Technics and Tactics of Anti-Pipeline Movements: Assessing Critical Technical Engagements with Oil and Gas Pipeline Projects

• In Event: STS Underground - III: Sensing the Underground

Abstract

Oil and gas pipelines have become a new front-line in advocacy movements opposing the petrochemical industry. In addition to growing recognition that pipelines lock communities into long-term dependencies on resource extraction, pipelines are increasingly drawing out concerns for petrochemical infrastructure’s risk to environment and public health. Pipelines are important study sites of study for STS. Because of their linear topology, pipelines bring into contact people, economies, and cultural identities spanning broad geographic regions. Pipeline fights are furthermore characterized by extreme information asymmetries, where communities often learn about a pending pipeline long after permits are approved and construction begins. However, innovative uses of data and technology by concerned citizen groups—such as in data transparency projects, participatory mapping platforms, and deployments of surveillance equipment—are radically altering how coalitions emerge to engage with permitting and oversight. Yet, we have little knowledge of the sociotechnical systems in play, nor how these tactics drive more visible legal and political strategies. Based on survey data and two years of ethnographic fieldwork at sites across the U.S., this presentation suggests technical mobilizations have had a range of effect, from restructuring participation in regulatory decision-making, to expanding impact assessment criteria, to tangibly reducing the risks of pipelines. However, the roots of interventions emerge unevenly along pipelines depending on local availabilities of social and technical capital. These findings are significant for recent STS studies exploring publicly-enacted “critical” impact assessments, as well aspects digital inequality and “data justice” in environmental social movements.

Author

• Kirk Jalbert, Arizona State University