What insights have you gained about air pollution governance from TAF and 6+ Cities research? How would you add to or expand the list of themes/findings developed in very early stages of the project?

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Aalok Khandekar's picture
July 8, 2019

Copied below are preliminary articulations for findings from TAF India that we started developing recently.

  • Development OR Environment: an apparent framing tension, especially since the bulk of our power production comes from coal. This framing is beginning to be challenged, but this is a balancing act: even among activists, there is suspicion of the West telling India that we can’t pollute. But there is also the recognition that emulating the West won’t do either.

 

  • Also points to the need to understand urban-rural linkages across scales. On the one hand, Indian cities have been undergoing dramatic growth, fed in part by rural-urban migrations, given that the countryside is in economic distress. Power plants, however, are often located in rural places, in order to support growing cities. For example. In Chennai also, Deepa’s work documents how peripheral areas have been conceptualized as “industrial sacrifice zones” under modernist planning ideals. While attention to urban spaces is important, we cannot think of them in isolation.

 

  • “Implementation rather than (weak) laws/frameworks is the problem”

 

  • AQ isn’t the most pressing concern--concerns over access to and quality of water, for example, seems to be more important. Methodologically, signals a need for “lateral arrival” to air via water. Climate change as another entrypoint into this discussion. There is recognition about the close relationship between fossil fuel dependency and climate change. AQ isn’t an overt concern, but positively implicated in the discussion. Extreme weather events, such as summer droughts followed by monsoon floods also gets attention. Rural-urban linkages are also implicated, with an emerging discourse around climate change refugees.

 

  • There is also a dissonance here: going by international reportage etc., the tone is generally alarmist, representations of just how bad India’s AQ is have been proliferating. But that doesn’t seem to translate into a significant concern on the ground, or even lead to much mobilization among CSOs (outside of Delhi, maybe).

 

  • Expertise fragmented; public participation superficial, if at all; state institutions dominate decision-making

 

  • Health effects of pollution have been frequently disavowed, have only recently begun to be the focus.

 

  • “Activist” judiciary (Supreme Court, National Green Tribunal) as guarding against ineffective legislators and executives → Speaks to the role of different institutional actors, while some look toward the Supreme Court in the recent past as a champion of the environment, others are critical of this mode of governance since it bypasses elected officials, due process, and generally works against the development of capacity.




  • Data is both abundant and scarce at the same time

(Deepa) A lot of these comments come from Shweta Narayan and maybe Nity Jayaraman, some may be in the interviews, others are just from subsequent conversations. I might have notes. There's no doubt that there's a lot of data, but the experience is nonetheless one of scarcity. Who can read the data? Who can figure out if it's clean/good/useable? Who can verify if it's been collected appropriately? It's like having the numbers in a research paper, but no methodology section. And what sense any of it makes to anyone is another story. So even if there is data, we don't know how good it is & it's not easily readable. Telling that the AQ data in chennai is out there for any driver to see, but it's the goddamned US consulate that publishes an AQ index that actually tells me what it means and what to do with it! Two issues then: data and data quality on the one side, accessibility on the other. Both lead to the "there's no data" frustration.

 

My sense is that this fits with what Prerna was saying Kalapana Balakrishnan & co are saying -- there's a LOT of data, but a need to use it (?). Yeah, ok. But then when your ordinary/non-technical researcher comes to it -- what sense do you make of it? And if you can't (either because the data isn't there or verifiable or clean or readable), then you create your own (what some of these groups are doing) but that's just to get a foot in the legal door, so to speak; that's to make environmental noise and maybe just even ascertain for yourself that there's a problem you've been only just sensing for so long. Actual state/legal recognition of environmental problems and any hope of redressal comes from presenting trusted, recognized state source data. So you're back in an interminable loop. That's half the issue. The other half, I'd add is: what happens when the "intermediaries" and intellectuals who CAN read the data and DO publish on it -- only present at academic conferences and such like? Not speaking to other researchers, for example :D They're either so busy or hiding or being proprietary or all of the above, whatever it is they have to say about this clearly isn't getting to the right places. Expert cultures are their own firewalls.

 

Health data is another story -- I think Rakhal Gaitonde spoke about it a bunch. Here you need longitudinal studies which the IITs or other big institutions have to put their money and might behind, or you just don't get the right numbers and connections. So groups are after the public health--AQ connections, but they can only make these in cursory ways. Which is ok to make some media noise, but not sufficient to drive policy or the next NGT case. And they know it.


The question I wanted to raise in the call the other night, but didn't know how fully: we're used to thinking of AQ as a data-driven problem. But that's a super rationalist approach, and if that's right the right data should be compelling enough to drive significant change. But clearly that hasn't happened. Of course what counts as the "right data" is difficult to determine (experiential data gathered by groups can have a lot of political weight, but little legal value etc.). We're still asking why "compelling" data isn't so compelling really. I do wonder what's up with that. A cultural thing? (we're not a data-driven society in thinking no matter how much we walk the walk?) A political thing? (we'd trust data if it came only from certain sources, no matter what the data actually showed?) An experiential thing? (the only data that really ever drives anything is one that speaks to experience, so it's not just about the data..).

Ali Kenner's picture
July 7, 2019

Again, for me, TAF and 6+Cities is about comparative analysis. Right now I have some themes and questions which I've developed in conversation with Aalok but that's about as far as I've gotten with this. I could say some things about Philadelphia, but I don't think they're particularly insightful or new. Mostly the same old stuff that we know about air pollution governance. The refinery closing is something new to simmer on. I'm very much hoping to share notes and talk about themes and findings collectively at this meeting so that we can walk away with something to publish.

Also, where can I find the early stage themes and findings? Are they archived somewhere?

July 5, 2019

One insight that sticks with me is from a research trip to Houston where we learned about how the mayor of Houston was working directly with federal-level regulators and scientists (at the EPA) in a context where the state "governing" body was not exactly jumping at the chance to prioritize air quality and environmental health in Houston (or the rest of Texas). In my teaching and research I increasingly think about nested systems and cross-scale analysis and design (including a recent submission to Data Science Journal with Lindsay Poirier adapting the multi-scale analysis Kim Fortun has been developing for understanding diverse data cultures). 

Another insight that sticks with me is from a few years ago when some of TAF researchers read a peer-reviewed article produced by chemical industry-funded scientists picking apart research suggesting that tightening ground level ozone standards could save 5X as many lives. I think often about how this article seemed to not just push against scientific content (much produced at the EPA) but the very idea that many smaller bits of research (admittedly each limited and imperfect) can add up to something bigger.