Knowledge about environmental technology and spatial planning is gendered – current innovation fails to account for important feminine perspectives

ABSTRACT The expansion of fracking, an intensive form of hydrocarbon extraction, has been met with increasing public hostility, spanning a diverse range of interests and political allegiances. However, to date, few authors have engaged with the role of gender and women activists. In this paper, I consider how gender and gendered ideas have been used as a resource to underpin fracking protests in the USA and UK. I find that a problematic gendered binary has emerged that undermined the veracity of anti-fracking protestors’ opposition and aligns with modes of planning governance that valorize universal and objective forms of knowledge. Drawing upon a feminist epistemological stance, I turn to a planning dispute over noise levels in Lancashire, England, to explore the limits to current forms of knowledge production. I argue that specific actors, behaviours, and forms of knowledge become framed as gendered and unreliable in the sphere of technical decision making, diminishing our understanding of the complexities of human experience and subjectivity within spatial planning. Women think differently to men on a whole range of issues – I am sure both men and women would agree with that statement … As a mother, I would do nothing to put my family, or any other family, in harm’s way. As a scientist, I study the facts and know that many of the fears are irrational … Scientific language does not resonate with them [women]. They do not engage with it. What they do connect with is the impact they think science or technology will have on them and their family. Averil MacDonald1 My opening epigraph sets out the viewpoint of the scientist Averil MacDonald who was appointed chair of the industry lobbying body UK Onshore Oil and Gas in 2015. Her words exemplify a wider perception of public opposition to fracking. The assertion that public viewpoints from women on the matter are something that can be disregarded as irrational goes to the heart of questions of knowledge and objectivity, and how science is framed and utilised to support vastly different perspectives within planning disputes. To date, the intense public debate on fracking, which refers to a key part of the extraction of shale gas from deep subsurface rock, has revolved around disputed knowledge claims regarding the environmental, health, and social impacts on local communities (see Cotton, 2015; Sovacool et al., 2020). Supporters of the industry have deployed arguments that opposition is rooted in the non-rational world of emotions, with women so concerned with their caring roles that they are unable to engage with science in their everyday lives. Gendered discourses have in turn been used by anti-fracking campaigners to support their claims to know and care for local environments more deeply. In this paper, I explore how essentialist ideas about gender have proliferated throughout the public debate on fracking. In the first section of the paper I outline how gendered opposition that draws on ideas about the relationship between nature and women have animated aspects of public protest. Secondly, I turn to a feminist epistemological critique that challenges a prevailing “rational versus irrational” knowledge binary underpinned by gendered stereotypes. In the final section I examine these gendered framings through the politics of noise. I look at the limitations of current governance approaches that seek universal measures through which to evaluate decisions. Specifically, I consider how the multi-layered nature of opposition to fracking reveals the continuing limitations of current conceptualisations of knowledge within environmental and planning decision-making. My argument draws upon interviews with people involved in the shale gas dispute, including advocates and protesters, in Pennsylvania, USA, and Lancashire England.2 I focus in this paper on the interviews with women, although gender was not the primary focus of my research at the time of conducting fieldwork. The final part of the paper, focused on a specific dispute over noise, draws on the publicly available reports, from the planning inquiry, and noise reports, as well as watching the public inquiry via weblink and recorded sessions (9 February–11 March 2016). Drawing on a feminist lens, I raise questions about how a binary distinction emerges between objective scientific decision-making and more subjective “emotional” forms of knowledge and dissent both shape and limit policy-making processes. Focusing upon a key area of dispute, noise, I examine how feminist epistemological approaches towards the subjective are crucial to understanding and analysing the complexities of shale gas development. Noise emerges as an important factor to consider questions of knowledge as the community could gain influence through engaging with technical assessment of sound. However, the sounds produced by fracking operations cannot be reduced to standardised levels of noise that are presumed to have similar and universal impacts on others. Women have emerged as key actors in the anti-fracking movement but their activism has been subject to a backlash and underpins a key tenet of the dismissal of public concerns as irrational and outside the rational space of allegedly scientifically informed policy-making. Whilst the anti-fracking movement spans gender and political affiliations, a feminist epistemology provides crucial insights into the relegation of community forms of understanding that have long been critiqued in planning research (see Aitken, 2009; Rydin, 2007, 2020). A feminist critique challenges modes of policy-making that separate decisions from people and imagine a rational world where decision-making has equal impacts on different groups and all are equally able to participate in public debates. Public policy scholars have emphasised the growing need to engage with the role of emotions in policy-making (Verhoeven and Duyvendak, 2016). However, expressions of emotion can act to re-essentialise gendered tropes (see for example Durnová and Hejzlarová, 2018). Jessica Pykett and colleagues point to the growing “emotionalised rhetoric” deployed in political debates but they further caution that “emotional resources and repertoires are of course in themselves linked to wider inequalities: who is able to muster and display appropriate emotions within encounters with the state  … ” (Pykett et al., 2016: 9). By a feminist and gendered approach, my research focus is on women involved in the movement, and how a binary emerges relegating community objection to a long-standing gendered sets of ideas of irrationality and subjectivity. Yet fracking disputes are further constrained by the highly formal realm of spatial planning where permission must be sought for each specific shale gas well to developed and require objections to conform to a series of issues deemed relevant by central government. Planning as a spatial mode of governance has been subject to critique due to its limited ability to engage with the public in highly formal settings (Aitken, 2009). Furthermore, the challenges of multi-scalar forms of decision-making that may bypass the public at higher levels and where they may struggle to be heard at locally specific stages. (see Abbot, 2020; Owens, 2004; Rydin, 2020). “Spatial governance” refers to those systems of decision making that have spatial or environmental dimensions including, but not limited to, the formal state apparatus and the legislative framework for land use planning. Whilst planning ostensibly lies within the hands of the state, the operation of shale gas requires engagement with regulatory state actors, as well as industry actors monitoring, advising, and producing research data. Yet these non-traditional forms of governance raise questions of legitimacy and accountability (see Lau, 2014) There is considerable dispute between work focused on fracking disputes that argues that knowledge and information has little bearing on community beliefs about the industry (Evensen, 2017; Stedman et al., 2016). A second strand queries the notion of objective risk as well as the limited trust that public institutions hold, particularly when they are seen to be advocates for the technology (see Bradshaw and Waite, 2017; Goldstein, 2014; Williams et al., 2017; Zilliox and Smith, 2018). Environmental concerns regarding air quality, water contamination, traffic impacts, noise levels, human and animal health, and wider social impacts of shale gas development have advanced particularly in the US context (see Davis and Fisk, 2017; Dunlop et al., 2021; Evensen and Stedman, 2017; Kinchy et al., 2014; Szolucha, 2021). There continues to be public distrust of the industry, as well as a series of studies examining the negative impacts for local residents living near shale gas sites or affected by the wider industry (Burbidge and Adams, 2020; Fry et al., 2015; Litovitz et al., 2013; Meng, 2015). The anti-fracking protests themselves have drawn increasing attention from scholars with studies have focused on motivations for opposition and the experiences of residents, adding to existing work on environmental activism (see Beebeejaun, 2019; Cotton and Charnley-Parry, 2018; Muncie, 2020). The limitations of current public policy arenas to weave together scientific complexities into robust regulatory frameworks, arguably challenges the limits to current forms of governance and decision-making. Pathways to resolving these disputes have proved to be a thorny issue with no clear answers. The idea of frames through which discursive claims regarding the industry’s impacts and pathways to decision-making has been an important focus of attention in how to engage with the disputed and highly-charged terrain. The scholars Tamara Metze and Jennifer Dodge (2016) have explored the way in which ostensibly deliberative debates around fracking are shaped or framed by different actors seeking to frame the benefits or risks to fracking. Despite the intense differences between perspectives that contribute to highly adversarial processes, Dodge (2015) suggests that ways of thinking have been advanced over time with debates pushing forward all actors’ knowledge and perspectives. Yet the capacity of the state to reframe the nature of the debate acts to resituate the types of knowledge that might illuminate decisions. Tamara Metze traces the shifting boundaries that unfolded in the face of public controversy and strong opposition to fracking in the Netherlands. She notes that it moved from economic issues to one of environment risk before being transferred to the planning arena. The change of forum for debate presented a way of reasserting the topic as a technical debate rather than a political one that some formulation of national interest could guide (Metze, 2017). Planning inquiries exemplify such an arena where evidence produced by communities is often considered to lack the scientific and objective credibility (see Aitken, 2009, 2010; Lee et al., 2018; Rydin et al., 2018). The environmental impact assessment processes (EIA) informs potential development of shale gas in the UK as is the case with many other countries. These assessments have become increasingly complex, spanning a range of distinctive scientific and technical fields arguably far beyond the knowledge and expertise of planners. For the planning system to operate it must be presumed that Environmental Impact Assessments provide “correct” forms of data. The legal scholar Jane Holder is critical of the undue influence that developers garner through the EIA process, given their ability to set the terms of reference for data collection. “The reliance in environmental assessments procedures upon scientific and expert opinion appears to offer objectivity in terms of prediction of likely effects and impacts” (Holder, 2004: 241). Ideas of objective certainty become important political currency, with even objectors questioning their own credibility within the highly formal and semi-legal processes of the planning inquiry. The energy researcher Mhairi Aitken elucidates how knowledge and science is represented within the public inquiry:Prior inquiries may be construed to have socialised members of the public to accept that expert knowledge exists apart from—even as superior to—lay knowledge and that this alone is an appropriate basis for determining technical decisions (Aitken, 2010: 63).Despite an acknowledgement that women are more likely to be opposed to fracking, the role of gender, particularly as a socially and politically constructed categorisation, has been largely overlooked in much research (for an example see Weible et al., 2016). Discussion of gender, when it does occur, reveals essentialist representations of gender exemplified in the epigraph. Furthermore, Rachel Howell’s evaluation of public opposition notes how “Hypotheses to account for the gender differences that are often found in environmental risk perceptions include biological and social explanations (women are more vulnerable and are nurturers by nature or socialisation) … ” (2018: 726). Exploring how gender intersects with the framing of opposition and shapes knowledge disputes remains an important yet underexplored arena.