a collective force has been expressed by some actors, but the stories about how they actually work are far from encouraging. This suggests that in certain institutional contexts, participatory reforms such as the EU WFD may revive problems rather than solve them. The WFD set a goal for the water to be of high quality by 2021, but in many river basins in Sweden this is still not the case, and the measures undertaken are highly dependent on a few engaged individuals.

Overflows is a concept that has been used to refer to moments where the framing of an issue is challenged. It calls for reframing and reorientation but remains vague about how and in which direction. In the case of water management, we can see that there are many negotiable issues. Whether the freshwater pearl mussel is attended to or whether there are measures to reduce eutrophication depend on negotiations taking place within water councils between actors with diverging interests, varying engagements and different competences. So where are the overflows?

The challenges that participants express are related to responsibilities that are not accompanied by the power or resources needed to address them. This is especially true of the problematically loose coupling between local engagement in the water councils and decision-making. These issues are, we argue, typically non-negotiable. The unfortunate result is a mix of old and new styles of governance – the tradition of local participation and a decentralisation of water issues without adequate provision of resources. This problem – which is quite unintentional – is very difficult to remedy. As part of overarching shifts in power relations and subject formation, processes of responsibilisation are hard to grasp and turn into explicit objects of critique. At the same time, dispersed responsibility without dispersed resources creates overflows. There is thus a vulnerability built into the local participatory approach in the case of water management in Sweden. The fact that voluntary unpaid work to improve water quality is conducted by a few engaged individuals who are happy to be involved, but at the same time disappointed and worn out, will lead to continuous overflows, that is, problems that are difficult to manage without resources or political mandate.

Discussion: What is negotiable and for whom?

As we have seen in the analysis, in our study of nuclear waste management a traditionally expert-led process has been mixed with a new element of voluntariness on behalf of the municipalities. This was a new principle introduced by the nuclear industry in order to deal with overflows in relation to strong protests against the siting process. By this principle, the nuclear industry managed to transform overflows into manageable leaks and still keep technical issues within a narrow expert frame. In the case of water management, while participatory elements had been in place for a long time, the new elements were rather connected to a new context for extended participation: from local self-governance to local responsibilisation.

We have argued that processes of extended participation need to be studied empirically in order to know what the mixes of new and old governance styles look like, which historical framings new participatory elements are embedded in, and how conflicts understood as overflows are taken care of. In our interpretation, this means that we need to attend to what is negotiable and what is not (Barthe et al. 2020). Protests and conflicts often reveal that a narrow technocratic framing does not hold. Extended participation can thus facilitate the acknowledgement of problems. This is also in line with how STS approaches to the democratisation of science and technology have often been seen as a form of oppositional activity. We have argued that a key focus for empirical studies of participation needs to be on how to discover negotiable and non-negotiable issues. A way to do this is to attend to invited and uninvited publics. It is important to see how industries and governments draw the boundary between who is a legitimate participant (invited) and who is not (uninvited) in order to analyse how they define non-negotiable issues.

This raises questions about how governing bodies respond to challenges: do they interpret the conflict as a challenge to a narrow expert framing, and do the challenges lead to changes or an entire reframing of the issue? Or do governing bodies interpret challenges as leaks which can be repaired without reframing issues or relevant participants? The distinction between leaks and overflows helps us to point to an in-between response by governing bodies, whereby overflows are neither denied nor accepted, but give rise to a reinterpretation of overflows as manageable leaks. As we discussed in relation to our cases, leaks can be clogged and repaired without changing the framing or the overall composition of the sociotechnical network, while overflows, if admitted as such, challenge the entire framing and composition.

As we show in the nuclear waste case, it is of great importance to analyse how actors understand overflows and the strategic reasons for actors to try to transform overflows into more manageable leaks. And of course, as also shown in this case, the outcomes of such processes have consequences for participation. The industry in this example negotiated the technical concept ‘in-house’ and thereby maintained the technical core closed for public deliberation. If the industry had admitted overflows, this could have opened up a renegotiation of legitimate participants, which could have led to changes in how the municipalities and environmental organisations participate and interact with industry and authorities about issues assessed by the industry as ‘technical’.

In the water management case, local participation facilitated an awareness of water-related problems, which led to the discovery of overflows, but an overarching governing body that could direct attention to such overflows was lacking. Participation, in this case, is introduced in a context of responsibilisation without resources and power. This leads to an overflow of overflows, since the acknowledgement of problems happens at a faster pace than anyone can manage.

These two cases show the importance of distinguishing between the relationship between publics that attend to overflows and governing bodies that interpret and respond to such overflows. It is in making these connections that we can talk about democratic situations. We thus suggest that it is important to focus on how the governing bodies respond to the problems voiced by publics when we explore democratic situations. This implies a need to take conflicts seriously and understand them as part of a foundation for new social arrangements – what we have referred to as hybrid forums. In short, overflows need be taken care of within a context of public deliberation, which requires cultivating discussion as well as new actor constellations.

From this we can conclude that the feasibility studies set up by the nuclear industry to establish good contacts with municipalities have not given rise to the cultivation of a more open participatory process, since they had a clear instrumental focus on achieving the acceptance of expert work and ready-made technical solutions.

The water management case is a good illustration of an ambition to create space for hybrid communities and to expand the middle ground between expert work, the public and traditional political institutions. Such a space is lacking in our technical-democratic societies, as exemplified by the failure identified in the water case to bridge this divide. The support for this ambition, it turned out, was fragile; too many of the water councils’ activities were dependent on the voluntary engagement of individuals, and too little support and resources were provided by the authorities to support these engagements.

If governing elites are only interested in stopping leaks, then increased dialogue with invited publics can be enough. However, if overflows need to be acknowledged and managed, then decision makers need to be responsive to challenges to the entire framing of an issue and be prepared to make more fundamental changes in how they approach the problems at hand. In the nuclear waste example, we can conclude that the responsible actors are unwilling to acknowledge overflows. On the other hand, if the authorities have no problem accepting overflows but push responsibilities downwards, there will be too much overflowing. This is the situation in the example of water management, in which local actors get engaged and try to do most of the work themselves in the absence of governing bodies handling the overflows.

While our study is very much in line with what other STS scholars have already shown (for example, Callon et al. 2009), we believe that our attention to old and new styles of governance, our focus on the power distribution and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that these new combinations imply, and not least how overflows can be interpreted and taken care of in different ways are valuable developments in order to approach hybrid participation in a critical as well as constructive way.

STS scholars can point to the need for decision makers to be attentive to the challenges involved in addressing controversial issues, either by giving voice to protests of the uninvited, or by facilitating attentive listening to the quieter dripping and rippling that could be a first sign of serious leaks and overflows. The aim of such research should be to show different understandings and conflicts in relation to overflows and leaks, based on the assumption that they need to be taken care of with the help of wide participation. Our two cases have shown that the crucial relationship is between publics that attend to overflows and the governing bodies that interpret and respond to such overflows. It is when this relation is dynamic, and when the public can actually be part of negotiations of how to change and improve the governance of issues, that participation becomes meaningful.

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