| NSF Org: |
SES Division of Social and Economic Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | March 29, 2017 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | March 29, 2017 |
| Award Number: | 1703120 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Joseph Whitmeyer
jwhitmey@nsf.gov (703)292-7808 SES Division of Social and Economic Sciences SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | June 1, 2017 |
| End Date: | May 31, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $12,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $12,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
2385 IRVING HILL RD LAWRENCE KS US 66045-7563 (785)864-3441 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
2385 Irving Hill Rd Lawrence KS US 66045-7568 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Sociology |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
This study will assess perceptions of environmental risk among a vulnerable population in southeast Louisiana and analyze the connections between these perceptions and local-level political processes surrounding coastal restoration issues in the region. The study will focus on Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes--the two Louisiana parishes adjacent to the mouth of the Mississippi River. The study will investigate residents' attitudes on climate change and assess the relationship between these attitudes and local environmental policy. This region is of specific interest due to the unique configuration of social and environmental factors that impact the community, including environmental risk, economic dependence on extractive industry, high rates of climate change denial, and high concentration of oil and gas employment. This study will challenge dominant perspectives on climate skepticism by incorporating economic, cultural, and emotional factors into the discourse on climate change denial. By contributing to a more complete and nuanced understanding of climate change denial, this study will have potentially transformative impacts on the future of climate discourse and policy by providing new tools for climate advocates to address climate denial in the political arena.
The study will focus on the central questions of how residents interpret the relationship between environmental security and economic prosperity in their community, and how the negotiation of these two social priorities plays out in local political processes. Residents of southeast Louisiana regularly experience environmental harm yet remain bound economically to industries that exploit the local environment. While environmental awareness is common, climate change denial is persistent in the community. The theory of socially organized denial, which explores social dimensions of climate change denial, will be applied to investigate the origins of these attitudes and factors that perpetuate widespread climate skepticism in the region. This study will utilize content analysis and semi-structured interviews to better understand local interpretations of the relationship between economy and environment. The content analysis phase of the study will utilize local print media to establish a discursive field within which attitudes form on environmental issues. The interview phase of the project will utilize responses from a broad sample of respondents in the community. The interviews will focus on several themes including news acquisition, political attitudes, attitudes toward local economic issues, attitudes toward environmental issues such as coastal restoration and climate change, and attitudes regarding the political processes around these issues in the community. The combination of these methods will allow the researchers to contextualize respondents' testimony within public environmental discourse, yielding rich data that will facilitate a deep exploration of local environmental attitudes and politics.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Introduction
This research investigated multiple dimensions of the contentious political conflict around the state of Louisiana's Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast. Specifically, this worked aimed to investigate the roles of local knowledge and the oil and gas industry in informing the State's approach to resolving its coastal restoration crisis. Using a political ecology framework, this project asked questions about the influence of global political economic processes in influencing local ecological decisions, as well as questions about who has power to exercise authority over local ecological governance.
This research found a local ecological governance process heavily influenced by neoliberalism. This was evidenced by the State's unwillingness or inability to attribute coastal erosion and risk to oil and gas activities, and the lack of accountability placed on these industries in coastal restoration activities, despite the academic research indicating these industries' harmful coastal impact. Furthermore, this research found that the State's discursive process around coastal restoration was exclusive of local knowledge, much of which is held in communities that stand to be impacted not only by coastal erosion but by the State's particular restoration strategies that are likely to disrupt the fishing industry in southeast Louisiana's estuaries.
Intellectual Merit
This research utilizes principles of political ecology to perform a sociological analysis of a contentious, local political situation in coastal Louisiana. This project provides a framework for performing similar sociological inquiry in other contexts by asking questions rooted in political ecology and seeking their answers in the operation of institutional power. This project recognizes the interplay of power structures across geographical scales and across epistemic communities. This approach revealed inequities stemming from groups' positions along these dimensions in terms of their ability to participate in and affect local democratic processes. This same process of inquiry can be applied to other ecological governance disputes in a variety of contexts and can expose inequities that are easily overlooked in state-level analyses. This project engaged a variety of sociological concepts to ultimately describe and analyze the political processes at play, including social movement theory, framing and ideology, political economic issues around neoliberal governance, and epistemic conflict between institutional and local knowledge communities.
Broader Impacts
The broader impacts of this study are in the ways in which it sheds light on inequities in local political processes around ecological governance. Louisiana is working to become a global leader in water management by building a scientific community capable of helping the state navigate its coastal erosion crisis. This project reveals how scientific leadership that fails to account for power imbalances and inequities in political access can be deployed in technocratic ways that fail to account for the needs of a diverse range of vulnerable communities. This study exposes the need for a coastal restoration process that--in addition to scientific leadership--actively works to redress power imbalances in the coastal zone.
In order for the state of Louisiana to resolve its coastal restoration crisis in a way that is equitable and reduces vulnerability in its frontline communities, it must develop a leadership agenda that is not only scientific but political. This involves challenging the power relations that have produced the coastal erosion crisis, even if this means challenging economically powerful interests like oil and gas. This also involves expanding democratic access to decision-making power for communities throughout the coastal zone. Resolving the coastal erosion crisis cannot just be about keeping risk out; it requires reimagining and diversifying the local economy to simultaneously reduce risk production and provide economic and political opportunity to vulnerable communities and individuals.
Project Outcomes
The major academic outcome of this project was the completion of the Co-I's (Jacob Lipsman's) PhD, which is being conferred in Summer 2020. Additionally, this research yielded multiple research products. The research discussed here has directly yielded two journal articles, with a third being developed for the review process. Additionally, several conference presentations have been given by the co-I on this research. The published articles are listed here:
Lipsman, Jacob E. 2020. "Non-Decision Power and Political Opportunity: Exposing Structural Barriers to Mobilization in Louisiana's Coastal Restoration Conflict." Social Currents (OnlineFirst):1-18. doi:10.1177/2329496520930824.
Lipsman, Jacob E. 2019. "Local Knowledge and Democracy in Fisheries Management: A Case Study of Adaptation to the Anthropocene in Southeast Louisiana." Ecology and Society 24(4):20. doi:10.5751/ES-11100-240420.
Last Modified: 08/20/2020
Modified by: Jacob E Lipsman
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