Latest draft of Rationale

Here is the latest draft of the Rationale Section of my Thesis.

I've recently reworked the hypothesis section. As always, I hope you enjoy, but best of all if you can provide feedback.

Hugs,

Checho.


REDISCOVERING DEMOCRACY: DELIBERATING ENVIRONMENTAL INSECURITIES IN THE COSTA RICAN POWER SECTOR

RATIONALE

The Costa Rican power sector is facing a deadlock that prevents the country from articulating a coherent, legitimized and sustainable electricity governance strategy. The standoff between social movements, on the one hand, and government planners and public and private generation companies, on the other, has been building up for close to a decade, and gained momentum in 2000, as a result of popular protests that successfully prevented Congress from passing a legal Bill promoting the partial privatization of the state owned utility (ICE). The main points of contention are the construction of new hydroelectric projects and the participation of the private sector in energy generation.

While social opposition has been successful in preventing or delaying several hydroelectric projects, through diverse tactics that include roadblocks, municipal referendums, and Constitutional appeals (Programa Estado de la Nacion, 2005, p. 218), no substantial efforts have been made to promote a viable clean substitute or to substantially reduce consumption. This situation, combined with subsidiary factors (such as the delays in commissioning of a planned thermal powerplant), has led to rising electricity deficits for 2006-2008.

Energy planners from ICE have turned to short-term fixes, like electricity imports and leasing or buying excess power from privately-owned diesel generators, to supply the steady growth in demand (Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad [ICE], 2006, p. 40). From an energy and environmental security perspective, this not only leads to an increased national carbon footprint, due to expanded fossil-fuel generation, but it also reduces the utility’s capacity to adapt to weather fluctuations (like reduced rainfall regimes) or accidental downtime. These factors had a significant role in causing the crisis in energy supply that the country experienced last April, where homes and businesses throughout the country had to endure unscheduled power cuts lasting sometimes more than five hours.

The standoff exemplifies many elements of conflict escalation, such as group polarization, the rise of contentious norms and militant leadership, and the illusion of unanimity (Rubin, Pruitt and Kim, 1994, pp. 92-94; Steenbergen, Bächtiger, Spörndli & Steiner, 2004, p. 16). However, the broader context of the conflict also offers reasons to be hopeful about the possibility of leading the debate towards less polarized interactions. The current administration’s commitment to steer Costa Rica on the path of becoming first country to generate all its electricity from renewables by 2021 (Ministerio de Planificación Nacional y Política Económica, 2007, p. 81) creates pressures (whether the government acknowledges it or not) to address communal concerns in order to gain support for some hydroelectric plants, given the effectiveness of opposition thus far.

Another encouraging sign is the presence of critical reflection in some of the views held by environmental activists, regarding the fact that despite all of the movement’s accomplishments, more attention needs to be paid to the construction of alternatives (Castro, 2005, p. 48). A third hopeful element is the occurrence of past multi-stakeholder collaborative interactions in environmental governance, of which the most relevant to the issue at hand was the consensus process carried out in 2002-2004 to produce a draft Water Resources Law Bill. (Aguilar et. al., 2004, p. 11).

Recognizing the fundamental role of inter-group dynamics and institutional barriers in perpetuating this conflict, the present Masters Thesis seeks to explore how a particular stream of democratic practice, deliberative democracy, can contribute to the recognition of mutual concerns and to the creation of a space for the outlining of solutions. Deliberative approaches emphasize elements generally neglected in habitual power sector institutional arrangements, such as full participation and the promotion of enlightened understanding (Farrelly, 2004, p. 3). However, under certain conditions it has been argued that deliberation may at times exacerbate polarization. (Steenbergen et al., 2004, p. 17).

Therefore, the questions posed by this Thesis are: what value can deliberative democracy offer to environmental governance in Costa Rica? and what are the obstacles to deliberation in the context of the Costa Rican power sector? The objectives that will guide the research to be undertaken will therefore be:

a) To seek empirical verification of the potential benefits of democratic deliberation in the context of environmental governance in Costa Rica; and

b) To determine major barriers to deliberation among stakeholders in the country’s power subsector.

At this early stage of the project, it is possible to sketch the following preliminary hypotheses based on the researcher’s experience working with other stakeholders in the power sector, and on the bibliographic research that has been carried out concerning the applications of deliberation to environmental governance:

• Although the issues under dispute in power sector governance conflicts are commonly depicted as two-sided (for example: pro versus anti hydroelectricity; for or against private sector participation in generation; or supporting versus undermining ICE’s sovereignty) the actual diversity of viewpoints is much greater. The illusion of bipolarity is a result of an adversarial approach that has characterized all frames of the issue. This suggests that none of the discourses of the stakeholders engaged with this issue manage to integrate the three key elements of deliberative interaction: inclusion, dialogue and self-reflection.

• As a corollary to the previous hypothesis, although the reasons that multiple stakeholders have for opposing or supporting a position are also diverse, this is obscured by an illusion of unanimity, that is, stakeholders will tend to believe that all people arguing for or against a given action or policy are doing so for nearly identical reasons. This encourages groupthink between all those who are on the same side of an issue, and the fundamental attribution error in interpreting the character and motivations of all those who are on the opposing side.

• When people speak up or take action to promote or oppose a specific energy infrastructure project or to advocate a particular energy sector institutional model, their actions are influenced in part by their views about democracy. People’s concerns about the functioning and accountability of public service institutions, or about the distribution of costs and benefits from natural resource-based production, are informed and shaped by their individual and collective frames about how the governance of collective needs and endowments.

• These views about democracy, particularly as they become central to the conformation of movement identity and to the characterization of movement opponents, can lose their accuracy and become more like slogans used for mobilization. This lack of dialogue and reflection about the movement’s democratic principles is one of the main behaviors that allow social polarization.

• Increasing the deliberative quality of democratic practice, by promoting a greater integration of the three key principles of deliberation: inclusion, dialogue and self-reflection, in the exchanges between stakeholders with shared interests as well as between those who have opposing interests, can help overcome the stalemate by creating clear expectations about the ground rules for fairness, legitimacy and effectiveness in the search for solutions.

• Directing attention towards the question of “the quality of democracy we want” can reduce escalation by focusing away from blame and “enemy images”, and help “expand the pie” in the search for solutions. Deliberation can be an attractive concept for both sides, because it stresses participation, which is attractive to social movements, and rational understanding, which is attractive to generators and policy-makers.

Just as the “failed states” paradigm, was useful to environmental security in its initial years (dominated at the time by “national security” thinking) because it articulated the notion of environment-driven conflict as a threat to democracy; this thesis seeks to promote a paradigm of “deliberative environmental governance” that from a human security perspective, focuses on the need to “rehabilitate” the practices of decision-making and participation to promote more pluralistic understanding and legitimacy in environmental governance and enhance the social will to manage resources and constraints.