Unsettled Settlements of Environmental Risk: Accounting for hazardous legacies, risky environments, and settlement exposures

Abstract

This study examines struggles over settlement exposures to environmental risk, and the ways socio-environmental legacies and commitments are problematised, challenged, transformed, or otherwise ‘unsettled’. Inquiry is directed to discursive and material processes that shape legacy exposures and risk commitments ‘in place’, yet remain relatively neglected in scholarship, policy, and planning. Drawing upon critical, constructivist, and conflict perspectives, especially within environmental sociology and the sociologies of risk and disaster, the study systematically addresses issues of power in the production and placement of risk, hazard, and exposure, and in related understanding of impacts, and response. Grounded in a qualitative methodology, a case approach and mixed methods are employed to identify and investigate three environmental risk controversies situated in the coastal, mainland Moreton Bay Region in Southeast Queensland, Australia. Methods used include the analysis of documentary and archival material, a household survey, and semi-structured interviews with self-selected residents who were survey respondents, and with purposively sampled community group representatives. The cases investigate, in turn, contentious settlement exposures related to the ‘encroachment’ of hazardous industries and a large chemical factory fire, catastrophic flooding and the manageability of flood risk, and the acceptable impacts of climate change adaptation itself. Analysis in each case was directed to the following: predominant problem and solution framing; critical attention to government roles in risk creation; issues of allocation and claims of tolerability, acceptability, and responsibility for risk acceptance; and related contestation and prospects for transformation. ‘Placing’ environmental risk controversies in this way supported consideration of the nature, significance, and limits of any related (symbolic or material) unsettling. The incidents, disasters, and disputes under study included challenges to the authority of technical and scientific knowledge, its appropriate application in local contexts, and the accessibility and acceptability of paths and processes for determining the stakes and commitments of settlement. Interpreted as cases of encroachment, fragmentation, and displacement, powerful risk commitments were argued to remain ‘out of frame’ in important ways. Enduring socio-institutional and politico-legal commitments to the accommodation, accumulation, and domestication of risk, hazard, and exposure were evident across the cases. The hazardous legacies of past land-use decisions, for instance, were identified but naturalised in ways that served to enable the advancement of certain trajectories, forms, and locations of development. It was argued that these ongoing risk commitments, and challenges to them, are best understood as inseparable from both local ‘risk landscapes’ and broader claims to the legitimate terms and bounds of governance, environment, and settlement.