Environmental (in)justice and the post-political

Abstract

Food production plays a crucial role for challenging the escalating environmental breakdown. It is also a fertile ground for analysing environmental (in)justice and its components of recognition and participation in environmental decision-making. Scholars of environmental justice have paid limited attention to the post-political and its implications for the ability to challenge the ecologically destructive status quo. This article innovatively combines environmental justice perspective with the literature on the post-political condition, using the case study of pig farming intensification in rural Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has been driving policy to encourage growth and intensify its meat production, resulting in a sharp rise of intensive farms. The resulting pollution have and continue generating environmental justice concerns. Using qualitative data from a 2-month fieldwork in November-December 2018, the article shows that local community’s ideas around how farming should be organised were not recognised. Their participation in environmental decision-making was also reduced to an empty ritual; formal inclusion did not translate into a genuine impact on the decision-making outcome. In the post-political landscape, environmental justice concerns become harder to address; environmental decision-making becomes a means of serving the operations of capitalism, stifling disputes around the neoliberal growth agenda, and precluding possibilities for a meaningful change of the ecologically destructive status quo.

Introduction

Meat production in the twenty-first century is over five times higher than in the early 1960s. It has increased from 70 million metric tonnes to more than 375 million metric tonnes today and propelled dramatic changes to both the society and the natural environment. Meat, rather than being simply food, can serve as a lens for examining socio-environmental relations today.

Industrial meat production has been long entangled with environmental injustice. Wing et al. (2000) and Ladd and Edward (2002) pointed out that in North Carolina economically disadvantaged and ethnic minority residents have been bearing an unfair share of the ever-expanding pork production industry and its pollution, economic costs and land displacement issues. Other examples intersecting environmental injustice and industrial meat production are multiple: Wilson et al. (2002) on industrial pork production in Mississippi, Lenhardt and Ogneva-Himmelberger (2013) on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in Ohio, Chamanara et al. (2021) on industrial beef production in California, Hall et al. (2021) and Galarraga et al. (2022) on industrial chicken farming in Maryland and Delaware respectively, Gladkova (2020) on industrialisation of pig farming in Northern Ireland.

It is also important to remember that environmental justice is a social and political movement at its core, seeking to challenge and dismantle systemic inequalities and entrenched power imbalances that underpin them. Yet, in today’s world of ‘reflexive impotence’ (Fisher, 2009, 21) its political nature may be facing a challenge. In recent years, several political theorists (with Badiou, Rancière, Mouffe, Žižek, Swyngedouw among others) started suggesting that we live in the era of ‘post-politics’, ‘post-democracy’ and ‘the post-political’. In it, we are witnessing erosion of democracy and weakening of the public sphere – and their replacement by ‘technocratic mechanisms and consensual procedures that operate within an unquestioned framework of representative democracy, free market economics, and cosmopolitan liberalism’ (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014: 6). The post-political condition is particularly damaging at the current time of multiple intersecting injustices; embracing de-politicising policies and practices and thus sustaining the status quo will lead to detrimental consequences for both human and more-than-human, be it industrially farmed animals themselves, other species inhabiting the affected ecosystems, biotic and abiotic systems such as soil, and abiotic entities such air, water and the Earth’s climate.

In this article, I combine environmental justice perspective with the literature on the post-political condition, using the under-researched rural context and the case of pig farming intensification in Northern Ireland. The main objective of the article is to reflect on environmental decision-making – particularly on the aspects of recognition and participation – in the post-political context and enhance our understanding of the relationship between environmental justice and the post-political.

The article innovates the existing environmental justice knowledge by expanding the discussions around recognitional and procedural environmental justice. I advance the idea that the populations that are not considered minority and do not experience discrimination can also face environmental injustice on the grounds of such populations experiencing disenfranchisement in the processes of environmental decision-making. The article also contributes to environmental politics knowledge by examining the relationship between the capitalist economy and democratic politics, demonstrating that environmental affairs oftentimes serve as an arena where ‘the hegemony of the neoliberal thought becomes entrenched’ (Blühdorn 2014: 147).

The article first reviews the existing debates around post-politics and environmental justice, focusing specifically on the two environmental justice components relevant to the argument: recognition and participation. The article then proceeds to describe the context of Northern Ireland and its fitting nature for researching at the intersection of environmental justice and post-politics, followed by a case study methodology. The main argument of the paper is made when discussing (non)recognition of the ideas of opposition to farming intensification and (non)participation in environmental decision-making: the post-political condition, grounded in the preservation of neoliberal capitalist logic, presents a significant challenge for addressing the current environmental challenges, both in the realm of industrial meat production and beyond.

Conceptualising post-politics and environmental justice

This section presents a theoretical framework for this paper: it first briefly summarises the literature on post-politics and environmental justice, followed by a more in-depth discussion of the two elements of Schlosberg’s environmental justice model that are relevant to this paper – recognition and participation – and their consideration through the lens of the post-political.

Post-politics

What theorists such as Mouffe, Rancière, Žižek or Swyngedouw are referring to as post-politics and the post-political constellation gradually evolved in the 1990s. Post-political theorists distinguish between politics and the political (Mouffe, 2005; Rancière, 1999). The former is a sphere of political processes and institutions through which an order is established. The latter is a moment in which the status quo is fundamentally challenged. Not every instance of public decision-making is therefore political – it only becomes political when ‘a particular demand is not simply part of a negation of interests but aims at something more, and starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire social space’ (Žižek, 2000: 208). Since the end of the Cold War, it’s been increasingly difficult to orchestrate such restructuring and critique or challenge the ideology of neoliberal capitalism, and post-politics theorists acknowledge that its hegemony is the root cause of depoliticisation we are witnessing today.

Depoliticisation refers to a discursive construction of a new consensus which annuls political conflict (Rancière, 1999). That means pacification, suppression, and disappearance of the political, erosion of spaces where dissensus can be expressed and celebrated. Politics in turn becomes reduced to consensual governance, which is inclusive and participatory on the surface but excludes any voices that challenge the hegemonic consensus around neoliberal capitalism. By excluding alternative ideas and visions, post-political condition works to sustain – or as Rancière (1999) puts it, police – the continuation of the prevailing order. Post-political condition is paradoxical. It is characterised by widespread political apathy, cynicism and decline in political participation. On the other hand, alternative and oppositional voices are also immediately discredited and labelled as irrational, unrealistic or even terrorist because of them challenging the prevailing neoliberal capitalist consensus and its objective truths (Blühdorn and Deflorian, 2021).

However, one should be cautious to not create a dichotomy between consensus and dissensus and generalising that one being more desirable than the other; as Legacy et al. (2019) point out, creating dissensus and engaging in conflict can lead to even more dramatic oppression of some populations. Furthermore, Blühdorn and Butzlaff (2020) caution against the universalising, simplifying nature of the idea of post-politics, echoing Dean (2014) and Alexander and Welzel (2017). They urge to explore the ongoing transformation of politics and society in a more nuanced fashion, considering the spread of consumer culture and the digital revolution and their implications for democratic participation resulting in a much more ambiguous democratic reality. Blühdorn and Butzlaff (2020) note how with socio-technological modernisation, demand for participation has increased while confidence in its effectiveness and change-making capacity has declined.

Environmental justice

The concept of environmental justice originated in the 1980s in the United States, intersecting anti-toxics and civil rights movements (Temper and Del Bene, 2016). Environmental justice activism initially focused on the environmental hazards and pollution affecting minority groups in the US (Bullard, 2005; Bullard and Wright, 2009; Taylor, 2014) but grew to encompass the variety of unsustainable practices, including resource depletion, energy use, consumption patterns, food systems, and industrialisation (Holifield et al., 2018; Pellow and Brulle, 2005).

Environmental justice research in academia has focused on the topic of unequal access to healthy, safe, and nurturing environments (Kelly-Reif and Wing, 2016; Pellow and Brulle, 2005; Wolford, 2008). Yet, the focus on only the distributional aspect of justice has been critiqued.

Walker and Bulkeley (2006) suggest that uneven distribution of risks could be addressed by evening out the sharing of burdens without a fundamental overhaul of the structures behind problems in question. They also question the very essence of even distribution, pointing out that the environment is uniquely distributed into particular places and cannot be experienced equally. Therefore, uneven distribution of environmental ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ might not be classified as unjust. It is, therefore ‘the ‘fairness’ of the processes through which the distribution has occurred and the possibilities which individuals and communities have to avoid or ameliorate risk, or to access environmental resources, which are important’ (Walker and Bulkeley, 2006: 656). Indeed, different aspects of justice are linked (Schlosberg, 2007). Most environmental justice advocates have become concerned with social, cultural, and political processes of environmental decision-making (Chakraborty, 2017; Holifield et al., 2018), thus echoing the call of prominent environmental justice scholars (Bullard, 1990; Fraser, 1998; Hunold and Young, 1998; Pulido, 1996; Young, 1990) to address not only distribution, but the causes of maldistribution of environmental benefits and burdens. The focus on the latter allows examination of social, cultural, and political processes, which is reflected in Schlosberg’s (2007) multifaceted conception of justice. Schlosberg (2007) theorises environmental justice as a synthesis of distribution, individual and community recognition, participation, and delivery of basic capabilities.

Recognition

Recognition entails recognising the experiences of participants from affected communities (Schlosberg, 2004). Fraser (2001) suggests that individuals and groups should be able to define what qualifies as a good life and pursue it, without impeding on others’ individual liberties. Such definitions of a good life, as well as other heterogeneous positions and perspectives present in society (Hunold and Young, 1998) should be recognised in decision-making. Moreover, Fraser (1998) suggests that within the recognition paradigm differences should not only be recognised but celebrated.

Recognitional injustice might take forms of non-recognition (where individuals are rendered invisible as a result of dominant cultural norms), misrecognition (where individuals are seen as lacking value and as inferior) and disrespect (where individuals are maligned or disparaged in everyday interactions or representations) (Fraser, 1997). Recognitional injustice might arise when social institutions operate according to cultural norms that do not allow for equal participation (Fraser, 2001). Yet, cultural injustices inevitably have economic sources and consequences, such as economic exploitation and deprivation, and are interrelated with the economic ones (Fraser, 2000).

Discussions of recognition focus predominantly on the recognition of individuals or communities. However, some authors also consider that individuals’ and communities’ values, rationales, and lifestyles as well as their ideas can be unrecognised (Bustos et al., 2017), leaving individuals and communities disempowered. The authors suggest that participatory arrangements are not designed to recognise what Schlosberg (2004: 524) identifies as ‘diverse cultures, identities, economies, and ways of knowing’, and such lack of recognition hampers meaningful participation. Bustos et al. (2017: 297) suggest that the reason behind this instance of misrecognition is the exclusion of the views situated outside ‘the reigning ‘consensuses’ (in economic, environmental and development terms)’ in formally participatory processes of environmental decision-making.

Political economy of neoliberal capitalism has reconfigured political processes and capitalism is regarded as an unquestionable foundation of social and economic order. Social actors, thus, operate within the boundaries of the consensus around a growth- and profit-driven neoliberal capitalist system and those challenging it are placed outside the consensus and dismissed (Swyngedouw, 2007). Capitalist hegemony is constituted through power relations that are safeguarded through eliminating the conflict between the powerful and the powerless in political processes (Mouffe, 2005). Consensus-based decision-making is linked to the phenomenon of depoliticisation.

The space of disagreement gets narrower to include ‘different opinions on anything imaginable (as long as it does not question fundamentally the existing state of the neo-liberal political-economic configuration) in arrangements of impotent participation and consensual ‘good’ techno-managerial governance’ (Swyngedouw, 2009: 610). In addition to being circumscribed, political choices are also often deemed too complex to comprehend, necessitating the involvement of experts to legitimise decisions (Swyngedouw, 2011), making recognitional justice yet more unachievable. Additionally, depoliticisation in this case occurs as members of the public become disillusioned with political participation because of their conviction that certain issues can be only understood by experts (Young, 1990).

Participation

Participation is seen as a crucial element in procedural environmental justice and refers to the manner in which the different experiences of individuals and communities are validated (Schlosberg, 2004). Participation implies wider engagement boosted by democratic decision-making, where individuals and communities can influence the outcome of decision-making (O’Faircheallaigh, 2010). The rationale for public participation and its role in achieving environmental justice is multifaceted. Public participation allows access to local knowledge, which broadens the range of solutions (Stewart and Sinclair, 2007). Participatory decision-making is also integral to the notion of environmental democracy (Gellers and Jeffords, 2018) and is a condition for social justice (Young, 1990). In theory, it should contribute to individual and community empowerment (Stewart and Sinclair, 2007).

Empowered participation for Reed (2008) takes two forms: ensuring that participants have the power to really influence the decision and ensuring that participants have the technical capability to engage effectively with the decision. Therefore, scrutinising the idea of public participation oftentimes means engaging with the question of power. Uneven environmental outcomes result from political economic relations of capitalism, within which inequalities of power in environmental decision-making persist (Holifield et al., 2018; Walker, 2012). Some authors suggest that public participation tends to reflect the distribution of social power rather than change the status quo (Devlin and Yap, 2008). Others are more optimistic, claiming that public participation challenges the inequitable distribution of social goods and burdens, as well as the culture of misrecognition (Schlosberg, 2004).

The post-political paradox looms large again. On the one hand, ‘participatory’ and ‘inclusive’ forms of governance are nurtured and fostered (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014), members of the public are encouraged to actively engage in decision-making on the matters that affect them. On the other hand, there is a difficulty in influencing decisions due to power imbalance, and difficulty in understanding the basis on which decisions are made. Zizek is critical of this form of ‘radical democracy’, he argues that it blocks possibilities for building an alternative world order by limiting itself to ‘palliative damage-control measures within the global capitalist framework’ (Zizek, 2000: 321). Participation in environmental decision-making has been compromised by neoliberal managerial governance logic and the political is being narrowed down through consensus-generating participation infrastructures (Legacy et al., 2019). Post-political scholars suggest that participatory processes are organised in a way that the scope of possible outcomes is narrowly defined in advance (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014). Participation becomes a futile formality, lacking in any formal power; such impotent participation ensures that the framework of decision-making does not question or disrupt the existing state of the neoliberal political-economic configuration (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014).

To conclude, the theoretical framework for this paper is built for analysing the relationship between environmental justice and the post-political in the context of industrial meat production. Focusing on the underlying mechanisms behind the uneven distribution of environmental burdens – recognition and participation – and considering their transformation through the lens of post-politics allows reflecting on the process of environmental-decision making and its potential for addressing food system-driven socio-ecological challenges in Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has a rich farming heritage – the land has been farmed for centuries, and the mild weather plays an important role in the Northern Irish farming success. Farming has been long characterised by small, usually family-owned, farms: their average size is 41 ha compared to 81 ha in the UK (DAERA, 2020). Yet, the status quo is changing with the policy drive to encourage growth and intensify production. In 2017, it was reported that Northern Ireland experienced a sharp increase in the number of intensive pig and poultry farms. The number of farms went up by sixty-eight percent from 154 in 2011 to 259 (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 2017).

Environmental NGOs and campaigners attributed this trend to a broader shift in farming intensification, in addition to the Northern Irish government’s adoption of the Going for Growth (GfG) strategy in 2012. GfG was an industry-led strategy that endeavoured to expand the agri-food sector and set out a vision of ‘growing a sustainable, profitable and integrated Agri-Food supply chain, focused on delivering the needs of the market’ (AFSB, 2013: 11). GfG placed an emphasis on growth within specific sectors, notably the pig and poultry. The pig sector has been recognised as having the potential to be successful since it does not rely on government subsidies as a source of income and is able to meet market demand for pork.

Comparing the Agricultural Census in Northern Ireland conducted by the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) in 2000 and 2017 shows the evolution of the pig sector in terms of concentration and intensification. In 2000, 808 pig farms in Northern Ireland had a total of 413,480 pigs (DAERA, 2000); in 2017, the number of farms fell to 322, but the number of animals increased to 649,120 (DAERA 2018). The 2017 census emphasised that ‘a small number of large, highly productive businesses drive most of the change in the sector’ (DAERA, 2018: 17). The above-described GfG strategy further encouraged the sector’s expansion. Since the commencement of the strategy in 2012, the total number of pigs rose from 480,317 in 2013 to the above-mentioned 649,120 in 2017 (DAERA, 2018). Despite GfG coming to an end in 2017, it is reported that it embodies the desired direction for the industry (Attorp and McAreavey, 2020). The number of planning applications for new pig farms or pig farm extensions currently appears to be on the rise. According to Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland (2018), these applications would add more than 150,000 new pigs each year to the already existing pig population.

Northern Ireland is also fitting for the development of environmental justice research (Turner, 2007), providing an interesting context for recognitional and procedural environmental justice studies. Researchers into community participation in Northern Ireland note a strange dichotomy. While members of the public are encouraged to actively engage in decision-making on the matters that affect them (Cave 2013; Knox and Carmichael, 2015), there are accounts of public disengagement (Turner, 2007), difficulty in influencing decisions due to power imbalance, and difficulty in understanding the basis on which decisions are made (Mcalister, 2010; Turner, 2007). Considering this, it becomes crucial to analyse how decisions in relation to the emerging intensive pig farms are made, how the outcomes of these decisions influence the distribution of negative effects associated with industrial farming and what role the post-political condition plays in environmental decision-making. Northern Ireland, therefore, presents an interesting case for enriching the debates at the intersection of environmental justice and the post-political through the lens of industrial meat production.

Methodology

I used a case study research design, and its empirical basis originated from semi-structured interviews with the residents affected by farming intensification in the Newtownabbey area in County Antrim north of Belfast in Northern Ireland. Alkon and colleagues (2013) claim that getting insights into community perspectives is essential for providing support for those affected by environmental inequalities. I selected this area because several planning applications for intensive farms had been submitted to the local planning authorities prior to fieldwork and the area already had a large pig farm that houses approximately 9000 animals, as well as several smaller farms. The location therefore was suitable for studying environmental decision-making in depth, with a particular focus on participation of the community in the process.

I interviewed fifteen individuals in person in November and December 2018: eight non-farmer residents (both those who actively oppose largescale farm projects in the area and those neutral about such projects (codified as COM)); three local NGO workers (codified as NGO); four local government officials - two local councillors (codified as COU) and two local Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs). For sampling of the participants, snowball sampling was employed: as the key informants provided more information on the local context, other potential informants were identified. The key informants were selected based on the following criteria: they had available knowledge and/or experience needed for this research (either of the farming industry in Northern Ireland or of the effects of farming intensification); they were capable of reflection; and they had time to be interviewed and were willing to take part in this research (Flick, 2014). The participants interviewed were the ones affected directly by the existing farms and/or the ones who participated in the decision-making processes behind farming intensification. I considered the perspectives of those actively opposing large-scale farm projects in the area as well as those not actively contributing to decision-making around such projects. Government officials were involved directly in decision-making regarding farming intensification.

During the interviews, the resident participants were asked about their participation in the decision-making process around new farm developments, and about the recognition of their views in that process. Local government officials were asked about the planning process in Northern Ireland and their engagement with residents on the matters related to farming intensification. Each interview lasted from 45 min to 2 h.

I used thematic analysis when analysing the final data, following the steps proposed by Braun and Clarke (2006): familiarising myself with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, producing the final report.

‘You spend an awful amount of time fighting it and they aren’t really listening…’

The following sections provide empirical insights from the Northern Irish context into the theoretical debate around environmental justice components of recognition and participation in light of the post-political condition. To reiterate, environmental justice as recognition is considered as inclusion and respect of participants in decision-making, their experiences as well as their ideas, values, rationales, and lifestyles. Environmental justice as participation implies community engagement in environmental decision-making, with an ability to influence the outcome of decision-making.

However, first it is important to outline local community’s concerns about the process of farming intensification and provide background context to their engagement with environmental decision-making processes. For the participants, proliferation of intensive farms was associated with a number of environmental threats.

First, disposal of animal waste presented a challenge for the area. Whereas in non-intensive farms animal waste is considered to be an essential element of a natural nutrient cycle, animal waste disposal becomes a problem in intensive farms. Mismanagement of both waste itself and wastewater may result in air, soil, and water pollution. A common current practice is to use animal manure as a fertiliser by applying it onto land. Yet, the proliferation of farms meant that the amount of animal waste both locally and nationally would increase dramatically, which was mentioned by the participants (COM007; COM004; COU001).

Water and air quality were of particular concern to participants. Water pollution preoccupied local residents both in terms of its impact on the native species and local people (COM001; COM002; COM007), with some participants reporting that water contamination had already taken place in the area (COM002).

The respondents also saw the existing farms as a burden on the local ecological system and were concerned about the loss of biodiversity. Loss of biodiversity in river ecosystems was indicated above, but the respondents were also preoccupied about terrestrial biodiversity (COM006; COM007).

Finally, human health concerns were also mentioned (COU001; COM002), particularly around exposure to antibiotic resistant bacteria and have higher risks of developing respiratory diseases. Participants noted that industrial farm developments would significantly compromise their quality of life and ability to enjoy the outdoors (COM007; COM004; COM002; COM003).

(Non)recognition of the ideas of opposition to farming intensification

From my respondents’ perspectives, the process of environmental decision-making was not built to recognise values, rationales, and lifestyles of those who opposed farming intensification in Northern Ireland. The respondents lamented that their ideas of how farming should be organised in the area and what environment they would like to live in were not recognised by decision-makers.

The respondents brought up the issue of a moratorium on the planning applications for intensive farms: ‘The Government had 4,326 emails from the public calling for a moratorium’ (NGO002).

Yet, despite these concerns, they suggested that the government agencies were reluctant to address them:

‘We talked to the NIEA and asked all stakeholders for a moratorium on such applications. NIEA was admitting that the slurry from these farms were impacting environmentally sensitive areas, ninety percent of them were being impacted by the nitrates. They never got round to tell us why they would not put a moratorium’ (COM007).

Rather than heeding public concerns over farming intensification, the government dismissed those expressing the views against economic growth being beneficial for the collective good as ‘anti-economy’:

‘There is a backlash against us coming through from the government. <…> We try to separate it out – we are not against farms. <…> But when you have the GfG programme and it states that it will reduce 26,000 family farms to 6,000. In a country where farming is the main industry! It is unbelievable. But we have been accused of interfering with the Northern Irish economy and civil service policies’ (COM008).

‘I do not think [the council] recognises the views and concerns of people – they just let everything happen. Even though they know that there is quite a big opposition, they are not making any effort to put checks in place, they are not treating it like an ongoing issue. They are not taking it seriously and they are not dealing with it’ (COM003).

The latter was exacerbated by the fact that the government agencies responsible for the oversight of the new planning applications were reported to ignore the potential impacts of farming intensification:

‘We were challenging them on the fact that all our statutory agencies had written back to the planning department on the largest pig factory farm in the UK that they had no concerns. Public health – no concerns, veterinary – no concerns, NIEA – no concerns’ (COM008).

‘But if you look at most application <…> – roads never seem to have an issue, environment and water never seem to have an issue. If anybody in their right mind looked at those applications, they would have an issue with them’ (COU002).

Non-recognition of the views of opposition to farming intensification is linked to the previously discussed idea of the consensus around growth- and profit-driven neoliberal capitalist system. Alternative ideas are included as long as they do not question the integrity of the neoliberal political economy (Swyngedouw, 2011).

Furthermore, the architecture of and the relations within the planning system also safeguard the hegemony of the dominant capitalist order and reinforce power disequilibrium between individuals and communities and the farming industry. Struggles for the recognition of ideas are rooted in what Fraser (2000) calls institutionalised misrecognition, which was reflected in the interviews:

‘Although you might get a thousand objection letters, it is a very small number of those objections that consider a planning issue and can be addressed by the council. People’s reasons for opposing something are perfectly valid but not relevant to the planning so they cannot be addressed’ (COU001).

‘Government departments produced initiatives from a decade or more ago which were allowed to run because there is no process for challenging them against the environmental need of local people, local residents’ (MLA002).

It is harder to argue against a proposal that is compliant with legally established standards, which was also suggested by one respondent:

‘I think planning legislation is set up in a way that restrictions cannot be put upon these developments, proliferation of these developments is not a planning consideration in terms of objections to these. Planners would point to the fact that they are operating within the existing planning legislation’ (MLA002).

The legitimation on the institutional level further reinforces lack of recognition of ideas against farming intensification. The respondents pointed out that the structure of decision-making forums obscures the concerns beyond the economic rationale:

‘We have no role or ability to look at ethical issues or any other kind of issues – animal welfare, issues beyond the planning scope. That restricts our ability to look at all the possible consequences. We cannot ask for expert advice on health, animal health, waste management. It is very limited. <…> The legislation sets out Conduct and Guidance for planners specifying what evidence they can look at – it is very restrictive in terms of what it allows us to do. It is concerned with us going off on a tangent and looking at things we should not look at. It is possible but that fear does not allow us to look at things we should be looking at to make a more informed choice’ (COU001).

The economic dimension, on the other hand, was put forward in the decision-making forums:

‘There’s so much emphasis in the planning applications on economic supremacy. If they are bringing in some pounds, it seems to be the real frontrunner that makes them [decision-makers] go – this is a good thing. Economic supremacy is used time and again as a justification for quite poor decisions’ (NGO002).

Several respondents stressed that concerns such as profitability, efficiency, and economic growth displaced other ideas and interests, such as environmental and ethical concerns (COU001, COU002, MLA002):

‘They have to have greater goals towards the community need and the environmental need for the wider area where you’re dealing with the quality of life for a large number of the local people. That is not a field in the planning legislation’ (MLA002).

Non-recognition and disrespect of the ideas of opposition to farming intensification present an example of recognitional environmental injustice. They are rooted in the hegemony of the growth- and profit-driven neoliberal capitalist system constituted through power relations between the state and corporate actors in the farming industry that reject the possibility of alternatives to it. The hegemony becomes ‘an organic and relational whole, embedded in institutions and apparatuses’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 67). It is reproduced through the micro level relations in planning, which compromises the ability of the latter to act as a mechanism of control for farming intensification. The ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony of neoliberal capitalism also reconfigures the political process of environmental decision-making. As power relations work to exclude the alternatives to the growth- and profit-driven political economic system, they also reinforce consensus-based technocratic decision-making. My respondents were unable to ‘counter argue the prevailing consensuses that sustain their situation’ (Bustos et al., 2017: 292), as they did not have a chance to resist the political structures that produce the neoliberal consensus. Thus, the decision-making process became largely depoliticised.

At the same time, this instance of depoliticised environmental decision-making rooted in the lack of recognition of the ideas of opposition to farming intensification is not rooted solely in hegemonic domination. While it is a significant factor (particularly in the unique case of Northern Ireland and its farming context), the emancipatory dimension of environmental decision-making also plays a part. As Butzlaff (2020) suggests, post-democratic turn offers a promise of flexible, efficient engagement leading to change. Research participants certainly sought to make their views recognised and had high expectations around direct engagement, legitimated by the planning system. However, the initial perception of how recognition will be organised did not prove to be true, therefore leading to environmental decision-making being an ambivalent process: holding an emancipatory promise and burdensome at the same time (Butzlaff, 2020).

(Non)participation in environmental decision-making

From my interviews, it was clear that members of the public were formally included in the process of decision-making. Yet, the nature of formal inclusion and public participation in Northern Ireland is problematic because of its safeguarding of the existing power balance and turning into an empty ritual of participation. The latter was aptly summarised by one of the respondents:

‘[when it comes to participation in decision-making], you are given three minutes to speak if you are an objector [at a meeting to make a verbal submission to the council]. Three minutes when you are looking at a huge list of things that potentially could impact – environmental pollution, health, the size, etc. You have to somehow work out what the key points are – you need to know how to sway people. It is an absolute minefield and to be given just three minutes for that’ (NGO002).

The comment above reveals power disequilibrium in the decision-making forums. Yet, Swyngedouw (2009) suggests that justice enters the space of the political under the name of equality. Moreover, a proper democratic space of public participation, according to Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw, (2010), allows expression of diverse opinions under the unconditional presumption of equality. The account below demonstrates that members of the public were not considered to be full members in a social interaction (Fraser, 1997) and their demands were seen as unjustified or irrelevant:

‘We still have a culture that is carried over from the way things used to be – you have a central planning authority that is distant and aloof, they saw the public as a nuisance that had to be kept in their place. Since planning powers transferred to the local authority, that culture has been retained. While the aspiration of the Department for Infrastructure who are still responsible for strategic planning would be that we have a planning system with community involvement as much as possible. So rather than a central authority dictating what the plan should be, councils are devising their own plans with community involvement. That is the aspiration but the culture of treating the public as if they were a nuisance persists. They pay lip service to democratisation’ (NGO003).

The above can be interpreted as an illustration of internal exclusion (Young, 1990), whereby the claims made by the public are not treated with equal respect and are not taken seriously. Perceiving members of the public as a nuisance also serves to legitimise a belief that situated knowledges lack validity, which perpetuates the cycle of limited recognition resulting in limited participation. Internal exclusion is also visible in different treatments of public and expert opinions:

‘The only letters they were paid any attention to were the letters that came from expert engineers. They paid attention to that because it came from experts. Another one was from an MBA in planning because they saw a specialist planner. This whole idea that local people will be listened to – nobody paid any attention at all’ (COM006).

The quote above also suggests the importance of an appeal to experts to legitimise the decisions made. Masked in technical jargon, the decisions around new farms can be framed in the terms favourable to those benefitting from them:

‘[They] do not read environmental impact assessments, the applicant puts something in and they go – great, we have got it. They accept it because those people have ‘PhD’ or ‘expert’ next to their name’ (COM002).

Although some of the interviewed community members acquired impressive levels of technical and legal expertise related to planning around farm applications, they, as Hunold and Young (1998) articulate it, were disadvantaged at the outset:

‘What we found was that the applicant was very economical with the truth. We started to dissect the planning application and saying that the figures were not right. And nobody really was listening to us, nor wanted to listen to us’ (COM008).

The disadvantage mentioned above is related to power disequilibrium between members of the public and the farming industry. The issue of power disequilibrium was reflected in the interviews: ‘They have big money, they can afford specialists’ (COM006). The existing economic structures underpinned by inequality deprive local residents of the resources needed for full participation:

‘We did what we could to prevent it but there is a lot of money behind it and a lot of paid-for expertise that helped them to deal with objections that might have risen. People opposing it are local people who did not have resources and were dependent on friendly advice from universities and other parties’ (COU001).

Furthermore, another element of just participation is making sure that public ideas matter and have influence over the result of environmental decisions. Limited influence where public input is not taken into consideration in the decision-making and does not have a genuine impact on the outcome is a marker of procedural injustice. The comment below evidences such limited influence:

‘We had a meeting with a head planner, and he encouraged us to write to the planners and let our views be known because they were interested in listening to the views and expertise and local knowledge that [we] would have. But it was all ignored! The letters that I wrote – I put information about different mistakes, mistakes in the drainage, different aspects of it, nobody paid any attention’ (COM006).

The imbalance of power resurfaces again; participation equals power and participation without power redistribution is futile. The comment above displays the sentiment of disempowerment of the public, as expressed in another comment: ‘The general public is getting frustrated, they put in a complaint and nothing happens’ (COM005). While members of the public could have access to decision-making forums, simply having access did not mean that their contribution was valued. A skewed balance of power allowed the decision-makers to acknowledge community participation, but without the community benefitting from that participation. The latter is emblematic of the exercise of hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, whereby democratic decision-making becomes a façade of economic power (Swyngedouw, 2011). Additionally, this case of non-participation once again resonates with Blühdorn and Butzlaff’s (2020) conclusion about the contradiction between rising democratic expectations and a growing scepticism about democracy as a tool to provide justice. While the community members participated with an intention of change-making, the actual experience of participation, characterised by a status-quo preserving, alternatives-restricting nature, very quickly led to frustration.

Conclusion

In this article I examined how a democratic deficit (Swyngedouw, 2000) is growing despite celebration of individual and community political empowerment through participation in environmental decision-making. Looking at environmental decision-making around new industrial pig farms, I reflected on the challenges around recognitional and procedural justice in rural Northern Ireland and applied the lens of post-political to explain them.

Once the right to determine the future of one’s environment is invoked, it ruptures the fabric of the dominant ideological consensus. The ideology of the free-market economy dominates institutional structures of planning and shapes the path taken by decision-makers, leading to non-recognition of the environmental and social concerns related to farming intensification. The structure of decision-making forums is such that it obscures public concerns beyond the economic rationale and thus becomes a form of legitimation of the dominant consensus. The problematic nature of consensus is that under it a questioning of the existing order becomes nearly impossible. The community that questions the fundamental idea of what they are being consulted upon (in my case, construction of intensive farms in the area) ‘find themselves excluded from the post-democratic apparatus of consensual governance’ (Haughton et al., 2016: 477).

I also showed that participation in environmental decision-making was reduced to an empty ritual, where formal inclusion did not translate into a genuine impact on the decision-making outcome. Non-recognition, thus, constructed barriers for meaningful participation – the views of opposition to farming intensification not recognised within the reigning political economic consensus found little influence in the participatory arena.

Instruments of participation thus become a means of serving the operations of capitalism, stifling disputes around the neoliberal growth agenda, and consequently leading to the elimination of the political under neoliberal capitalism (Mouffe, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2007; Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014). Disagreements can exist, but decision-making forums operate ‘within an overall model of elite consensus and agreement, subordinated to a managerial-technocratic regime’ (Swyngedouw, 2009: 610). Demands and concerns related to the sphere of meat production and inequalities through which environmental harms from it are produced and reproduced are positioned outside the arena of disagreement. It creates a situation in which, while power of individuals and communities is widely circulated, relationships in decision-making are still marked by injustice (Young, 1990) and hegemony of neoliberal capitalism ‘based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity’ (Gramsci, 1971: 46) is not challenged.

The post-political condition thus presents a challenging terrain for reversing the present order of unsustainability (Blühdorn, 2007). As the dominant neoliberal capitalist hegemony manifests in the policies, practices and the ways of knowing that shape environmental decision-making around new industrial pig farms, it becomes increasingly more difficult to challenge it. Yet, political disagreements and struggles are essential for configuring alternative or different trajectories of socio-environmental change and the construction of new and better futures for human and more-than-human; we need to bring them back.