Cultural Discourses of Public Engagement: Insights for Energy System Transformation

Abstract

Our case study explores the public's roles in energy transition by examining public participation processes and their meanings in Boulder's Energy Future. Drawing on Cultural Discourse Analysis (Carbaugh, 2007b) as an analytical framework, we investigate discourses of public participation active in city council meetings as resources for generating insights about how to design more meaningful engagement practices. Our analysis traces meanings attached to attending and speaking at city council meetings, emailing council, outreach and education efforts, task force service, and voting. These practices and meanings provide insights for designing future public participation as well as theorizing public participation in energy governance.

Editorial: A Research Agenda for Energy Democracy

“…While energy democracy movements are increasingly asserting their role in energy decision-making, interdisciplinary energy systems scholarship is just beginning to substantively engage with this empirical phenomenon that has important consequences for energy policy, participatory democracy, and public participation in energy decision-making. Indeed, the term and the ideal behind it are seldom addressed in extant scholarship (Reinig and Sprain, 2016) (Although this is changing as we see more uptake of the concept in scholarship since 2016 when we prepared for the Energy Democracy Symposium and observed a palpable lack of research engagement with the emergent concept). Energy democracy is one research pathway that brings together scholarship in democratic theory, communication, interdisciplinary energy studies, rhetoric of science, and STS research.…”

The Energy Covenant: Energy Dominance and the Rhetoric of the Aggrieved

“…Energy policy in the United States-and all of the practices it has enabled and entailed-has historically depended on the following: the construction of a superior, exceptional American state, undergirded by cheap and reliable energy, and created at the expense of expendable "sacrifice zones" and/or colonized peoples. Scholars of energy studies have studied how American energy extraction and consumption practices impact communities, groups of people, and environments differentially, and how those communities organize to resist (Pezzullo, 2009;Mitchell, 2013;Heffron et al, 2015;Endres et al, 2016;Fuller and McCauley, 2016;Reinig and Sprain, 2016). The industrial era and the booming postwar American economy may have been enabled by access to "cheap and plentiful" forms of energy, but that energy was often produced at the expense of poor communities and communities of color, both in the United States and abroad, through the construction of environmental and social "sacrifice zones" (e.g., Kuletz, 1998;Fox, 1999;O'Rourke and Connolly, 2003;Lerner, 2010;Hecht, 2012).…”