Energy justice and offshore oil: weighing environmental risk and privilege in the North Atlantic

ABSTRACT

We examine framing of the social-ecological benefits and risks of offshore oil development across the North Atlantic region (Denmark, Newfoundland and Labrador, Norway, and Scotland). Drawing on field observation and interviews, we show that the environmental privileges of the oil sector are legitimated through frames that emphasize economic contributions to social wellbeing, as well as through frames of maintaining global competitiveness for host societies. There is generally a high level of trust in existing systems of oil governance to ensure responsible resource extraction. Where environmental risk framing emerges, this focuses on local impacts of new oil development that disproportionately impacts rural coastal communities that depend on tourism and fisheries. Environmental risk framing also relates to issues of decommissioning and global climate change. Throughout our analysis, we attend to differences in framing across our case study regions. We show that energy justice research benefits from greater engagement with two distinct, but related aspects of analysis: 1) environmental privilege and environmental risk; and 2) localised and globalised environmental risk.

KEYWORDS:

• Energy justice
• offshore oil
• Canada – Newfoundland and Labrador
• Denmark
• Norway
• Scotland

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Seo Young-Pyo, Gilles Verpraet, Shu-Fen Kao, and Shin-Ock Chang for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper. For their input throughout the development of this project, we thank: John McLevey, Alice Mattoni, Karl Benediktsson, Arn Keeling, Berit Kristoffersen, Patrick McCurdy, Kari Norgaard, Howard Ramos, Natalie Slawinski, Julie Uldam, Mette Blæsbjerg, Brigt Dale, Guðrún Þóra Gunnarsdóttir, Óli Halldórsson, Auður Ingólfsdóttir, Marianthi Leon, Marianne Helene Rasmussen, Guðrún Rósa Þórsteinsdóttir, and John Urry. Research assistance was provided by Cory Collins, Paula Graham, Megan Stewart, and Yixi Yang.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For an overview of the framing perspective see Snow et al. (2014); on the application of the framing perspective for energy justice see Fuller and McCauley (2016).

2. As a qualification, it is important to note that the cases represent different levels of political jurisdiction. Norway and Denmark are independent countries, while Denmark is also a member of the European Union. Newfoundland and Labrador is a province of Canada, though in the Canadian federalist system provincial governments have substantial jurisdiction over natural resource development. Scotland is a more autonomous region within the United Kingdom and is embroiled in the Brexit process with the UK leaving the European Union, which has renewed interest in Scottish independence. Despite these geo-political differences, we adopt a regional focus on the North Atlantic in response to calls to move beyond the methodological nationalism that treats nation-states as the natural, de facto units of analysis in comparative re-search, which has dominated social sciences for decades (e.g. Beck and Levy 2013; Thorpe 2012). At the same time, a focus on cases that are linked through the shared maritime geography of the northern Atlantic Ocean extends recent sociological research on oceans as sites of conflict over resource development (Hannigan 2017; Longo and Clark 2016; Widener 2018).

3. This multi-scalar approach is not unique to an energy justice perspective. The foundations of environmental justice are in community-level studies and activism. However, environmental justice has broadened to include local-global dynamics (Schlosberg 2013). The interplay of local and global dimensions of environmental injustice has been a longstanding concern in work by authors like Martinez-Alier (1997).

4. Collins et al.’s (2016) analysis of ‘hyper-polluters’ goes further in embedding the double diversion concept in an environmental justice perspective. Their analysis shows that the companies that are disproportionately responsible for industrial toxic pollution also disproportionately impact racialized and low-income communities.

5. Widener (2018) sets out a ‘marine justice’ theoretical framework that is also complementary to the energy justice perspective.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) under Grant 435-2015-0308.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2015-0308];

Notes on contributors

Mark C.J. Stoddart

Mark C.J. Stoddartis Professor in the Department of Sociology at Memorial University, with research interests in environmental sociology, social movements, and communications and culture. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Industrial Development and Eco-Tourism: Can Oil Extraction and Nature Conservation Co-Exist? (Palgrave). His work appears in a range of sociology and interdisciplinary journals, including Global Environmental Change, Energy Research & Social Science, Organization & Environment, Environmental Politics, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Environmental Communication, Mobilities, and Social Movement Studies.

B. Quinn Burt

B. Quinn Burt is an MA graduate from the Department of Sociology at Memorial University, whose research focuses on media representations of Indigenous-led environmentalism. He has previously published in the Oxford Handbook of Political Consumerism.