When power networks collide: an actor-network theory analysis of state-led community consultation for the siting of a high voltage electricity powerline

This thesis presents an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) analysis of a community consultation and participatory decision-making process undertaken by a state electricity supply authority to decide the route of a new high voltage electricity powerline, and is motivated by two key questions. First, how do relations between the state and the public in state-led consultative processes play out in the decision-making process? Second, how do community concerns influence or shape the outcomes of state-led participatory decision-making processes? In contrast to other research, which argues for new ways to conceive democratic forms of public participation, here the contention is that community consultation is a deliberative democracy in action. In making this argument, the thesis demarcates traditional institutional boundaries between the state, science, and the public, and locates community consultation and participatory decision-making as a central site of these relations in terms of heterogeneous engineering and discursive fact-making, and as places where assemblages gather around matters of concern. The ANT analysis presented in this thesis yields two significant findings. The first is that community consultation is not a rational, linear process tempered by public concerns and values, or by social forces. Instead, community consultation is a dynamic relationship between human and non-human actors who either associate or disassociate with many technological, scientific, economic, environmental, and social matters of concern. The outcomes of community consultation and participatory decision-making processes are thus network effects, reliant upon a strength of associations, and analogous to the power networks from where they emerge. Second, this study shows how the metamorphosis between matters of fact and matters of concern occurs as the assemblages of emerging, divergent actor-networks gather around competing problematisations about electricity powerlines, the environment or NIEMR/EMF and potential health issues.