Resistance is in the air: From post-politics to the politics of expertise

Abstract

Knowledge about air pollution is key, both to contest the status quo and to propose a different environmental imaginary as to how urban reality should be. Empirically, this paper focuses on Brussels and its history of air pollution contestation over the last fifty years, in order to trace how knowledge dynamics shape the politics of air. Theoretically, the paper offers a critical reading of the ‘post-political city’ literature that has been omnipresent in urban studies, human geography and political ecology over the last decades, in order to offer a more sophisticated theorization of expertise and knowledge. The paper offers at least three key insights. First, lay as well as public knowledge is of key importance in making air pollution manifest as a matter of concern. Making a perceived problem visible to a wider public in itself can be transformative and can pressure governments to respond, albeit rarely adequately. Second, the use of scientific knowledge by social movements and civil society plays a central role in contesting established priorities and in developing counter strategies, often alternating lay knowledge and more formal scientific knowledge in the process. At the same time, scientific knowledge and other forms of specialized expertise also play an important role in solidifying existing hierarchies of authority. Third, our analysis points to the centrality of the state as an arena for political action and to the importance of a politics of shifting blame and responsibility onto other layers of government or other societal actors.

Keywords

Air pollution postpolitics knowledge politics expertise Brussels

Introduction

On 26 November 2017, the hearing took place of a lawsuit filed by five Brussels residents and the NGO ClientEarth on air pollution issues. The plaintiffs contended that the efforts of Brussels authorities to mitigate pollution were insufficient, and that regional air monitoring was inadequate with regard to providing accurate measurements in places where people are exposed to the highest concentrations. On the same day, a few hundred citizens demonstrated their support for the complainants in front of the tribunal building, holding candles and placards with a clear message to the government: ‘Clean Air Now’. One of the groups leading the demonstration is known as Bruxsel’air and was first established as part of a citizen science project to monitor black carbon in the city’s environment. Following a five-year legal battle, in January 2021 a Brussels court ruled that the Brussels regional government has breached EU law and has failed to correctly monitor and protect its citizens against harmful levels of air pollution. The court case and the citizens’ actions are part of a larger mobilization for cleaner air that was unrolling in Brussels at the time of writing, and are emblematic of an essential feature of air politics and more widely environmental politics, namely the central role played by knowledge and the role of expertise and experts in political contestation and action.

Knowledge–about the quality of air, and the sources of pollution and its uneven effects–is key, both to contest the status quo and to propose a different environmental imaginary as to how urban reality should be. Unavoidably, in this process knowledge itself becomes an object of contestation, with different actors offering different analyses and interpretations of the quality of the collected data, the devices and methods used, and of the underlying explanatory models. In this paper, we explore the dynamic relation between politics and knowledge by looking both at the role of multiple knowledges in (de)politicising air pollution and at how knowledge itself becomes a terrain of political controversy. Our empirical focus is on the Brussels-Capital Region–in particular, on past cases of civic mobilization around the question of better air quality–since this city offers fertile ground to explore how knowledge shapes the politics of air. The recent decades have been characterized by a shift in the sources of urban air pollution from industry to transport, providing a wealth of empirical cases during which multiple forms of knowledge have been mobilized both by the state and by civil society to shed light on the biophysical and ecological–but also social, political and economic–dimensions of air pollution. Along similar lines, for the same period we can observe a certain continuity in terms of the institutional framework, approaches to civic contestation and access to (scientific) knowledge; which means that the processes and dynamics that we scrutinize can be helpful with regard to understanding the present context. Taking a long-term perspective, moreover, allows us to obtain a thorough understanding of the developments of each of the examined cases, some of which lasted for several years.

On a theoretical level, we use this empirical focus to build on, but also critically interrogate, literature on the ‘post-political city’ that has been omnipresent in urban studies, human geography and political ecology over recent decades (MacLeod, 2011; Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014). As we argue in more detail in the next section, post-political literature in these domains of research argues that urban governance has tendentially become depoliticized due to a consensus-driven rejection of conflict and a recourse to expert-driven forms of administration. This critique of expertise and expert knowledge is central to post-political thought, but is rarely investigated in much detail. In putting knowledge and expertise centre stage in our analysis, we complicate the strong assumption in much of the post-political literature that experts contribute to the depoliticization of urban governance; instead, we highlight the contested, experiential and political dynamics of knowledge. We also point to the importance of the institutionalization of knowledge and the role of the state as an arena for political contestation, something which only receives marginal attention or is actively rejected by many working within a post-political framework often characterised by ‘state phobia’ (Hannah, 2016). Our aim with this article is thus not simply to suggest that politics is everywhere, but to question this cursory rejection of institutions and experts in the post-political literature. Instead, we argue, it is precisely within the realm of existing institutions and established fields of expertise that we can identify important moments of politicization.

Our paper is structured as follows. In the next section, we introduce the debate on post-politicization to address head-on ‘the post-political and its discontents’ (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014). In the section ‘Air politics as politics of expertise’ we zoom in on knowledge and expertise, showing the extent to which the politics of air is first and foremost a politics of expertise and necessitates paying substantive attention to the ways in which processes of depoliticization and politicization are mediated through different forms of ‘claim-making’ (Walker, 2012) and multiple forms of knowledge. Then, in the four subsequent sections, we introduce the empirical setting of Brussels and the adopted research strategy, and present the empirical material on three cases and sites of air pollution contestation: a mobilisation against air pollution related to a local industrial plant, one against air pollution connected to a regional waste incinerator and legal action concerning transport-related air pollution. In the final section, we move away from the individual cases and offer a more synthetic analysis, as well as preliminary conclusions concerning the role of knowledge and expertise in processes of post-politicization.

The post-political and its discontents

As Anneleen Kenis and Matthias Lievens (2014: 532) summarize most succinctly, the mainstream discourse on environmental politics has shifted over recent decades; from a focus on a substantive transformation of the social order towards an increasing alignment of environmental concerns with the imperatives of a neoliberal market- and growth-oriented global economy. The resulting paradox is that one can observe an increasing awareness and centrality of environmental concerns in political and media debates–signified by popular labels such as ecological modernization, the green economy and green growth–but at the same time almost no fundamental questioning of the existing social order that causes these environmental problems. In trying (and rhetorically claiming) to reconcile environmental protection and capitalist development, these discourses reduce the challenge of realizing a more sustainable society to a matter of technological innovation, more efficient governance and expert-driven administration (Gonzalez, 2005; Mol and Spaargaren, 2000). Critics of this logic of environmental modernization argue that this tends to operate with a post-political understanding of society, since it rejects conflict as constitutive of the social and instead opts for ‘the instituted terrain of assumedly inclusive participatory stakeholder-based governance configured as market-driven techno-managerial forms of management … whereby politics is reduced to expert management’ (Swyngedouw, 2017: 58).

A cursory reading of these post-political strands of literature might suggest that their authors overemphasize the institutional closure of and the strong push towards depoliticization by contemporary governance regimes, and in doing so, ignore or downplay the impact of various forms of contestation and politicization. We largely agree with these points of criticism, as it is hard to deny that much of the literature on the post-political city at least creates the impression of an ‘all-encompassing post-political condition’ and limited ‘sense of contingency’ (Beveridge and Koch, 2016: 63). A more sympathetic reading and substantive engagement, however, also points to much that is of value and useful for the analysis of the politics of air pollution; and environmental issues more widely. The post-foundational ontology shared by post-political thinkers opens up the field of urban politics by refusing to identify a preferred political agent or place (Davidson and Iveson, 2014). This is particularly important in research into environmental politics, which has traditionally focused on place-based environmental injustices and the overexposure of racialized and impoverished communities to pollution (Walker, 2009). A post-political analysis re-energizes and diversifies research on urban politics through a radically contingent approach, which acknowledges all places as potentially political places and all people as potentially political subjects. Political action, in turn, is about making visible what was previously invisible, in what Jacques Rancière identifies as ‘proper politics’ challenging ‘the police order’ (1999) or what Chantal Mouffe (2005) would describe as the challenge of the hegemonic order by counterhegemonic practices. For Mustafa Dikeç, this entails a disruptive form of politics, which ‘invites a reflexive withdrawal from the accepted givens, normalized repetitive practices and ordering principles of political communities’ (Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017: 52). At the same time, as already mentioned, the active construction of consensus is part and parcel of the governing logic of current post-political regimes, which implies that dissenting voices are always in danger of being marginalized. This marginalization can take place through brute force, but also through the exercise of hierarchical authority by what Rancière refers to as those with ‘titles to govern’ (based on descendancy or wealth, but also ‘legitimate’ expertise) (Moulin-Doos, 2015; Rancière, 2007).

These post-political arguments have enriched our theoretical reasoning and are useful to better grasp what is at stake in the politics of air pollution, but as hinted at in the introduction there are at least two major weaknesses that are in need of further development. A first weakness is that much of the post-political literature adopts a too narrow perspective on expertise, with expertise in urban governance mostly reduced to the management of consensus-driven politics. Erik Swyngedouw’s work in particular has been very influential in the fields of urban studies and political ecology, and has strongly shaped this narrow reading of urban expertise, in which expertise is seen as mere ‘expert management’ within given institutional configurations (Swyngedouw, 2017: 58), or as a matter of depoliticized ‘expert social administration’ (Swyngedouw, 2007: 66). Swyngedouw’s main philosophical source of inspiration, Jacques Rancière, is more subtle. As mentioned in the previous section, Rancière is critical of the exercise of hierarchical authority by those with ‘titles to govern’, which includes those with expertise considered legitimate because of their functional position or educational title. Although still a somewhat reductionist view of expertise, at least Rancière recognizes the possibility of opening up expert-led government through the ‘granting of equality’ to other actors (Davidson and Iveson, 2014: 547, 548; Rancière, 2007). More recent work in this area has started offering more substantial and empirically grounded analyses of expertise and our paper contributes to this body of literature. In their paper on behavioural public policy in the Netherlands, for example, Mark Whitehead and colleagues (2020) offer a critical engagement with the post-political literature in order to point to the ‘vagaries of expertise’ in which the transfer of scientific knowledge into policy settings is much messier and more contested than the post-political concern with consensus suggests. And Cristina Temenos (2017), in a paper on drug policy activism, rightly argues that ‘fundamental political debates over rights and freedoms do in fact remain in public discourse’ (2017: 585) and are not simply dominated or even controlled by administrative experts. Empirically, she points to the centrality of ‘everyday proper politics’ and the multiple advocacy networks, scientific experts, public health services and other actors that collectively (though not without conflicts and diverging interests) shape harm reduction strategies.

A second weakness is intimately connected to the observation by Whitehead et al. (2020), Temenos (2017) and others that the institutionalization of knowledge and expertise does not quasi-unavoidably lead to depoliticization, but is instead a highly contested, contingent and political process. Taking seriously the post-foundational ontology underpinning post-political thought by refusing to a priori identify a preferred political agent or place logically implies that in principle any space can become a site for politicization, but despite this much of the post-political literature has a tendency to prioritize particular sites (at its most clichéd: squares and the streets – see Davidson and Iveson (2014) for a useful deconstruction). This is criticized by Clive Barnett as a flawed ‘pattern of spatialized concept formation’ (2017: 10) that restricts transformative political action to a limited set of places and events and that can only see instituted politics ‘as part of a fixed, instituted order, a status quo, all merely aspects of a world of consensus’ (2017: 85). Recent work has taken on board this criticism and has started investigating the ‘diverse spatial practices of politicisation’ (Featherstone, 2019: 4) and the multiple political practices occurring ‘in-between’ everyday life and instituted modes of social interaction (also see Legacy et al., 2019). Broadening the socio-spatial orientation of post-political reasoning is an important first step, but in our view needs to be connected to a more substantive theorization and investigation of the state. This is most certainly less developed; Matthew Hannah even points to an ‘undifferentiated state phobia’ (2016: 490) in the post-political literature. Most importantly in our view, it misrecognizes that the fundamental relationality of all social processes also applies to the state. This is a lesson learnt and much better developed by (Marxist) state theory in its emphasis on the structural or strategic selectivity of the state (the state in service of class domination or capital accumulation), but also the state as internally fractured and divided, with its functioning strongly dependent on the balance of forces within and outside the state (Jessop, 2007; Poulantzas, 1980). A recent paper by David Etherington and Martin Jones starts addressing these weaknesses and points to the continued role of the state as a ‘productive arena for performing politics’ (2018: 52) and perhaps even as a privileged site for investigating the dialectic of politicization and depoliticization. We follow this argumentation and understand our paper on air pollution and the politics of expertise as a contribution to this emergent debate.

Air politics as politics of expertise

While air pollution is increasingly recognized as a major environmental health problem in cities throughout the world, it is often presented as a ‘technical’ issue that can be solved through technological intervention and more efficient types of governance, instead of through a more radical rethinking of the organization of the economy. This is what we discussed in the previous section as ecological modernization discourse and as typical of a post-political understanding of society. At the same time, the central role of knowledge is widely recognized in the context of different environmental matters (Ascher et al., 2010; Juntti et al., 2009). When both the human condition, with its ideals, values and conflicts, and the chemistry and physics of the natural world are at stake, the call for evidence-based decision making seems to be unanimous among governments, scientists and civil society. Similarly, knowledge has played a key role for advocacy movements, both to prove the existence of environmental contamination and its harmful effects, and to reveal and make these effects manifest (Boudia and Jas, 2014). Both in policy and advocacy contexts, knowledge is an important element while framing a problem; it helps in clarifying goals and objectives, and evaluating progress, and it influences actors’ perceptions of the issues at stake and the choices among alternative solutions (Ascher et al., 2010; Dotti, 2018; Radaelli, 1995; Weingart, 1999). The prominent role of knowledge in the politics of air, however, is somewhat unique. As opposed to other urban metabolic flows, clean air does not need production or distribution infrastructures, such as pipelines and aqueducts, electric grids, or road and rail networks (although of course, dirty air is mostly linked to physical infrastructures such as roads, factories and industrial agriculture): governing the air is about devising a system of sensors, models and maps that measure the presence of specific contaminants in the atmosphere. In this context, the role of specialized expertise in interpreting knowledge about air pollution takes centre stage. More specifically, the fact that air politics is so much about knowledge implies in turn that knowledge about air itself becomes political: ‘what we know about air pollution, and the ways in which atmosphere are governed, are not inevitable parts of closed systems of air science and government, but are legitimate objects of political contestation and potential transformation’ (Whitehead, 2009: 4).

In a context where the political and contested nature of knowledge is recognized, framing knowledge as a form of claim-making can be particularly helpful (Walker, 2012: especially Ch. 3). Looking at claim-making puts emphasis on agency – that is, who makes a particular claim – and conflict, where alternative claims can be in competition with one another and where the definition of good or bad knowledge reflects both power imbalances and an argument’s strength. Any particular claim for knowledge, in fact, is a consequence of many implicit or explicit choices regarding what to scrutinize, what depth and scale to use, what methodology and epistemology to adopt, and what technology to use and trust. All these choices imply a virtually endless multiplication of different forms of knowledge that can be mobilized, with different outcomes. In his research on environmental justice, Walker (2012) proposes a framework for claim-making that can be useful in exploring the broader questions of air politics. In addition to claims for evidence (descriptive claims about how the reality is), the framework also includes normative and explanatory claims; that is, claims about how things should be and about why they are the way they are. In relation to air pollution, they refer for instance to what is an acceptable level of pollutant concentration or to everyone’s right to health, and to issues of direct and indirect causation and responsibility. While prima facie knowledge seems to be associated with the description, and politics with the norm, this juxtaposition hides a much more nuanced reality. Various forms of knowledge pervade the different types of claim and are mobilized in defining normative ideals or processual explanations, similar to the way in which values and politics play a role in how knowledge is generated and used. Whereas post-political theorists by and large tend to see the knowledge of those with ‘titles to govern’ in a framework of hierarchical authority and in the service of consensus-driven governance, this unravelling leads us to adopt a much more multi-layered, processual and multi-agent view of knowledge and expertise. In our view, this stays closer to the original post-foundational concerns in post-political literature, in that we recognize that knowledge is socio-spatially and institutionally distributed; hence the politicization of knowledge about air pollution can in principle emerge anywhere and with anyone.

As different scholars have highlighted, professional and in particular scientific knowledge–legitimized by credentials, and using recognized analytical approaches and conventional data collection protocols (Ascher et al., 2010)–has indeed been a privileged input in environmental policy for a long time, and expectations towards it have only increased. It is presented as universally valid and ‘objective’ (quite literally, as evidence that stems directly from the object under scrutiny), based on factual argument and evaluated in virtue of the rigour of the methodology. At the same time, however, such knowledge is no longer seen as a universal truth, and its role, procedures and meanings increasingly need to be negotiated (Clark et al., 2006; Pellizzoni, 2010). Also, what is labelled as professional and scientific knowledge is not a monolith: different forms of knowledge exist side by side, with different levels of recognition. Traditionally, professional and research knowledge has been opposed to lay knowledge, with the latter referring to the type of knowledge non-professionals can have about a given issue. This ranges from concrete and barely-codifiable know-how and skills, to mental models and schemas through which people perceive and make sense of their world. While being criticized for being high in emotional content and controversial in nature, it is valuable inasmuch as it is implanted in a specific milieu and can address context-related specificities. This is why it is also referred to as ‘local knowledge’ (Juntti et al., 2009). Research into the public understanding of air pollution, for instance, illustrates how citizens develop their own ideas and meanings concerning pollution, and make claims in relation to the responsibility for and vulnerability to it. In this way, local knowledge and embodied perceptions (for example, smell, sight and intuitive experiences) can complement but also contest professional and scientific knowledge (Bickerstaff and Walker, 2003). Not all forms of knowledge are likely to be given the same credit, and the boundaries that are created between them are often instrumental to legitimize how one is (or should be) preferred over the other (Gieryn, 1983). The likelihood of different knowledge to be given credit and to be positioned in a virtual hierarchy–and here the resonance with post-political debates on expertise is obvious–is directly related to questions of power and recognition; that is, the extent to which a given piece of knowledge reflects and reproduces existing power structures. In other words, the distinction and the implicit or explicit ranking among forms of knowledge is an artificial exercise, inasmuch as a certain representation of reality, through processes of framing and evidence collection, becomes authoritative only to the extent it is adopted by powerful actors (Juntti et al., 2009).

Summarizing this debate and confrontation of literature on the post-political city with research on knowledge and expertise, we can provide a ‘minimal definition’ of politicization and depoliticization in relation to knowledge and expertise. If we accept that depoliticization involves: i) the active construction of consensus and the marginalization of dissenting voices; and ii) the reduction of societal challenges to ‘technical’ issues that can be solved through technological interventions without necessitating a rethinking of the organization of the economy (two core claims shared across the different post-political strands of literature); then iii) for purposes of operationalization we need to understand better to what extent and in what ways knowledge and expertise contribute to or contest (i) and (ii). These are largely questions that demand case-specific and empirical investigation, but theoretically this raises at least two issues. A first issue relates to the post-foundationalist conviction that all places and people are potentially political, which can easily lead to the conclusion that everything is political. To avoid such a broad definition, authors such as Mouffe emphasize that political action is not merely about questioning consensus, but that this action should actually challenge the hegemonic order. Rancière sets the bar even higher by arguing that these political contestations should lead to the granting of equality ‘to those who have no part’ in the current system or what Rancière calls ‘police order’. Politics should pre-suppose the equality of everyone and, in doing so, disrupt and ultimately transform the existing order. As Mark Davidson and Kurt Iveson (2018) argue within the context of urban studies, ‘such confrontations depend upon the construction of a stage where actors can establish themselves as parties to a disagreement’ (2018: 34). As we will see below in our empirical sections, air pollution politics thrives on the construction of such ‘stages’ and we can observe both politicizing and depoliticizing tendencies. Politicizing, because actors construct a stage on which they stake out their claims and pre-suppose their equality to all other actors. And depoliticizing, because these stages are shot through with hierarchizing relations with some actors (often state actors) not recognizing this equality, for example through the rejection of specific types of knowledge and expertise.

A second issue concerns the operationalization of the different dimensions of the political and how each dimension relates to knowledge, expertise and ‘institutional’ settings. We rely here on the dimensions as introduced by De Moor et al. (2019) to structure our argument: critical political ideas; agonistic theories of social change; and contentious action to challenge power. The first dimension refers to the extent to which social actors propose ideas that challenge the existing order. As we will see, different kinds of expertise plays a key role in the production and legitimization of these critical political ideas. The second dimension can be evaluated in relation to whether actors pursue a consensual or more conflictual/agonistic approach. Whereas De Moor et al. (2019) tend to present this as an either/or choice, our research provides evidence of and/and strategies: social actors regularly combine consensual and conflictual approaches, and the development of expertise sometimes crosses the boundaries between supposedly opposing groups. The third dimension considers the role of contentious action in realizing political aims. De Moor et al. (2019) emphasize the importance of ‘extra-institutional’ political action and see limited opportunities for politics to emerge within ‘institutional or conventional political arenas’ (2019: 5). In our view, such an interpretation ignores the relationality of the state and in particular the relations between ‘extra-parliamentary’ action and instituted politics. Again, as we will see in our empirical sections, expertise and experts play a key role in mediating this relation.

Context, data and methods

In our analysis of the relation between air pollution knowledge and politics we investigate the case of Brussels in the last fifty years. The city (i.e. the Brussels-Capital Region, BCR) occupies an area of about 160 km² at the core of a larger metropolitan area. It encompasses 19 municipalities with a population of just above 1.2 million (see da Schio et al., 2017 for more contextual information on air pollution in Brussels). In western Europe and North America, the period under scrutiny is characterized by a new and relatively consistent way to deal with environmental and air pollution inasmuch as research, institutional development and civic mobilization are concerned. From the late 1960s onwards, ecological concerns started to become more prominent in broader social and political contestation, and governments responded with the creation of dedicated ministries and agencies (Boudia and Jas, 2014). In the subsequent decades, international organizations such as the WHO, the OECD and the EU played a key role in spurring on technological and policy development: by developing and harmonising measuring methods and health protection values in the 1970s and 1980s, and by informing the public and making the limit values legally binding in the 1990s and 2000s. In the same period, a change in the nature of air pollution also took place: together with a general reduction of the absolute levels of monitored pollutants, there was a shift in the kind of contaminants (e.g. from sulphur to particulate) and in the emission sources (e.g. from industries to transport).

The case of Brussels fits within this broader context. Beginning with the installation of the ‘sulphur and smoke network’ in 1968 and then the first automatic monitoring system in 1977, the national and regional networks for air quality monitoring have been developed to their current status, expanding the range of pollutants under scrutiny and adopting newly available technologies (see Brasseur, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c). From an institutional perspective, air pollution monitoring was historically led by entities within the federal Ministry of Health. Following the establishment of the regional institutions in 1989 and the devolution of environmental matters to regions, air became a regional competence in 1994, managed by the Brussels Environmental Protection Agency (Bruxelles Environnement – Leefmilieu Brussel). A suite of policy interventions has subsequently been put in place by the regional government, mainly focusing on raising alertness and awareness (for example, the Transparent Air phone service, the Pollumetre and the Pollution Peak Emergency plan). In terms of citizens’ mobilization, the two main environmental NGOs, Inter-Environnement Bruxelles (IEB) and Brusselse Raad voor het Leefmilieu (BRAL), were also established in the 1970s and remain active to date on different urban and environmental issues.

Our research is mainly based on the analysis of material from the archive of IEB. The archive houses more than 27,000 documents collected by the NGO since its establishment in 1974, including daily press reviews, articles from newspapers and specialized magazines, reports and books. We focus on the period ranging from the establishment of the archive in 1974, to 2016, the year in which the last available version of the State of the Environment report was published (Bruxelles Environnement, 2016a) and the Regional Plan for Air, Climate and Energy was adopted, which provides the current regional priorities regarding air quality (Bruxelles Environnement, 2016b). In the first instance, we selected all documents archived under the label ‘air pollution’, focusing on cases of public policy and of civic mobilization at the scale of the Brussels-Capital Region or smaller. This line of enquiry was potentially biased by the IEB personnel’s choices of how to select and label the relevant press documents. However, this strategy also allowed us to look at the issue from the perspective of the people who were part of the debate at the time it took place, thereby correcting another–potentially more problematic–source of bias: looking at the history of air from today’s perspective and risking focusing on issues and frames only relevant to the contemporary observer.

The search allowed us to obtain a thorough understanding of the themes, processes and events related to air pollution and contestation. It also allowed us to identify several cases of civic mobilization around the topic of clean air, widely and persistently covered by the press at the time. We then selected three cases that we considered particularly illustrative of the interaction between air pollution knowledge and politics, namely a mobilization against the nuisance from a factory, one concerning a regional waste incinerator and third, a court-case against the government for traffic-related air pollution. Our aim was not strictly to compare, but to use the cases both as substantive empirical cases in their own right and as theoretical illustrations of different dynamics of (de)politicization and the role of expertise in the domain of air pollution. Moving beyond the IEB archive, we conducted further research on these three cases by reviewing other documents referred to in the press (such as policy documents, transcripts of the regional parliaments’ sessions, legislation, etc.) and documentation from the archives conserved by the different actors directly involved in the three cases. This search allowed us to draft a detailed reconstruction of the events, including extensive information about the forms and qualities of expertise mobilised by the different actors and about the strategies used in the controversy. On the basis of this description, we analysed the trajectories of the three cases through the lens of the theoretical framework discussed in the previous sections.

Industrial pollution, residents and experiential knowledge

The first case deals with urban functional mix, focusing on residents’ mobilisation at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s against air pollution nuisances allegedly produced by the plant of the printing company Illochroma. The quarrel is emblematic of an issue that today has almost disappeared, but which was particularly relevant in this period, namely a conflict between environmental, residential and industrial priorities. A dossier published at the time by IEB indicated that printing factories, together with metal processing, dry cleaning and car workshops were the main culprits (IEB Archive [hereafter Arch IEB]: 1989.09.01 IEB dossier). The place of contestation is the Bourdon neighbourhood, in the southern fringes of Brussels, and described in the press as a calm, almost bucolic urban space (Arch IEB: 1990.04.11 DH). Between the 1960s and the 1990s the neighbourhood went through important transformations, from a semi-urban area to an urban residential area, with higher population density and a more extended built up area. In the same period, the artisanal workshop set up in 1964 became a fully-fledged industrial plant, larger and noisier, employing 400–450 people over day and night shifts (Arch IEB: 1990.04.11 DH; 1990.05.11 LLB).

The first frictions between the company and the residents occurred in the mid-1970s, with a petition submitted in 1977 by the residents (Arch IEB: 1990.04.11 DH). It was not until a decade later, however, that the issue entered more broadly into the public debate. In 1988, the IEB magazine first reported about the complaints of the residents, by then associated in the BREG neighbourhood committee (Arch IEB: 1988.08.01 QRT). A year later, the issue was picked up by the national press, reporting on a session of the Uccle municipal council debating on the quarrel (Arch IEB: 1989.04.29 LS). The sources of nuisance are clearly illustrated: ‘Then there is the smell. Not yet sickening, but frankly unpleasant’. In this first phase, pollution was detected through the residents’ senses and made manifest by their complaints. The talk was of smell: repulsive odour or malodorous emanations. The language used in the descriptive claims alludes immediately to the normative ones: air pollution was an issue for the residents’ comfort, which the law protects through the provision of an operating permit.

In 1990, the commune officially declared itself non-competent, and the regional government referred the issue to the environmental protection agency, to carry out noise and odour analyses. The results were clear: while both the noise and air pollution represented a real nuisance, the results of the analysis indicated it as non-dangerous and anyway below the legal limits, making the complaint unfounded (Arch IEB: 1990.04.11 DH; 1990.05.11 LLB). Unhappy to see the administration taking decisions ‘under the diktats of a decibel meter’, the BREG decided to take the company to court (Arch IEB: 1990.04.11 DH). Illochroma defended itself and claimed to have made major investments to reduce traffic, noise and smell, even without a clear obligation to do so (Arch IEB: 1990.05.02 LS). The narrative of mismatching economic and environmental priorities surfaces in the language used by the different actors, with the company threatening to leave (Arch IEB: 1990.05.02 LS; 1990.05.11 LLB).

The quarrel culminated in mid-May 1990, with a Company Open Day and a residents' march, just few days before the issue was heard by the Justice of the Peace court (Arch IEB: 1990.05.11 LLB). In front of the judge, the company explained that two studies had been commissioned to assess the nuisances and the possible solutions (Arch IEB: 1990.05.21 DH; 1990.07.23 LS). As a result, the parties were invited to carry on a dialogue and try to reach an agreement (Arch IEB: 1990.06.01 VH and 1990.05.21 DH). In July, the residents were invited to express themselves at a public inquiry, carried out in the context of extending the company’s operating permit (Arch IEB: 1990.07.03 LS). During the summer, it also seems that the air pollution problem was solved through the installation of a filter, albeit generating additional noise (Arch IEB: 1990.07.23 LS).

At the end of the year, the quarrel took a different turn. Illochroma threatened to close the plant and merge it with its other facilities in the eastern periphery of Belgium (‘We want to stay, but [the government] must make it possible to do so’. Arch IEB: 1990.12.13 LS). In December, Illochroma’s CEO announced that the company would transfer part of its production, laying off some 100–130 employees in Uccle. The CEO stated that this was part of a restructuring plan, and independent from the quarrel with the neighbours (Arch IEB: 1991.01.08 LLB). BREG and IEB reacted by denouncing the company’s blackmail and urged the regional government to initiate a coherent approach to economic development (Arch IEB: 1990.12.17 CP; 1990.12.21 LS; 1991.01.08 LLB). The following year, the government stepped in, proposing to partially finance a ‘sufficiently convincing’ study into the environmental impact of the company and to contribute to addressing the problems highlighted in the report (Arch IEB: 1991.02.23 LLB). Following the government intervention, pollution seem to have been reduced (Arch IEB: 1992.04.22 LS). The mobilization also slowly came to an end and there are no further press reports on the issue.

This first case already shows the ‘messiness’ of (de)politicization. The residents’ mobilization can be understood in politicizing terms as the construction of a stage where they established themselves as parties to a disagreement with the company. The use of lay, experiential knowledge was key in this respect, whereas scientific expertise, i.e. the results of the noise and odour analyses carried out by the regional environmental protection agency, had a depoliticizing effect in the sense that it defined the perceived problem as non-existent. Nevertheless, the residents’ embodied experience of pollution, backed by their pressure on the streets and through the public inquiry, was recognized as legitimate grounds for the company to make technical investments that (at least partially) solved the problem. Local and regional governments had an ambivalent role throughout this conflict: they recognized the legitimacy of the claims and expertise of the residents and acted as mediator between residents and the company, but at the same time their consensus-seeking approach did not fundamentally question the existing order. And with the partial closure of the company branch in Uccle, these local concerns were soon overshadowed and marginalized by broader considerations of economic restructuring.

Waste management and multiscalar politics

The second case study concerns the regional waste incinerator, built in 1984 in Neder-over-Heembeek (NOH). The neighbourhood is located in the industrial areas in the north of Brussels, close to the border with Flanders, in an area historically characterized by different sorts of pollution and environmental degradation problems, including those due to a former industrial site used for illegal waste dumping, a propane and butane filling centre, and a coking plant. The contention about the incinerator began in 1989, when the press mentioned the possibility of expanding the plant to deal with increasing waste volumes and with the expected saturation of the incinerator (Arch IEB: 1989.02.08 DH). While the government seemed to be favourable, the opposition advocated more eco-friendly waste management practices, and in any case opposed the expansion of the incinerator (Arch IEB: 1989.05.02 LS; 1989.05.02.LS). In 1990, the press also reported a mobilization of the residents, complaining about the blackening and corrosive dust dispersed by the incinerator on their homes, and blaming the region for treating their neighbourhood as the ‘regional trash bin’ (Arch IEB: 1990.02.15 DH; 1990.06.01 VH). If anything, this case shows the continuing importance of the state as an arena for the political (Etherington and Jones, 2018) and how contentious forms of action emerge ‘in-between’ defined institutional settings (party politics) and civic engagement.

From early on, the contention took place at two levels: at the local level, with residents complaining about the nuisance they experienced; and at the level of the regional government, in the form of a dispute between parties about the broader pros and cons of the incinerator and other waste management approaches. Similar to the case of Illochroma, the initial complaints were based on the residents’ sensory perceptions of a combination of different forms of nuisance (what they saw in the air and on their homes). An issue of scale was also at stake: while pollution was only visible locally, the residents claimed that it was dispersed well beyond the NOH neighbourhood. The different actors also made normative claims about the future of the incinerator. At the local level, residents mobilized justice arguments, demanding a fairer distribution of regional sources of nuisance, and the implementation of compensation schemes, in addition to a technological fix. At the regional level, the government defended the incinerator for reasons of effectiveness and economic viability, while the opposition (the greens) mobilized environmental arguments for minimizing pollution from the incinerator and abandoning its expansion.

In 1991, the environmental NGO Greenpeace decided to take the NOH incinerators as an emblematic case within its international campaign against waste incineration (Arch IEB: 1991.10.19 LS). This definitely contributed to scaling up the conflict and to changing the balance of power, as the NGO had the means to play at the same level as governmental institutions; specifically the finances to pay for scientific studies, the ability to attract wide media attention and the capacity to engage in a broad debate on the incinerator beyond neighbourhood problems. Between 1990 and 1991, the NGO published different reports, prepared internally or by research institutions, making new powerful claims supported by ‘hard’ knowledge on matters for which official data is barely available (Arch IEB: 1991.06.11 Tijd; 1991.10.19 LL; 1991.10.19 LLB. 1991.10.19 LS). In these reports, the issue was given a regional scale (vs local), an environmental health frame (vs environmental justice) and a clear normative outcome: the progressive shutdown of the plant (vs compensation and the fair distribution of sources of nuisance).

The government immediately responded by defending the ‘true' performance of the incinerator and questioning the validity of the studies. The press reports detailed the uncertainties concerning the actual environmental impact of incinerators, with environmental organizations claiming that noxious releases could not be completely eliminated and industries arguing the opposite (‘backed with researchers’ reports’, Arch IEB: 1991.10.04 LS). The regional environmental protection agency also produced two counter-reports (‘critical analyses’), albeit after a certain delay needed to carry out the examinations. Through these counter-reports, the quarrel took the form of a scientific dispute, centred on different interpretations and ‘uses’ of the existing uncertainties, but the debate had already left the laboratories. Whereas the post-political literature tends to understand legitimized modes of expertise as primarily contributing to consensus-driven politics, this example shows that scientific knowledge can fail to contribute to creating the consensus its use was intended for; to the contrary, both the inherent uncertainties in scientific claims and the strategic-instrumental inclusion of scientific knowledge in political action (of governments as well as NGOs and citizen groups) led in this case to an ongoing discussion and further politicization of knowledge about air pollution. The contestation reached one of its high points in May 1992, when Greenpeace activists, blaming the region for ignoring citizens’ concerns, climbed the feeding cranes of the incinerator de facto blocking the plant’s operation. While bitterly criticized by the government, the spectacular action garnered wide press coverage and contributed to keeping the issue high on the agenda.

The years 1995 and 1996 represent a new and different phase in the quarrel over the NOH incinerator, centred on the discussion over the installation of smoke filters and the establishment of a public private partnership, signed amidst polemics in December 1996 (Arch IEB: 1996.12.20 LS; 1996.12.21–22 LS; 1997.01.23 LS). The press reported the scientific dispute over incinerators, while admitting that the debate had taken an irrational turn (‘In both fields, they exhibit experts’ reports, they multiply the comparisons with the experiences of other countries, they throw environmental models in each other’s face … but remaining aware that the debate has become “political” and therefore somewhat irrational’. Arch IEB: 1995.10.20 LS). Rather than being irrational, however, the debate now concerned a different rationality: how much the various options would come to cost tax payers. The promise of a technological fix seemed to make the environmental concerns disappear and the financial arguments dominate. During the course of 1998, filtering systems were installed and significantly reduced the emissions from the incinerator, providing a technological fix to the contention, which faded out (Arch IEB: 1998.02.21 LS; 1998.03.10 LS). In 2002, after persistent requests from civil society, a permanent monitoring system was also installed in the proximity of the incinerator (Arch IEB: 2000.10.19 CP; 2002.04.25 BEM). The technological fix can be understood as a classic depoliticizing intervention, aimed at marginalizing more radical voices that proposed a shutting down of the incinerator. That said, core goals put forward by residents, Greenpeace and the political opposition in the earlier ‘politicizing’ phases were achieved: reduction of pollution and nuisance, and no further expansion of the incinerator.

Transport, hierarchical authority and the legality of pollution

Our third case revolves around a legal action initiated in June 2000 by the two community-based organizations IEB and BRAL, already mentioned above. In particular, they blamed the government for shirking their responsibilities to combat summer ozone peaks (Arch IEB: 2000.06.02 CP). The action can be seen against the backdrop of the long-standing contestation against transport-related air pollution, and more in general against the dominance of the private car in the city’s road network and public space. Focusing on this case requires a shift in scale and perspective, inasmuch as the object of the contestation was not immediately the source of the emissions, mobile and more diffused throughout the region, but government institutions, allegedly responsible for limiting pollutants concentration. From a post-political perspective, this case is interesting as it shows how contentious action–taking the government to court–can be intimately intertwined with a more consensual approach concerning the framing of the problem. Whereas scientific expertise was not contested by any of the parties involved, legal expertise in this case had both politicizing and depoliticizing effects.

In the complaint, IEB and BRAL made the point that ozone pollution and its impact on human health are issues that have long been recognized, as is the main source: road transport. Reference was made to a recent statement by the ministry of environment that ‘certain road routes are carcinogenic’ (Arch IEB: 1990.09.23 LS), as well as to local and international institutional publications. They also made factual claims, based on the measurements of the environmental protection agency, about how well-established health protection thresholds were regularly being exceeded in Brussels, that road transport was the main source, and that this needed to be reduced drastically (BRAL Archive [hereafter Arch BRAL]: 2000.06. OZ). According to the plaintiffs, the action undertaken by the government was limited, and therefore went against its constitutional duty to protect citizens’ wellbeing as a bonus pater familias. The lawsuit was grounded on consolidated knowledge about the quality of the air, as well as the sources and the impact of pollution. The descriptive arguments mobilized in the compliant were uncontroversial and part of the knowledge about air pollution that was shared by the parties to the dispute. Thus, in their response, the defendants did not in any way contest the fact that air pollution was a problem in Brussels, nor did they explicitly contest the claim that the government is responsible for existing pollution levels. Instead, they claimed that no law had been broken and that the lawsuit anyway did not meet the necessary requirements to be heard by the judge. In addition, they claimed that what the plaintiffs were asking the judge to rule on, went well beyond the remit of the judicial power.

Politicians at different levels reacted to the initiative soon after. While expressing scepticism about the form the complaint took, the regional environment ministry expressed solidarity with the plaintiffs and criticized the federal ozone plan (Arch IEB: 2000.06.02 DM; 2000.06.03 LS). The federal minister for transport (co-author of the ozone plan) was mentioned to ‘understand and share’ the CBOs’ initiative, while criticising the blame-shifting behaviour of the regional government (Arch IEB: 2000.06.03 LS). At a plenary session of the regional parliament a few days after the first hearing, many MPs intervened on the question of air pollution, also directly referring to the court case. While the opposition largely showed support for the two CBOs, the majority party blamed the federal government for not playing its role (Arch IEB: 2000.06.17 LS; 2000.07.12 BEM). During the parliamentary debate, MPs also mobilized scientific knowledge to support their position and confirm the civil society claims (‘By analysing the results from the measuring stations, we note that…’, ‘Studies demonstrate that…’, ‘I will mention some statistics that I find important…’, ‘The dramatic numbers of consequences [of pollution] on public health speak for themselves…’ (Conseil de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale, 2000). Similar to the first case, we can thus observe the role of government as de facto passive when confronted with air pollution politics; and primarily involved in shifting the blame to other political levels or actors, a classic depoliticizing move.

The plea hearing took place in July 2000, with the debate mainly focusing on a procedural question. The two CBOs denounced the illegitimate mismatch between decision makers’ promises and actions. The government’s lawyers asked the judge to reject the action, claiming that the tribunal’s role is to deliberate in case of a manifest violation of the environmental law, and not to assess the work of the executive or to take its place (Arch IEB: 2000.07.12 LS; 2000.07.12 LL). Three days later the ruling was made public: the lawsuit was judged inadmissible, mainly for procedural reasons. The trial radically transformed the terms of the contestation. The dominance of procedural knowledge politics was made explicit in the ruling, for example when the judge recognized that ‘while nobody denies that it is important to quickly find a solution to stop this pollution, there is no urgency in the sense of the Judicial Code’ (Arch BRAL: 2000.07.14 OZ). The outcome of the lawsuit sheds light on the weak position of civil society in the context of legal contentions concerning environmental issues, both because of an ostensible lack of resources to successfully pursue a lawsuit (in the aftermath of the process, Minister Gosuin mocked the CBOs by saying that even a law-student would have been able to anticipate the ruling. Arch IEB: 2000.07.19 DH), and in terms of the legal arrangements that make it difficult for private parties to win a lawsuit concerning generally recognized environmental problems (Arch IEB: 2003.08.12 LS). This role of legal expertise in producing a depoliticized outcome is not pre-ordained, however, and the recent success of ClientEarth in suing the Brussels regional government for breaching EU law (as mentioned in the introduction to this paper) shows that such expertise can also politicize the situation and realize progressive outcomes. Although rejected without appeal, the lawsuit did provide an opportunity to politicize the issue of air pollution in the public debate. IEB and BRAL emphasized how the court’s decision had not dismissed the urgency of dealing with pollution (Arch IEB: 2000.07.19 CP). Decision makers, in turn, committed to take effective measures, including some of those indicated by the plaintiffs (Arch IEB: 2000.07.29 LS; 2000.07.24 DH; 2000.08.08 LS).

The politics of air: Knowledge, expertise and the state

These three cases taken from a history of air pollution politics in the Brussels-Capital Region over the last fifty years provide us with different insights into the dynamic relation between politics and knowledge and the role of multiple types of expertise in (de)politicising air pollution. Theoretically and empirically, our paper offers a critical but sympathetic contribution to research on ‘post-political cities’. Concretely and on the basis of our theoretical reasoning and the empirical material, at least three preliminary conclusions seem possible.

First, both lay and public knowledge as expressed by local residents, community based organizations and citizens are of key importance in making air pollution manifest as a matter of concern. In the first case, it was the activities of residents and their often experiential knowledge that turned a mere nuisance into a substantive political debate, and which also led to the Illochroma company engaging in a number of technical interventions in order to reduce air pollution. In the second case, the mobilization of residents around the question of air pollution from the waste incinerator was fundamentally driven by lay, experiential knowledge, while introducing an environmental justice perspective into the public discussion. The third case was different, in that lay knowledge did not play a substantive role in the early phases of contestation, but it had in common with all the cases an element of public knowledge. Making a perceived problem visible to a wider public (from civic action to media reporting to political debates) is in itself transformative, and pressures governments to respond, albeit rarely sufficiently.

Second and as understood in literature on civic science, the use of scientific knowledge by social movements and civil society plays a key role in politicizing established priorities and the status quo, often by alternating lay knowledge and more formal scientific knowledge in the process (Scott and Barnett, 2009). This shows most clearly in the second case, in which Greenpeace actively drew on research reports to question government priorities; and not simply the expansion, but the very existence of waste incinerators. In the third case also, the community-based organizations BRAL and IEB relied on scientific knowledge in combination with another formalized mode of knowledge, namely legal expertise, to force the government to take action concerning summer ozone peaks. That this legal action was unsuccessful points to the Janus-faced nature of expertise in environmental politics. Scientific and legal knowledge–and, in all likelihood, other forms of specialized expertise–also play an important role in solidifying existing hierarchies of authority. This observation supports a post-political line of argumentation concerning expertise. In all three cases and in an ongoing dialectic with the politicization of knowledge, we can also observe a post-political consensus-driven governance style with knowledge being mobilized in order to mediate between the interests of residents and industrial production (as in the first case), to actively contest knowledge claims that cannot be easily incorporated into the status quo (as in the second case), and to simply reject substantive knowledge claims on the basis of procedural grounds (as in the third case).

Third, this raises questions concerning the role of the state in ‘managing’ the politics of air. Belgium is notorious for its fragmented state structure and hence our results might be biased due to this particular national context, but the institutional setting substantially shapes processes of politicization and depoliticization. All our cases point to the importance of a politics of shifting blame and responsibility onto other layers of government or other societal actors: in the first case by the commune of Uccle declaring itself non-competent and pushing responsibility onto the regional level; in the second case by the regional government blaming an NGO for raising political issues outside of the established political communication channels; and in the third case by the regional government criticizing the federal government and vice versa. How to interpret this has to remain an open question for now. We can possibly understand this politics of shifting blame as one expression of post-political governance by pointing to the ways in which state actors recurrently use strategies of deferral or displacement to shift political problems to other arenas or a future point in time (Etherington and Jones, 2018: 54). But this particular problem might also be explained by decades of state decentralization and regionalization that has led to the complex state structure of Belgium today and for which post-politics is too narrow a category. But whatever the exact interpretation, if we accept that the state is a social relation (Jessop, 2007), this institutional dimension needs to be taken into account in any analysis of the urban political.

Archival sources

Arch IEB - Centre de documentation d’Inter-Environnement Bruxelles (http://biblio.ieb.be/)

BEM: Bruxelles En Mouvement

CP: Communiqué de Presse

DH: La Dernière Heure

DM: De Morgen

LC: La Capitale

LL: La Lanterne

LLB: La Libre Belgique

LS: Le Soir

QRT: Quartiers

SP: Sudpresse

TBX: La Tribune de Bruxelles

Tijd: De Tijd

VH: Ville et Habitants/Vivre à Bruxelles

Arch BRAL - Archief BRAL: Citizen Action Brussels

OZ: Ozone Zaak

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to Anne Delfairière, Noël Franck, An Descheemaeker and Joeri Thijs for their kind support in accessing and navigating the archival resources of IEB, BREG, BRAL and Greenpeace respectively.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Nicola da Schio

Nicola da Schio is a postdoctoral researcher at the Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium. He is interested in the uneven geographies and knowledges of urban socio-ecological goods and burdens, as well as in the nexus between science, state, and civil society as the place where these come to be established and contested. Thematically, his research focuses on air pollution and the urban forest.

Bas van Heur is an associate professor of urban studies at the Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium. His overarching interest is in the politics of urban development, focusing in particular on the ways in which state institutions at various scales (try to) regulate and govern social relations through the mobilization of different kinds of knowledge and expertise. Underlying this interest is a more normative concern with state-society relations and the capacity of civic actors to develop public knowledge about the city and democratic forms of collective organization.

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