Fighting the Pipe: neo-liberal governance and barriers to effective community participation in energy infrastructure planning

8/3/2019 Fighting the Pipe: neo-liberal governance and barriers to effective community participation in energy infrastructure

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Fighting the Pipe: neo-liberal governance and barriers to effective community

participation in energy infrastructure planning

Christopher Groves, Max Munday, and Natalia Yakovleva

Abstract

Development of effective participatory mechanisms within infrastructure planning

governance has been dependent on how far the outputs of participatory processes have an

impact upon strategic policy priorities. However, neoliberal modes of governance are

characterised by recentralisation within arms-length regulatory bodies and private

corporations. Tensions between participatory governance and re-centralisation are

exemplified by the relationship between energy privatisation and energy infrastructure

planning. This study examines these tensions using a case study of a critical infrastructure

project in the UK, the South Wales Gas Pipeline. Findings confirm arguments in the literature

that siting conflicts often centre on policy issues as much as local concerns. The study reveals

that the neoliberal recentralisation of some governance functions exacerbates such conflicts.It argues although new efforts to secure effective participation in neoliberal regimes are

necessary, they will face obstacles in the form of risk-based governance structures, as

exemplified by the privatised energy sector.

Keywords

Infrastructure planning, participatory governance, pipelines, planning cascade, privatisation.

Introduction

The heart of conflicts over the siting of nationally-important infrastructure is often seen as a

clash between not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) local interests and national policy. It has alsobeen argued, however, that siting conflicts over such infrastructure often act as condensation

points for wider concerns, which can cross scale from the interests of a specific community

to connect with national and even international issuessuch as mitigating climate change,

protecting indigenous peoples rights and so on (see Owens 2004). As a result, participatory

planning may be seen as more than just a means of improvingprocedural fairness, as

emphasised by some commentators (e.g. Gross 2007). By linking siting proposals to broader

political priorities, genuinely effective participation has a substantive dimension, exemplified

by the case of the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline in Canada (Gamble 1978). Nonetheless,

Owens (2004) and Cowell and Owens (2006) have pointed, in the UK context, to how a

countervailing streamlining tendency in land-use planning can close down opportunities for

participatory decision-making, reducing siting decisions to a trade-off between national needand local interests. In this paper, we explore how such trade-offs, and conflicts driven by

them, are the product of forms of governance which characterise neo-liberal societies, with

the aid of a major energy infrastructure case study from the UK (the South Wales Gas

Pipeline, or SWGP). Our argument is that, while participatory decision-making has made

inroads into governance within contemporary societies, the decentralisation of power

associated with neoliberalism (and in our case study, with energy privatisation in particular)

brings with it a distributed re-centralisation of decision-making. Such re-centralisation may

intensify streamlining tendencies within planning governance, and can prevent

participatory mechanisms from taking forms which achieve either procedural fairness or true

effectiveness, i.e. substantive impact. We show that, in line with significant recent literature,

that substantive issues often form the focus of planning conflicts. We also suggest that, basedon our case study, how the power to shape the policy priorities that drive infrastructure


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development is distributed may be among these issues. The paper is structured as follows.

First, it examines the literature in order to argue that the effectiveness of participatory

mechanisms is dependent on whether they allow second-order reflection on the policies and

purposes which drive infrastructure development. Second, it shows how this mode ofsubstantive participation stands in tension with risk-based modes of neo-liberal governance

exemplified by the privatised national energy network in the UK. Third, the paper explores

the history of the SWGP project and investigates how community groups engaged with the

planning process, before discussing how this case can help us understand the tensions

between the drive for more participation, and the re-centralisation of governance. We show

how, although the Pipeline was built under a planning regime that has been superseded in the

UK following the 2008 Planning Act, the issues it raises are perhaps even more significant

under the new regime.

Background

Participatory governance

Since the 1970s, land-use planning has seen a variety of experiments with participatory

processes as an alternative to the classic technocratic model of decide-announce-defend,

often associated with a high modernist model of government (Scott 1998). Simultaneously,

the emergence of neo-liberal forms of economic governance during the same period gradually

transformed the relationship between the state and society. Increasingly, the state became a

facilitator of development rather than its agent. The privatisation of public utilities in many

societies since the 1980s has consolidated this new role. However, as has been observed in

the case of the UK, this new form of state may have its own utopian projects quite as

ambitious as those of high modernism (Moran 2007 p. 6). The need for society to be legible

to an administrative centre did not decrease. Indeed, it increasedproportionate to the

degree to which administrative responsibilities are re-distributed and more and moreactivities become subject to audit and measurement. Further, the auditing gaze does not

simply survey the present. It also takes on a new temporal aspect by seeking to render thefuture more legible, through risk thinking (Rose 1999).

A new focus on participation, along with risk thinking, represent two tendencies within a

broad stream of governance reform that flowed through the 1960s to the 1990s (Walls et al.

2005, pp. 641-643). On the one hand, greater participation is seen as a means both of

enhancing the ability to anticipate perhaps overlooked negative outcomes of action, and of

also improving the legitimacy of governance by balancing the privatisation of governance

with greater involvement of stakeholders in decisions. On the other, the internalisation of

risk thinking as a discourse of quantification and auditing within organisations became a wayof creating another model of legitimacy for governance. The tense relationship between these

two tendencies is important for understanding how infrastructure planning has evolved under

neoliberalism.

In what follows, we set out, in more detail, key features of the two tendencies in relation to

planning. With respect to participatory governance, it has been argued that it may improve

decision making with regard to the potential social and environmental impacts of

infrastructure development (Ward 2001). Participatory processes may marshal a more

comprehensive and inclusive evidence base that draws on a variety of perspectives including

local knowledge. In this sense, they can be instrumentally useful. They may, however, be

preferred on account ofjustice. By allowing more perspectives on a proposal to be included,they can enhance distributive andproceduraljustice (Gross 2007). They may also enable


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greater recognition of historical injustices, including e.g. local accumulations of polluting

infrastructure that stigmatize particular places and communities (Walker 2009). To be

effective in serving these three purposes, participation should ideally be early, when

alternatives are still open; be inclusive and feature two-way communication; allow access to

key information; offer genuine opportunities to influence or even veto decisions; take into

account the diverse values of participants; and be transparent (Bond et al. 2004). However,

participation may be effective in another sense by allowing public reflection on substantive

issuesincluding what kind of society participants wish to inhabit, questions of national

interest, and other matters. In this way, participation around planning concerns at local and

regional scales can provide an arena for focused reflection on the assumed purposes of

national strategies (Cowell and Owens 2006, 2011).

Consequently, participation can embody reflexivity in an expanded sense, even if it takes

place downstream of strategic decisions. If a piece of infrastructure is a kind of solution to

a problem, then participatory governance may, by including more perspectives, enable the

problem itself to be examined, along with the ways in which it has been framed as a problem.

In this way, whether participation is effective or not depends on how far it enacts second-order reflexivity towards both means and presupposed ends. Substantively effective

participation may be imagined as creating a feedback loop (Rough 2011), which begins with

an examination of localised impacts, benefits and risks associated with a given proposal.

Widening participation in examining these illuminates, in turn, considerations which may

lead to a critique and re-framing of the policy problem to which the planning proposal

appears as a viable solution. In this way, local planning conflicts can lead to modifications in

assumed definitions of the national interest, even if they do not end in consensus (Owens

2004).

Risk thinking, power and energy infrastructure planning under neoliberalismWe now turn to the second of the aforementioned tendencies, i.e. the internalisation of risk

thinking within governance as a legitimatory discourse, and how this shapes the distribution

of power in planning. The relationship between this tendency and the evolution of

participation as a form of second-order reflexivity is often conflictual. The tension here

derives from the opposed logics of power which characterise the two tendencies. Where

effective participation demands dispersed power (Ward 2001), embodied in institutionalized

processes that drive critical scrutiny of policy problems as well as solutions, neo-liberal

enrolment of private companies and other governance actors decentralises while

simultaneously recentralising. The creation of new centres of calculation (e.g. privatised

energy utilities, industry regulators) is accompanied by the need to render the field in which

they operate legible to government, both in the present and with a view to its projectedfuturesrequirements in which risk thinking plays a significant role. In the next section, we

will explore the internalisation of risk thinking within the UKs planning regime in relation to

energy privatisation, and how risk knowledge and power are linked.

As noted at the beginning of the previous section, the neo-liberal state can be viewed as

evolving, in some respects, out of the high-modernist state. The high-modernist state evolved

a set of tools for transforming an uncertain future into a meaningful parameter of planning,

one that could be both told and tamed (Adam and Groves 2007). State bureaucracies

developed quantitative criteria for measuring the success or failure of policies, depoliticizing

decision making in the process and recreating the domain of politics in a way amenable to

bureaucratic management (Rose 1999, pp. 198-199). Representing the future in terms of risk,


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and developing methods for estimating and comparing risks, extends the legibility of society

into the future.

Neoliberalism re-affirms this legitimatory role for risk. In relation to the UK, Moran (2007)

observes that the contemporary British neo-liberal state has adopted a role of regulating and

balancing markets as providers of public goods. The amount of statistical information the

new regulatory state requires means that new and closer relationships have to be built

between government bureaucracies and expert advisors. The persistence of a centralised and

linear predict and provide approach to the future in contemporary British infrastructure

planning has been noted (Cowell and Owens 2006; Marshall 2010, p. 30), a durable high-

modernist element of a British political system where the stress, historically, has

consistently been upon strong, centralized, efficient government, rather than responsive

government, and in which the government has traditionally been seen as the sole judge of

the national interest (Marsh and Hall 2007). What changes with energy privatization is that

the centre where information is collated and future risk scenarios produced is no longer

singular and located in Whitehall, but multiple and dispersedlocated in the corporate

headquarters of privatised utilities and of regulatory agencies (Scott et al. 1998).

An important UK example of these changes is energy privatisation. Before privatisation in

the 1980s, the production and distribution of energy in the UK was a public duty of state-

controlled bodies. With privatisation, this universal obligation is lost (Guy et al. 1997).

Instead of one organisation, a multitude of providers is created, who have public service

obligations but also private commercial obligations. Away from energy production, the

electricity and gas distribution network was signed over to a private monopoly (National Grid

plc, formerly Transco, the sole transmission network operator or TNO in England and

Wales). Part of the public duties falling on National Grid (NG) as a TNO is to forecast future

demand and infrastructure needs and inform policy frameworks. In fulfilling the duties, NG

produces annual ten-year statements (e.g. National Grid 2005), which inform white papers,statements of need and other elements ofgovernment policy through fora which have

included (between 2001 and 2006) the Joint Energy Security of Supply Working Group

(JESS), whose remit was to assess risks to the UK's future gas and electricity supplies

(Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) 2009) and to identify relevant policy

issues and consider implications (Winstone et al. 2007, p. 5). Under the new planning

regime introduced by the Planning Act 2008, this information continues to be the main source

of demand forecasts which inform the National Policy Statements (NPS) relevant to gas and

electricity infrastructure (DECC 2009, p. 11). As a result, policy answers to the essentially

political question of what is in the national interest with respect to energy are significantly

influenced by essentially administrative bodies such as JESS.

NG thus plays the role of a key centre of calculation, providing future demand forecasts

which help tame uncertainty, while also being a developer that constructs infrastructure in

response to these forecasts. Following privatization, the commercial arrangements for

downstream supply of gas became much more complex. Increased uncertainty and risk for

investment in infrastructure created a greater need for stability, so that long-term supply

contracts guaranteeing stability of supply could be signed (Manners 1997, p. 302). In

contrast, the Government itself is no longer a developer, nor is it a strategic planner, having

adopted a governance role ofnon-decision making (Cowell 2004, pp. 312-313). Another

such centre is the energy industrys regulatory body, the Office of Gas and Electricity

Markets (Ofgem), which was responsible, along with the then Department of Trade and

Industry (DTI), for chairing JESS. Ofgem was created in 1999 with the primary remit of

making privatised energy production utilities accountable to consumers (Moran 2007) and of


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facilitating a predictable environment for investment through forward price signals

(Department of Trade and Industry 2003, p. 14). The need for a regulatory regime stronger

than that which operates across the rest of the private sector is necessitated by the statutory

duties which fall on utilities (established in the UK under, inter alia, the Gas Act 1986 and

Electricity Act 1989) to provide essential goods. Ofgem is often seen as an agency whose

primary goal is to encourage competition and hold energy producers accountable for their

pricing strategies. Nonetheless, it also has responsibilities for regulating the wider

environmental and social impacts of electricity and gas provision, including the infrastructure

which NG constructs. It has, however, proven difficult to translate these responsibilities into

concrete practice (Guy et al. 1997, p. 214; Cowell 2004, pp. 319-320).

At the strategic level, then, the relationship between NG and Ofgem as centres of calculation

is not strictly one of regulated and regulator, as Ofgem has historically concentrated on its

duties as a representative of energy consumers. NGs input into policy means that it occupies

a special role in the UK system, consolidated by the predict and provide strategic approach

to energy infrastructure, in which demand is something to be met, rather than managed. Since

the 1970s, the need for longer-term energy demand forecasting in neo-liberal societies hasincreasinglybeen framed in terms of maintaining energy security (Marshall 2010), an issue

defined by the International Energy Agency in terms of interlinked systemic risks (Winstone

et al. 2007, p. 1). Such discourses locate policy debates within narratives of necessity, in

which the national interest is assumed to lie in providing for projected energy demand, which

will in turn generate more economic growth (Cowell and Owens 2011, p. 15). This generates

the fundamental set of policy problems, in relation to which technical advice (from

companies like NG), white papers and infrastructure proposals (from companies like NG)

represent steps towards solutions. The position of energy utilities, TNOs and regulatory

agencies within high-level planning processes is thus defined within these narratives of

necessity. Their power to affect spatial planning is proportional to their role as centres of

calculation of need and risk, joined to their role as developers. While Ofgem is active intrying to regulate energy markets, it is not so in regulating infrastructure planning in any

high-level strategic sense. This is left to downstream processes of impact assessment and

review within the planning system. The lack of strategic regulation of environmental and

social impacts reinforces what Owens (2004) has described as a planning cascade, in which

policy problems, cloaked in necessity, drive policies which define national need, before being

translated into concrete infrastructure proposals. Only at this latter stage can participatory

mechanisms be activated, solely to determine where the infrastructural solution to the

policy problem should go, rather than enacting effective, substantive reflection on strategic

problems. In this way, planning conflicts emerge as, primarily, conflicts between local

interests and the national interest, this latter having become largely insulated from

reflection and critique in the process.

Recent changes to the UK planning system

Making the situation still more difficult for effective participatory governance are changes in

the mechanics of planning governance.1

Until 2008, the Town and Country Planning Act

(TCPA) was the chief legal instrument for oversight of land use planning in England and

Wales. For larger installations of national importance, consents were traditionally granted by

the relevant department of the UK Government, a system of deemed consent which

overrode the need, under the TCPA, for developers to seek permission from a local planning

1Note that this discussion applies primarily to the situation in England and Wales within the UK. Planning

governance in Scotland and Northern Ireland differs in relation to many or all of the following considerations.


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authority (LPA). This made it less imperative for LPAs to map out forward-looking policy on

the acceptability of different kinds of energy infrastructure in particular locations (Kellet

1993, p. 96). Consequently, the relationship between local authorities and privatised utilities

with regard to planning was generally, though not always (Guy et al. 1999), a highly reactive

one (Scott et al. 1998, p. 539). With respect to regional and local spatial planning local or

regional spatial development plans (LDPs, RDPs) were the medium through which LPAs

translated into policy the short- and longer-term interests of communities for whom they were

responsible. How the centralized decision-making processes of utility companies related to

these spatial strategies within the planning system was therefore complex and often

problematic (Guy et al. 1996). LPAs which attempted to use its LDP or RDP to ensure that a

particular area that had been historically burdened with hazardous and/or polluting

infrastructure developed along a different economic path have generally found that this was

not enough to stop planning permission being granted for more infrastructure of this kind

(Scott et al. 1998). Provided consent was given by the Secretary of State, then the only

further obstacle was having a proposal called in by a government minister, something

which opponents could request. Nonetheless, this system saw a series of significant,

successful challenges brought against major infrastructure projects in the 1980s and 1990s.As such, the planning system contained counterweights to technocratic, predict-and-

provide-style planning.

These challenges created a perception within government and industry that the planning

system was subject to blockages and in need of being modernised. At the same time, the

increased demand for participatory governance in planning was acknowledged. The result

was an uncomfortable synthesis of proposals for streamlining planning and for public

engagement in spatial planning, manifested within the Governments Planning: Delivering a

Fundamental Change Green Paper in 2001 (Cowell and Owens 2006, p. 407). The

subsequent Barker Review of Land Use Planning (2006) added to the momentum behind

modernisation, ahead of the 2008 Planning Act, which included two main innovations.First, new strategic policy instruments (National Policy Statements or NPS) relevant to large

infrastructure of national importance, and second, a new centre of calculation, the

Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC), whose role was to assess planning proposals

designed to fulfil needs identified in an NPS. The IPC could, in theory, find against a

proposal which might impose excessive costs on local communities, but would have to

disregard representations that relate to the merits of policy set out in a national policy

statement during [...] decision making (Woolley 2010, p. 236). Without a clearly negative

net local effect, the IPC would be likely to decide quickly in favour of the national interest, as

defined by an NPS, over local interests in any given case. This led some commentators to

interpret the new regime as reinforcing planning cascades by closing off opportunity

structures within which objectors could link particular proposals to reflections on strategicconcerns, in the way that substantively effective participation demands (Rough 2011, pp. 40-

41). Although some consultative input was allowed into the formation of NPS, the level of

abstraction involved here meant that these consultations were unlikely to benefit from the

energetic mobilisation of different perspectives with which local campaigns often connect

localised impacts to national policy (Woolley 2010, p. 237).

Not long after the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition took power in 2010, the IPC was

dissolved, with its role and powers being assigned to a section of the Planning Inspectorate.Revisiting their 2006 paper on the modernisation of planning, Cowell and Owens (2010)

noted that, under the Coalition, infrastructure planning would likely not be materially

different to the streamlined cascade structure established by the 2008 Act. The significance

of the localism governance agenda introduced by the Coalition, most notably with the


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Localism Act 2011, for these issues remains to be seen, although some have suggested that

negative impacts from the Act are likely to be felt on local democracy generally, and

planning in particular (Cowell 2012; Le-Las and Shirley 2012).

The potential for planning cascades shaped by high-level, technocratic processes of need and

risk management is thus characteristic of the UK planning system, before and after the 2008

Act, and is particularly evident in relation to energy infrastructure. The delegation of

legitimate authority to manage future energy risk by government to privatised utilities renders

decision-making non-transparent, creating facts on the ground to which LPAs and

communities affected by infrastructure plans have to respond when the cascade reaches them.

This reinstates a technocratic, modernist decide-announce-defend model of planning

strategy within neo-liberal governance (Hardy and Ritchie 2010, p. 15). The opportunity for

wider participation in the planning process comes far downstream from the point where a

piece of infrastructure has been judged nationally necessary, and a set of alternative sites

determined (Cotton and Devine-Wright 2011, p. 954). Consultation with regard to NPS

notwithstanding, the regime established by the 2008 Act does not establish opportunity

structures that might counteract the cascade, by allowing effective and substantiveparticipatory reflection on policy and the national interest. Under the neo-liberal

governance regime that prevails in energy privatisation, the responsibilities and power

delegated to TNOs like NG appears to put them in a unique position, where their strategic

role is counterbalanced neither by significant strategic regulatory oversight of the social and

environmental impacts of their activities, nor by upstream participatory negotiation of the

priorities they help define. Some have argued that the need for such counterweights is

underlined by the concern that with privatisation comes potential conflict between the public

duties of utility companies and their private obligations to shareholders and others, which can

result in negative consequences for service users and those affected by planning decisions

(Defeuilley 1999; Hall and Lobina 2004).

Case Study: The South Wales Gas Pipeline (SWGP)

The South Wales Gas Pipeline project, in which NG was a major actor, was framed by NG

and government against the background of an impending energy crisis linked to the

dependence of the UK on imported gas (e.g. Department of Trade and Industry 2003).

Official definitions of national need reflected assumptions that the country would

experience continually-growing demand for gas and other resources (Marshall 2011). In the

first years of the 21st

century, two consortia of petrochemical companies submitted plans to

build LNG terminals at sites around Milford Haven in West Wales in response to policy

signals regarding future demand for gas. NG signed contracts with these consortia that

imposed upon it an obligation to provide infrastructure to connect these terminals to the UKNational Transmission System (NTS) at a site across the English border in Gloucestershire.

The pipeline to connect the Milford Haven terminals to the NTS would be of unusually large

diameter (1220 mm, 48 inches) and run at a pressure higher than usual for the UK NTS (94

rather than 75 barg). The pipeline construction work comprised two phases (see Figure 1).

Phase 1 ran from Milford Haven to Aberdulais, with a length of 120 km (75 miles), and

Phase 2 ran from Felindre to Tirley, being 196 km (122 miles) long. The pipeline fell outside

the scope of powers granted to the Welsh Assembly in the 1998 Government of Wales Act.

Our research into how communities experienced the planning process for the pipeline took

the form of a series of 17 semi-structured interviews during 2007-09. Studying the impact of

network infrastructure like pipelines presents particular methodological difficulties. In order

to provide as comprehensive a picture as possible of concerns along the route, interviews


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were conducted with representatives of various campaign organisations from flash -point

sites along the full length of the pipeline, including Safe Haven (Milford Haven and

Waterston, the sites of the two terminals), CRA (Cilfrew Residents Association, concerned

with a pressure reduction station), CRAG (Cwmtawe Residents Action Group, at Trebanos,

concerned with Phase 1 of the pipeline), a looser group centring on Brecon and Hay-on-Wye

(concerned with Phase 2) and CAPRI (Campaign Against the Pressure Reduction Installation,

at Tirley). Participants were selected using a snowballing method (Bryman and Bell 2007).

Interview material was transcribed, coded and qualitatively analysed with NVivo 8 software

to identify and compare community concerns and how campaigns (and their primary

concerns) developed over time. Secondary materials were also used to help construct a

timeline of events. These included press reports, publications and press releases from NG, its

contractors, and the Milford Haven Port Authority, and planning documents. Case

development also drew on research undertaken on the impacts of LNG in West Wales by one

of the authors for Pembrokeshire Business Initiative during 2007 (Bryan and Munday 2007;

Bryan et al. 2007).


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Figure 1: The South Wales Gas Pipeline, Phases 1 & 2

Initial stages and early conflicts

Interviewees in Milford Haven, a town with a long history of petrochemical infrastructure

development, reported first being informed of the LNG terminal projects via exhibitions held

in the town during 2004, at least a year after the planning proposals had been submitted toPembrokeshire Council. They reported that local people had not being given any opportunity


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to comment on the applications during the period prior to this, when the proposals were being

considered by the LPA (Interviewee, Waterston, 31 July 2008). Concern began to crystallize

around how the risks of allowing LNG tankers into the narrow and busy Cleddau estuary had

been assessed, particularly following the Sea Empress disaster in 1996. Unsuccessful requests

to the terminal consortia and to Milford Haven Port Authority (MHPA) for risk assessments

in November 2004 resulted in a court case being brought by the members of what would

become the Safe Havens campaign group to compel MHPA to release the relevant

information. This case was unsuccessful, largely because the request had come too late in the

planning process for the release of the information relevant to make a difference: theyve

spent millions of pounds, therefore youve lost your window of opportunity (Interviewee,

Milford Haven, 23 July 2008). Safe Havens felt that the proposal had, thanks to concerns

about energy security, too much momentum and that Milfords existing concentration of

heavy industry had made it the ideal destination for the terminals, despite international best

practice recommendations on LNG facility siting recommending that they be sited offshore

(Interviewees, Milford Haven, 23 July 2008, and Waterston, 31 July 2008). When risk

assessment information was made available, after a ruling against MHPA from the

Information Commissioner, the content was felt to be generic rather than specific to theconditions in the Cleddau. Attempts to persuade the Welsh Assembly to intervene were

unsuccessful, an experience shared by Welsh campaigners against the pipeline later on.

Although the Assembly has no powers regarding strategic assessment of proposals of this

kind, it was a statutory consultee in both cases, and some interviewees expressed surprise that

it had not objected on the grounds of the Welsh Assembly Governments obligation to

promote sustainable development (Interviewee, Cilfrew, 22 July 2008).

For its part, NG submitted planning proposals for the two phases of the pipeline in 2004 in

line with the requirements of the Public Gas Transporter Regulations 1999 (subject to

deemed consent rather than to the TCPA). In its proposals, it justified the pipeline by

invoking an energy security national interest argument, buttressed by demand forecasts. Inaddition, it stated the pipeline was also necessary for it to fulfil its public service obligations

under the Gas Act 1986 to maintain efficient and economical gas supply infrastructure.

This second argument concerning public duties resurfaced at subsequent planning inquiriesalongside invocations of national interest. The relationship between these duties and NGs

private interest in fulfilling the contracts it had signed with LNG importers to finish the

pipeline by early 2007, would prove of particular interest to campaigners. To what extent,

campaigners would ask, were the criteria of efficient and economical an adequate way of

understandingNGs public duty, given that the fulfilment of private contracts for completion

by a certain date would determine how efficient and economical the infrastructure would

be. Campaigners were suspicious that consultation was kept to a minimum as a way of

avoiding siting conflicts and thus reducing commercial risk. The possibility of conflicts ofinterest ran alongside a lack of incentives for NG to promote participatory engagement.

Research suggests that energy infrastructure companies tend to view consultation as primarily

one-way and informational (Barnett et al. 2012). Network infrastructure, such as pipelines or

overhead power lines, which connect together multiple sites, presents particular practical

obstacles for public engagement. In such cases, researchers have also documented

assumptions held by developers about the publics inability to take the strategic view

necessary for looking at the network as a whole (Cotton and Devine-Wright 2010a).

The process of impact assessment and route choice for the two phases of construction

provided the first opportunity for opposition to the pipeline to crystallize. During 2004-05,

NG provided assessments of the viability and impact of a number of potential offshore and

onshore pipeline routes. Following the granting of consent for Phase 1 in December 2005, the


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selected route options for Phase 2 produced significant controversy. At this stage, the DTI

sought responses from statutory consultees, including relevant regulatory bodies, LPAs and

businesses. The Brecon Beacons National Park Authority, from the outset, took a strongly

critical stance towards any route through the Beacons. In responding to NGs proposals, the

BBNPA noted that (a) the route choices, (b) the judgement that a pipeline connecting Milford

Haven to the NTS was necessary for NG to fulfil its public obligations and in the wider

national interest, and (c) that a pipeline of just this specification was in the national interest

and required by NGs public obligations were all questionable. It suggested that it was for the

DTI to provide its own independent judgement on these issues, preferably by means of a

strategic environmental assessment of the whole project andpost-privatisation governance

(BBNPA 2005a, b).

The objections put forward by the BBNPA exploited its position as a statutory consultee by

seeking to establish a link between the potential harmful impacts of NGs specific proposals

and what it saw as illegitimate policy priorities. In doing so, it presented a strategic critique of

the pipeline project as a whole, rooted in its assessment of impacts on its locality.NGs

statement of need was interpreted by BBNPA as being in conflictwith its public dutiesunder the Governments planning guidance on sustainable development (ODPM 2004). This

was because a conflict of interest was perceived within the very choice of a predict and

provide methodology for assessing national need, given that NG also had a commercial

interest in stimulating gas demand (BBNPA 2005b, p. 6). Indeed, a subsidiary part of the case

for new infrastructure was that it would aid development and [] give opportunities for

industry and users of gas to create business opportunities (BBC News 2006). Further, the

argument from need did not acknowledge concerns first voiced in the late 1990s that

increasing demand for gas might create infrastructural path dependencies that could decrease

energy security (Sadler 2001, p. 14) and that demand should be managed rather than met.

BBNPAs argument was thus that the national need case for a pipeline was questionable, but

also that no national interest case could be made for any particular route. Further, it arguedthat there was a clear alternative definition of the national interest: protecting National Parks

held in trust for future generations, and driving energy infrastructure development faster

towards better use of renewables (BBNPA 2005b). The strategic arguments first put forward

by the BBNPA were subsequently employed by the various campaigning groups who became

active along the length of the pipeline, as they began to coordinate and share information,

thus allowing each group to create a strategic position on the need for the pipeline as a whole

which shared key feature with those developed by other community groups.

By the middle of 2006, Safe Havens had been joined by four other campaign groups. Cilfrew

Residents Association (CRA) and Campaign Against the Pressure Reduction Installation

(CAPRI) in Tirley were concerned with proposals for gas re-pressurization installations(PRIs) which, unlike the pipeline itself, fell under the TCPA and were subject to normal

planning consultation processes. The PRI in Cilfrew was part of Phase 1 of the pipeline,

while that at Tirley would connect Phase 2 to the main UK NTS. Cwmtawe Residents' Action

Group in Trebanos (CRAG) and a looser group of campaigners around Brecon and Hay-on-

Wye were concerned about issues relating directly to Phases 1 and 2 of the pipeline

respectively. In each case, interviewees reported that the groups had organised themselves in

response to what they felt was a failure on the part of NG to consult adequately, and in

particularly, a failure to involve communities in impact assessment processes.

In early 2006, CRA established that the PRI environmental impact assessment NG had

submitted was for the wrong site (Interviewee, Cilfrew, 22 July 2008), which required a

resubmission. When the LPAs planning committee approved the proposal in September


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2006, four councillors who had met CRA were excluded (Harris 2007). On the basis that this

had violated procedure, CRA applied for a judicial review of the grant of approval, which

they won in March 2007. The proposal was voted on again in May of that year and approved,

despite continuing and largely unanswered representations from CRA regarding its social and

environmental impact (Interviewee, Cilfrew, 15 October 2008).

In Trebanos, CRAG discovered in June 2006 that NGs contractors intended to use blasting

as part of the Phase 1 construction, following an exhibition on 5 and 6 June. CRAG objected

to the blasting taking place, on the grounds that the pipeline route took it close to peoples

houses, as well as through an area historically affected by subsidence and by unmapped mine

workings where laying of mains gas pipes was not permitted (Interviewee, Trebanos, 25

October 2008). In addition, they discovered that planning permission from the LPA was

needed, and had not been granted (Harris 2007). Following a failure to get the Welsh

Assembly to intervene, the group succeeded in getting the LPAs planning committee to vote

at the end of August on the blasting, which since 8 June had been taking place without

planning permission. However, like the Cilfrew planning committee vote, this was also

subject to procedural irregularities (Interviewee, Trebanos, 30 July 2008; Harris 2007).Thereafter, they contacted an environmental group called Rising Tide and independent

activists from Newport and Cardiff, who in November 2006 organised direct action protests.

Subsequently, on 22 November, the DTI contacted NG and CRAG to announce that

permission to blast had been denied.

Pipeline Phase 2 and the Gloucestershire PRI

Phase 2 of the pipeline was given consent on 7 February 2007. The decision to grant consent

drew on the application of the Silkin Test, a planning criterion set out in 1949 by Lewis

Silkin MP, designed to balance the national need for certain developments against the

localized impacts of such developments in national parks. This set out that development mustbe in the national interest and minimize damage to the park, and that no practical alternative

to must exist. In applying the Silkin Test, the Secretary of State identified the national interest

with the public duties of NG. The judgement stated that it was

desirable that the proposed pipe-line works should be carried out in the interests of the

development and maintenance of an efficient and economical system for the conveyance of

gas [...] (DTI 2007, pp. 5-6)

The BBNPA had suggested, as noted above, that the statement of need put forward by NG

conflated its public duty, the predetermined national interest in meeting gas demand, and the

private obligations NG bore to gas importers with whom it had signed contracts to completethe pipeline by a particular deadline. The decision to grant consent did not address this point.

The BBNPA had also objected that the assessment regime for the project had been deficient,

insofar as no high level strategic assessment had been undertaken by the DTI on the impact of

gas infrastructure development across South Wales, and indeed, of the broader impact of the

marketised modes of energy need and risk assessment that had emerged under privatisation.

The DTI ruled against this objection, noting that the governments role in relation to gas

infrastructure was not one of centralised strategic direction or installation development, and

that the DTI managed only a reactive, project-oriented handling system (DTI 2007, p.3) for

consents.

Following Phase 2 consent, campaigners increasingly began crossing scales, by questioning

in public the strategic social priorities behind the project as a whole at the same time as


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linking local impact concerns across different sites, and bringing together issues of safety and

environmental risks from different localities which crystallised concerns about the haste

with which the SWGP was being constructed, allegedly under commercial pressure. These

efforts began largely with campaigners in Tirley and Brecon who, with assistance from civil

and retired pipeline engineers living in their respective communities, began asking a series of

technical questions about the safety of the pipeline.

As had been the case at Milford Haven, campaigners expressed concern about the generic

content of risk assessments. A brief document, relating to the pipeline itself (as opposed to

the PRI) was submitted by NG as part of its planning application at Tirley (McCollum 2006).

This document was criticized for failing to include actual calculations and to set out its

assumptions, which campaigners felt suggested it hadbeen prepared at head office rather

than by someone with direct knowledge of local conditions which might affect the

assumptions behind the analysis (Interviewee, Tirley, 24 July 2008; two interviewees,

Brecon, 29 July 2008). Technical information on failure risk and what were felt to be

unaddressed uncertainties were circulated between CAPRI, the Brecon group, CRAG, CRA

and Safe Haven at a series of meetings involving two or more of the groups during 2006. Therationale behind the increased 94 barg operating pressure of the pipeline was subsequently

widely questioned. It was suggested that the increase in pressure resulted in a significant and

exponential reduction of the pipelines operational safety margin, but that it also increased

gas flow rate substantially (an important commercial consideration).

The strategic viewpoint adopted by campaign groups therefore focused on an alleged trade-

off between commercial interests (as distinct from the national interest) and the impacts on

affected communities. In Tirley, an additional localised focus for objections was the

environmental impacts of the proposed PRI on a historically unspoilt location. As with the

generic nature of risk assessments in Milford Haven and at Tirley, the difficulty of

obtaining information on these impacts was felt to reflect what we have referred to above asthe re-centralisation of decision making after privatisation: as a result of planning and

operational decisions being taken by NG at their headquarters in Warwick, and

communications being run by the companys public relations staff in London, the company

were not on the ground throughout the planning and construction process (Interviewee,

Brecon, 19 November 2008). Subsequently, the PRIs environmental impact assessment was

submitted late. When it was made available, part of its case for siting the PRI in this location

was that the specific choice of site was represented as being in the national interest.

CAPRI solicited over 1600 written objections to the proposal. A key point made by a

significant number of objectors, as well as by CAPRI itself, was that, while it might be true

that a PRI somewhere (to reduce gas pressure enough for it to flow into the NTS) would be inthe national interest, placing it in one precise location could not justifiably be said to be. AtTirley, what Owens (2004) describes as the it has to go somewhere dynamic of the

planning cascadebecame it has to go here. A direct, and to campaigners inexplicable,

connection was made between the national interest in energy security and positioning a PRI

in a specific field in Gloucestershire. Alternative sites were available, in particular near an

existing PRI 40km away. Consequently, environmental impacts and safety risks associated

with this site should not simply be traded off against the national interest, and the need for a

PRI at Tirley should be assessed primarily against social and environmental considerations.

The LPA agreed, and refused planning permission on the grounds that the environmental

impact of a PRI at Tirley had been underplayed in NGs EIA, and would be too significant,

given commitments in the LPAs LDP to preserve the integrity of the area.


14/19


NG appealed. A planning inquiry was held in April-May 2007, at which the national interest

argument for the Tirley site was reiterated (RPS Planning 2007). This inquiry upheld the

LPAs decision, and refused the appeal, a decision ratified by the Secretary of State in

December 2007 (Plummer and Mellish 2007). This decision denied validity to NGs assertion

that granting planning permission for one specific location was in the national interest, and

advised other locations should be examined. A planning application for a new site, which fellwithin neighbouring Tewkesbury Councils jurisdiction, was submitted in December 2008.

Following another campaign by CAPRI, the council refused permission in February 2010,

leading to another appeal and a further planning inquiry in July of that year. This time, the

Secretary of State followed the recommendations of the planning inspector by granting

planning permission.

During the Tirley campaign, after the terminals, pipeline phases 1 and 2, and the Cilfrew PRI

had all been consented and (mostly) constructed, the national interest and public duty

arguments advanced by NG for the pipeline and associated infrastructure were finally

subjected to intensive public examination on the basis of strategic arguments first articulated

by the BBNPA and developed, in relation to local risks, by a campaigners network thatextended the full length of the route. Nonetheless, the 2010 inquiry inspectors report stated

that to serve national need, NG should carry out its licensed and contractual obligations

to supply gas at the required higher volume and pressure through the pipeline, thus requiring

the PRI (Tester 2010, pp. 87-88).

Discussion

The SWGP case, we suggest, has to be understood as a series of siting conflicts which

emerged, in the first place, from repeated failures to facilitate early engagement, but which

were driven by a systemic lack of opportunity structures for effective engagement.

Consultation by the TNO over its strategic plans seems to have shared shortcomings with theefforts of the Milford Haven terminal developers: community campaigners reported these

being partial, often late, and non-inclusive, with NG subsequently being found unresponsive

and even obstructive by some. Following Freudenberg and Pastors (1992) recommendation

that siting conflicts be considered as, essentially, systemic products, we would suggest that

the possibility of effective engagement may be undermined by, first, the structures of

governance that shape policy, and second, the planning system through which infrastructure

proposals pass. We described the neoliberal de- and re-centralization of energy policy and

infrastructure development as a key development through which the opportunity structures

for effective engagement are restricted. By effectively black-boxing the mechanisms

through which national energy needs and appropriate policy responses are assessed, these

adjunct processes of privatisation make substantive, participatory reflection unlikely if notimpossible. In addition, re-centralisation may lead to materially worse impact assessment

procedures, and communication difficulties, as described by interviewees at Milford Haven

and Tirley.

Again and again, the campaigns around the SWGP sought to open up these processes to

scrutiny, to repoliticise processes which, having been framed as technical operations of risk

analysis and management carried out by new centres of calculation, had become de-

politicised, administrative processes. Safety and environmental risks were used to open up

reflexive links between local impacts and the justifiability of national policies. More

importantly, they were used to reframe the nature of the planning conflict. Campaigners

suggested that the question of unacceptability would appear in a different light if the focus

moved to the strategic conflict surrounding the pipeline. They essentially argued that this was


15/19


not between a fixed national interest and local interests. Instead, it was between the role of

essentially unaccountable, private commercial interests in shaping the national interest, and

the proper contribution which diverse localised community interests (in place, amenity, safety

etc.) could make to shaping assessments of national need.

Arguments about commercial versus community interest first emerged in the BBNPAs

criticisms of NGs choice of route for Phase 2, which, interviewees attested, subsequently

became a key reference point for campaigning (Interviewee, Gorseinon, 30 July 2008). They

managed to go far beyond a focus on amenity and safety to question the legitimacy of high-

level governance mechanisms such as the capacity auctions on which future planning

proposals and the private obligations entered into by privatised energy utilities are dependent

(Brecon Beacons National Park Authority 2005b; Tester 2010). Instead ofaccepting the it

has to go somewhere framing of the planning cascade and the attendant trade-off between

national and local interests, campaigners questioned the assumptions about social priorities

and legitimate expertise which allow such a trade-off to be constructed at all. They asked for

opportunities to represent different conceptions of national interest, such as might be rooted

in the kinds of often intangible and non-quantifiable values held to be the rightful concern ofstewardship organisations like the BBNPA (Interviewee, Hay-on-Wye, 28 July 2008).

However, the successes achieved by campaigners were mainly at planning inquiries where

the main issues were ones of environmental impact to be resolved under the TCPA. Although

campaigners succeeded in ventilating strategic issues, the key points of contention which they

were forced to address were, in the end, ones traditionally encountered at the far end of a

planning cascade, i.e. whether a particular site was acceptable.

Overall, the SWGP case is an example of how major infrastructure proposals were handled

under the TCPA and deemed consent system. How might the 2008 Planning Act and

subsequent developments have altered things? Is there any possibility that they might have

instituted new opportunity structures within which local interests in impacts could crossscales and produce strategic reflections on the relationship between proposals and policy?

As noted previously, there is much uncertainty in this regard. Nonetheless, there are reasons

to remain sceptical. On the one hand, since 2008, NG has demonstrated different approaches

to public engagement in early and wide consultation on strategic infrastructure route options

in relation to overhead linesalthough these approaches may still be based on traditional

developers assumptions about the public (Cotton and Devine-Wright 2012). On the other,

the strategic need for large projects is still settled, after the 2008 Act, in a way which

promises to reproduce planning cascades. NPS present certain forms of facility as desirable

in a way which is enduring, a priori to, and largely insulated from concerns about the

environmental consequences that may arise from individual projects (Cowell 2012), and

retain the same role for some privatised centres of calculation (such as NG) in shaping policyas existed in the days of JESS (DECC 2009, p. 11). The 2008 Act was supposed to allow

Parliament more say on the content of statements on national need. Nonetheless, critical

comment from MPs on the six approved energy NPS (approved in July 2011) produced only

a limited number of caveats. Interestingly, these echoed the worries about gas contributing to

energy insecurity registered by Sadler (2001), as well as the BBNPAs criticisms of new

infrastructure as increasing rather than simply meeting demanda perverse impact of a

new dash for gas (ECCC 2011, p. 84). Furthermore, the creation of a new centre of

calculation by the Coalition (a special unit within the Planning Inspectorate, to replace the

IPC), is likely to exacerbate concerns about transparency rather than reduce them.


16/19


Conclusion

In this paper, we began with the tension between two tendencies within contemporary neo-

liberal societies: increasing use of participatory governance, and developments that entrench

risk thinkingin new centres of calculation. We examined how this tension plays out

within a specific case study, originating within a privatised energy industry that has been

used as a template for international energy governance by development organisations like theWorld Bank (Guy et al. 1999, p. 161). This case shows how siting conflicts within neoliberal

systems of governance may centre on clashes of interests that are not reducible to national

need and local concern. If the need for participation is a legitimate need, then it requires, we

would suggest, procedurally fair implementation which focuses on substantive concerns,

including such conflicts of interests. What the SWGP case demonstrates is that, in systems of

governance where power is redistributed, to some degree, to private organisations with public

duties, the accountability of these organisations in assessing need and managing risk must be

included in the substantive issues participation considers. We therefore concur with recent

scholarship (Cowell and Owens 2006; Cotton and Devine-Wright 2010a; Cotton and Devine-

Wright 2010b; Cowell and Owens 2011; Cotton and Devine-Wright 2012) which suggests

that questions of national interest are likely to continue to prove their importance in shapinginfrastructure siting conflicts. The interaction of the planning system with the assumptions

and storylines (such as the centrality of risk management to governance, and the priority of

energy security) through which governance is framed by the executive emerges as a key

theme for further research. It is through these interactions that opportunity structures for

effective, i.e. substantive participation will be shaped. The implementation of effective

participatory governance faces serious obstacles, both in continued efforts to streamline

planning systems (as per the 2008 Act), and in the potential for conflicts between the private

obligations of private companies like NG and their public duties. Issues of commercial

confidentiality, for example, particularly with respect to supply contracts, proved an obstacle

to campaigners in the SWGP case seeking information about the case for national need.

With such issues in mind, it is not enough to call for early and wider consultation. It isnecessary to recognise that the evolution of governance under neoliberalism requires forms of

engagement which address both the redistribution of power to which this evolution has led,

and the continuing possibility of conflicts between private commercial interests and

community interests over how the national interest, and its relation to planning, is shaped.

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Documents

Fighting the Pipe: neo-liberal governance and barriers to effective community participation in energy infrastructure planning