Air Pollution Governance: Sites, Styles, Histories

This panel brings together researchers focused on ways air
pollution has been governed in different contexts. In keeping with
recent sensibilities in the literature, this panel takes governance to
include both state as well as a wide array of non-state actors, with a
particular interest in understanding the various roles that techno-
scientific communities across varied contexts play in governance
processes. The panel therefore invites reflections on a broad range
of topics: presentations can focus on different kinds of air pollution
(indoor or outdoor), and on different scales of governance — for
example, the development of national laws, urban planning
initiatives, or citizen mobilization against a particular polluting
facility. Presentations will also vary in where they focus on the
source-to-impact continuum, possibly examining, for example, the
thought styles of air pollution scientists, the public relations
strategies of polluting corporations, or ways nurses come to
understand and treat respiratory problems associated with air
pollution. Other topics of interest include science-to-policy
pathways, new data collection and visualization practices, air
pollution education, and environmental injustice. The panel
includes research and researchers based in settings around the
world, helping advance TRANSnational STS by developing a
nuanced and comparative understanding of governance styles
across different historical and cultural settings.
Participants:
Air Pollution Governance in 6+ Cities Aalok Khandekar, Indian
Institute of Technology Hyderabad; Kim Fortun, University
of California Irvine
The Air Pollution Governance Across Cities Study
(known as the 6+ Cities Study) works to characterize
comparative insight and cross-city dialogue in identifying
air pollution as the world’s largest single environmental
health risk. The 6+ Cities Study aims to characterize
distinctive styles of environmental health and risk
governance, at the city scale. Through interviews,
observation of public events, and analysis of media,
government, NGO and scientific reports, the study team is
examining different stakeholder roles and perspectives,
links between policy domains (especially environment,
transportation, health, and education), and links across
scale (urban, state, national, and international).
Originally, there were six cities in the study, with research
groups in each city (Beijing, Bangalore, Houston,
Philadelphia, New York City, and Albany, funded by the
US National Science Foundation). The study has now
expanded to include four more Indian cities (Delhi,
Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune, funded by the Azim
Premji Foundation), and Los Angeles. Methodologically,
the study models and advances capacity for multi-sited,
internationally collaborative anthropological field
research on education-to-science-to-policy pathways,
which can be used to address a wide range of complex societal problems. In this presentation, we’ll describe how
the 6+ City Study has developed, and what we have
learned so far.
Breathing in Delhi's Peripheries Rohit Negi, School of Human
Ecology, Ambedkar University Delhi; Prerna Srigyan,
Ambedkar University Delhi
Delhi’s environmental history cannot be understood
outside the continuing peripheralisation of ecological risk.
The city’s hinterlands have not only been the identified
sites for industries but also of waste and practices--from
slaughterhouses to landfills--deemed ‘out of place’ in a
modern, globalising city (Sharan, 2014). Our paper views
these sites through an atmospheric lens, examining the
relational production of space, vulnerability, and
breathing in these zones of exaggerated risk. It further
asks where the peripheries figure in the circuits of
knowledge production via measurement and visualisation,
and in the governance of air. Specifically, we consider the
neighbourhood of Okhla to think through these matters by
locating the changing nature of risk and mapping the
everyday practices of residents. Here, a large and
exhausted landfill, a modernist industrial area undergoing
post-industrial change, a depot where thousands of trucks
drop off containers from the larger region in transit via the
railways every night, and a new waste-to-energy plant
that deposits soot over buildings every night share space
with dense housing, multiple health facilities, and
remnant forests. Our interest in air and breathing in the
peripheries adds richness to the scholarship on the
intersections of environmental forms and urban
experiences in neoliberal India.
The Invisible Infrastructures of the Smog. Technical
Standardisation and Data Infrastructure in Air Pollution
Measurement (the Case of Poland) Michał Wróblewski,
Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland
High level of suspended particulates (PM10 and PM2,5)
makes Polish air quality one of the worst in Europe. This
is mainly related to the fact, that Polish individual energy
consumption is based mainly on coal. Although the
problem exists for quite long time now (since the 90s), it
became a subject of public concern only recently. Citizens
in big Polish cities started to pay more attention to air
quality. Numbers of NGOs exclusively concerned with
the problem (so-called Smog Alerts) have been created.
NGOs not only direct the attention of policy makers, local
politicians and public institution to poor air quality, but
they also create alternative data infrastructure. This
infrastructure consists on sensors and mobile applications
(that makes the data easy to obtain by regular users).
Recently the smog problem started to be the subject of
private sector interest. Many companies sell simple
sensors that can be used in home environment or create its
own infrastructure and collect data in Polish cities. The
latter are used by big web portals, that show information
about air quality to millions of viewers every day. The
question arises, what are the relations of different actors
(public institutions, NGOs and private companies)
involved with the air pollution controversy? To collect
accurate and reliable data on suspended particulates it is
necessary to calibrate measuring infrastructure and to
standardize the way data will be indexed. On the level of
technical standardisation and data infrastructure there are
serious discrepancies between aforementioned
stakeholders. Each one of them uses different sensors and devices, adopts different legal norms, uses different
analytical standards and different methods of data
visualisation. It can cause many social consequences –
e.g. private sector scales are simpler than those used by
public institutions and makes its data more visually
attractive, so their data has far more social range despite
its lack of accuracy. In the paper I want to: 1) show the
differences in the ways that data are collected and
standardize by different stakeholders; 2) consider how
those differences affect the possibilities of copperation
between stakeholders. My research project is based on
field research. The main part of the research are in-depth
interviews conducted with representatives of inspectorates
of environmental protection, NGOs and private sector.
The Role of Transboundary Air Pollution Research in the
Making of the South Korean Regulatory Regime Chuyoung
Won, Seoul National University
This paper aims to shed new light on the relationship
between transnational scientific cooperation and national
regulatory policy, based on a historical examination of the
responses to transboundary air pollutants in South Korea
from the mid-1980s to the 1990s. After the discovery of
acid deposition traveling from China to adjacent countries
during the mid-1980s, transboundary air pollution in East
Asia has begun to an emerging global environmental
issue. Since then, governments in East Asia have
promoted transnational cooperation projects to monitor
transboundary air pollutants. In this paper, I explore how
common technical standards and measurement methods
had been formed through such cooperative research
initiatives, and how they became the “scientific”
foundation of national regulatory policy on air pollutants.
Specifically, I trace Korean scientists’ activities in the
Regional Air Pollution Information and Simulation
Project (RAINS–Asia, 1992–1997), and then I examine
its impact upon South Korea’s national regulatory
research project, the Development of Technology for the
Monitoring and Prediction of Acid Rain (1993–1999).
RAINS–Asia, the first transnational scientific research
project on acid rain in Asia, sought to develop an
atmospheric assessment model. South Korean scientists
redesigned the assessment model to fit the local
atmospheric conditions of Korea through the subsequent
project. Including the modified assessment model in national regulatory policy, the South Korean government
succeeded in expanding its monitoring network for
transboundary air pollutants. Throughout this work, this
paper will contribute to STS literature on transnational
environmental governance and knowledge production.
Scientific Expertise And Public Action. Governing The Air
Pollution Problem In Paris. Justyna Barbara Moizard-
Lanvin, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Centre de recherche médecine, science, santé et sociét
In the 1990s, following the French air pollution cohort
study (PAARC), the air pollution, and in particular the
industrial air pollution, no longer represents a public
health issue. It calls into question the Air Quality
Monitoring Association funding in Paris. The Regional
Health Observatory epidemiologists are commissioned to
confirm this hypothesis. In 1994, the first “time
series” studies are published, illustrating short and
medium term effects between exposition to low doses of
air pollution and cardiorespiratory health, causing excess
mortality. Scientific and institutional partnership, carried out with epidemiologists on the international level and
with other scientific circles (toxicologists, statisticians
and metrologists), legitimized the epidemiologists
approach. The new air pollution source is documented –
transport, ignored so far for its environmental-health
harmful effects. Today, despite a public accumulation of
scientific knowledge, the associative mobilizations rise,
the health agencies development and the significant
growth of scientific expertise in the public policies
development, the national public action is characterized
by a certain degree of inaction leading to the long-term
persistence of these problems. This study calls for
attention to the recent phenomenon of a rise in
environmental and health public action initiated by Paris
as an addition to or substitution for national policies.
Drawing on documentary analysis, interviews and
observation of a Paris newborns cohort experts, this paper
analyses the place of scientific, political and economic
dynamics, and in particular the role of epidemiologists,
that structured the definition and multiply attempts to set
up public policies related to environmental-health
problems in Paris.
The Challenge of Air Pollution Governance: The Case of
Taiwan Wen-Ling Tu, National Chengchi University
Air pollution problems are extremely complex and
controversial due to the different "scientific" rationales
adopted by the various fields to explain the causes. To
understand the air pollution problems, we need the
following information/ knowledge generation: 1.
pollutants from the source of the emissions, 2. diffusion
path simulation, and 3. the affected and changing status of the receptor. However, there are still some intervals in
connecting different parts of knowledge. As a result, it
has become extremely challenging for the government to
introduce effective solutions. This paper, through the
perspectives of risk society, regulatory science and
environmental governance, examines Taiwan's civic anti-
air-pollution initiatives, which have been widely
organized in central and southern Taiwan against
industrial pollutions. The citizen mobilization has raised
the risk perception of the society and contributes to the
government's actions. This paper analyzes the certain and
uncertain knowledge of air pollution that constructed by
the civil society, and further discusses how those
initiatives highlight the difficulties and limitations in
clarifying and solving the uneven risk distribution
problems of air pollution. By examining the different
claims, arguments, and knowledge forms proposed by the
numerous roles involved in the air pollution controversies,
this paper will also reflect on the limits of the current
scientific benchmarks or risk assessments. In conclusion,
the paper highlight the important to incorporate STS
perspective and social science-oriented methodology into
air pollution prevention and control strategies.
Session Organizer:
Kim Fortun, University of California Irvine
Chair:
Aalok Khandekar, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad
Discussant:
Soraya Boudia, University Paris Descartes