Abstract
Background:
California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 617 (AB 617) in 2017 to help remedy the fact that the state's carbon cap-and-trade system ignored toxic air contaminants disproportionately clustered in racially marginalized, working-class, and Indigenous communities. AB 617 authorizes non-neoliberal approaches to change that are essential for addressing environmental injustice, and many AB 617 implementation committee members desire stronger environmental regulations on hazardous industrial activity. However, AB 617 implementation to date has taken strikingly neoliberal forms. In this article, we ask how AB 617 implementation became a site of quiescence about neoliberalism—that is, one in which community member participants' individual grievances did not translate into collective demands for counter-neoliberal policy implementation.
Methods:
To trace the law's implementation, we draw on ethnographic observation of AB 617 community steering committee meetings in which AB 617 implementation plans were developed, observation of other related meetings, and confidential interviews with committee members.
Results and Discussion:
We find that community quiescence about neoliberalism stems not only from limited resources and regulatory constraints, as others have noted, but also from subtle practices. The mere presence of powerful industry actors in the steering committees has inhibited community members from challenging industry's environmental impacts. In addition, powerful actors' “community” discourse obscures industry actors' conflicts of interest on these committees and their outsized influence over these committees' recommendations and has curtailed discussion of regulatory restrictions on hazardous industrial activity.
Conclusion:
Although AB 617 was ostensibly designed to empower residents who have historically been excluded from regulatory decision making, dynamics of AB 617 implementation effectively reproduce industry's disproportionate influence over regulatory decision making. Intentionally or not, these practices have the effect of silencing residents' and activists' interest in securing stronger regulatory restrictions on hazardous industrial activity.
INTRODUCTION
This article contributes to scholarship on sites of acceptance of and resistance to neoliberalism by identifying mechanisms that produce not acceptance or resistance per se but quiescence: a situation in which individual discontent does not translate into collective protest. 1 Scholarship has shown that community members' failure to collectively challenge hazardous industrial practices and the neoliberal policies that uphold them often stem from industry actors' overtly coercive tactics, such as job blackmail, 2 greenwashing, 3 and regulatory capture. 4
In this article, in contrast, we identify very subtle practices by powerful actors that lead activists and residents who privately contest neoliberalism to publicly endorse neoliberal policies. Specifically, we identify subtle practices that influence the interactive dynamics of environmental debate and decision making in ways that, intentionally or not, silence residents' and activists' desires for stronger regulatory restrictions on hazardous industrial air pollution.
We do so through analyzing the implementation of a 2017 environmental justice (EJ) bill in California, Assembly Bill 617 (AB 617). As we demonstrate in the “Background” section, AB 617 has substantial counter-neoliberal potential, as the law and its attending policy documents direct community-based committees to address air pollution through various mechanisms, including regulatory restrictions on hazardous industrial activity. However, the law's implementation has taken decidedly neoliberal forms and fails to challenge major industrial sources of air pollution.
In this article, we explain how this law—with its emphasis on empowering community members to direct the development of stronger regulatory restrictions on hazardous industrial air pollution—has come to be implemented as a set of neoliberal recommendations that disappointed the very community and activist participants the law was supposed to empower. Importantly, as we will show, many tasked with implementing the law desire stronger regulatory restrictions on hazardous industrial activity, but they did not collectively demand that the law's implementation require major industrial sources of air pollution to reduce their emissions.
Thus, following Shriver et al., we characterize this as a site of quiescence about neoliberalism—a situation in which some participants' counter-neoliberal desires remain private and individualized. 5 We ask: How did stronger regulatory restrictions on hazardous industry activity disappear from collective discussion and the law's implementation plans?
We draw on ethnographic observation of AB 617 implementation committee meetings and confidential interviews with committee members to trace how this occurred. First, we show that the mere presence of powerful industry actors in the steering committees inhibits community members of the committees from challenging industry's environmental impacts. Second, we show that powerful actors' “community” discourse obscures industry actors' conflicts of interest on these committees and their outsized influence over these committees' recommendations, and curtailed discussion of regulatory restrictions on hazardous industrial activity.
These findings show that quiescence about neoliberalism stems not only from industry actors' overt social control practices, as other scholars have demonstrated, but also subtle practices that shape interactive dynamics in regulatory deliberative spaces in ways that silence interest in more stringently regulating major sources of pollution.
Literature review: sites of acceptance of and resistance to neoliberal environmentalism
Neoliberalism—the claim that societies are best served by free trade, economic growth, and minimal government intrusion into industry activity—is the ideological justification for the weakening of environmental regulations in the past 40 years. The associated rollback of environmental regulations, evisceration of agency budgets, and declining regulatory enforcement have exacerbated environmental problems. 6 Although neoliberal reforms may harm all people, they are especially problematic for working-class, racially marginalized, and Native American communities, who have scarcely benefitted from the environmental protections that legislation and regulatory enforcement afford to many people. 7
Scholarship has helped explain why actors opposed to neoliberalism instead come to support it. Prominent threads of U.S. environmentalism have historically constituted sites of resistance to neoliberalism, advocating for stronger environmental laws, regulations, and permit conditions that restrict hazardous industrial activity. 8 Yet various activist organizations and overburdened communities have come to embrace neoliberal environmental politics.
For instance, Stephanie Malin and Shannon Bell have shown that some community members advocate for devolution of regulatory decision making and fewer regulatory restrictions on uranium and coal mining, respectively. They attribute these “sites of acceptance” to industry actors' long-standing efforts to overtly construct their practices as safe, sustainable, central to the community's identity, and solving economic precarity and growing inequality. 9
Gwen Ottinger has shown that residents dropped their oppositional activism against an oil refinery partly because industry actors used coercive tactics (including giving cash to low-income residents just before the holidays in exchange for their promises to stop their activism) and because the broader cultural and material terrain of neoliberalism channeled residents into supporting industry-friendly practices that reinforced the authority of industry engineers. 10
Other scholars have shown that activist acceptance of neoliberalism is not limited to risky industrial activity. In the realms of organic agriculture, wetland banking, forest conservation, recycling, urban greening, and stormwater management, many activists primarily pursue change through market-based, voluntary, behavioral, and other nonregulatory approaches to change and employ neoliberal rhetoric to rationalize these priorities. 11
Doing so further absolves the state of its responsibility to protect the public from environmental harm and leaves environmental problem-solving up to resources and interest. 12 This scholarship shows that activists' acceptance of neoliberalism is often a strategic response to legislative inaction, the rollback of regulatory authority and government agency resources that make non-neoliberal options appear politically impossible, growing corporate power, and declining funding for regulatory and policy advocacy.
But some scholars also show that neoliberal activism sometimes reflects neoliberal subjectivity among activists: uncritical, ideological support for “win-win,” industry-friendly private sector approaches to environmentalism, disdain for regulatory approaches, and otherwise markedly neoliberal “common sense” about how environmental problems should be solved. 13
Studies show that environmental regulatory agencies are similarly complex sites whose members variously resist and accept neoliberalization. On the one hand, agency staff have resisted antiregulatory elites' attacks on environmental regulation. 14 On the other hand, scholars have found that some agency staff have helped promote and foster the neoliberalization of environmental governance. 15 Some staff do so strategically when the prospects for regulatory and policy change are slim, whereas others evince neoliberal subjectivity, uncritically endorsing industry-friendly regulatory programs as superior to regulatory and policy restrictions on hazardous industrial activity. 16
Agencies' EJ advisory committees (such as the AB 617 community steering committees) constitute spaces that could more clearly resist neoliberal approaches to social change, as they are designed to enable EJ activists and members of overburdened and vulnerable communities—who have long argued that justice requires stronger regulatory and policy restrictions on hazardous industrial activity and other environmental harms—to have more influence over regulatory decision making.
Thus, EJ advisory committees that deviate from this expectation help illuminate why and how a setting becomes a site of acceptance of or quiescence about neoliberalism. Studies of agencies' EJ advisory committees and other sites ostensibly designed to elevate community input in regulatory decision making have found that these venues' counter-neoliberal potential has been hindered by industry participants' outright refusals to approve plans that reduce hazardous industrial practices, agency elites' insistence on the need to “balance” the agency's responsibility to protect the environment with its obligation to protect industry, and failures to give advisory committees the resources needed to empirically establish their EJ concerns with data that elites would deem acceptable. 17
Whereas other scholars have tended to attribute sites of acceptance or quiescence to industry actors' explicitly coercive techniques that enlist community allegiance and/or compel actors to embrace neoliberal approaches to social change for lack of other options, we instead argue for greater attention to subtle dynamics that also contribute to such outcomes.
Ottinger's study is instructive in this regard; while she highlights industry actors' flagrantly coercive tactics, as noted earlier, she also observes that industry actors controlled advisory committees that were ostensibly designed to address community concerns about the neighboring oil refinery “without overt exertions of their authority.” 18 We follow suit here, using the case of AB 617 implementation to show that actors' quiescence about neoliberalism can stem also from subtle interactive dynamics—in this case, the mere presence of industry actors, and powerful actors' use of seemingly innocuous “community” discourse.
Background on AB 617
AB 617 was passed in 2017 as a companion bill to AB 398, which renewed California's carbon cap-and-trade program (which was originally established by AB 32 in 2006). The cap-and-trade program allocates pollution permits to facilities emitting greenhouse gases (GHGs), allows facilities to trade permits, collects fees that it then uses to fund certain environmentally beneficial activities, and reduces total GHG emissions over time.
Although traditional environmentalists widely laud California's carbon trading program as a groundbreaking approach to reducing GHG emissions, EJ advocates have long criticized it for ignoring other toxic air contaminants disproportionately clustered in racially marginalized, working-class, and Indigenous communities. 19 Political leaders renewed the carbon trading system in 2017 despite the protests of EJ activists but passed AB 617 to address some of the system's inequitable fallout.
AB 617 fosters non-neoliberal approaches to change that are essential for addressing environmental injustice. AB 617 and its implementation policy documents task Community Steering Committees (CSCs) across the state with developing and implementing community emissions reductions plans (CERPs) “to reduce emissions of toxic air contaminants and criteria pollutants in communities affected by a high cumulative exposure burden,” and direct regulators to update pollution control standards and increase penalties for regulatory violations. 20
Notably, the primary AB 617 implementation document calls for “addressing the most significant emissions sources that contribute to elevated health risk”—which includes major industrial sources of air pollution—and specifies that the CERPs “[i]nclude a core regulatory focus through new rulemaking commitments by both CARB [California Air Resources Board] and air districts … to ensure the Program does not rely on incentives alone.” 21 The law's emphasis on strengthening regulatory restrictions on major sources of hazardous air pollutants strikes a notably counter-neoliberal contrast to the market-based nature of the carbon trading system.
In addition, the law requires regional air districts to work directly and collaboratively with communities in developing solutions to air pollution inequalities, an unprecedented integration of community members into air quality decision making that helps fulfill EJ advocates' call for increasing community participation in regulatory decision making. AB 617 also allocates funds to “disadvantaged” communities for data collection and other projects that will help them participate in regulatory decision making on greater par with industry and state actors.
Indeed, industry actors are prohibited from serving as co-chairs of the CSCs—that is, industry is structurally directed to take a back seat in CERP development. In some AB 617 implementation sites, including the one we focus on here, the CSCs are co-chaired by a regulatory official and an EJ advocate, a structure that independent observers have lauded as supporting the law's EJ goals. 22
Some scholars hail AB617 as a successful compromise between EJ advocates and California regulators, even suggesting that the law may be a blueprint for President Biden's national climate change approach. 23
However, despite the law's counter-neoliberal potential, thus far its implementation has taken decidedly neoliberal forms that do little to address major sources of industrial air pollution. To date, CARB has funded AB 617 in 15 communities, and their CERPs have focused almost exclusively on educating industry about existing regulations and best practices, educating residents about levels of air pollution, creating incentives that reward (but do not require) polluters to adopt greener technologies, and enacting quality of life projects such as urban greening. 24
To be sure, such projects are not antithetical to EJ, and CSC members support such projects. The point is that the CERPs include almost no new regulatory restrictions on industry activity. As one critical assessment emphasized, “the vast majority of the measures in these CERPs do not require or propose to require the development of quantifiable, permanent, and enforceable emissions reductions beyond what is already required by existing law.” 25 That is, despite AB 617's substantial counter-neoliberal potential, its implementation reinforces a broader pattern scholars have observed of EJ policy implementation: that it often takes neoliberal forms. 26
As we will show about one site of AB 617 implementation and as other assessments of AB 617 more broadly have found, 27 EJ advocates and other community residents who are members of the CSCs that designed these CERPs have lamented the CERPs' priorities and their lack of new regulatory restrictions on hazardous industrial activity.
To some extent, this divergence between EJ advocates' goals and the CERPs they helped develop stems from resource and regulatory constraints. The law's key implementation document characterizes community members as having “intimate familiarity” with the air quality problems in their community and states that therefore they should lead the effort in finding solutions. 28 However, to develop and justify regulatory restrictions on hazardous industrial activity, the CSCs needed the latest environmental and public health data on many industries; a sophisticated understanding of the complex multiscalar regulatory system; and knowledge of many industrial sectors' emissions control options and how they quantitatively affect air pollution levels.
CSCs were given inadequate technical support but were required to develop their recommendations within tight deadlines. 29 In addition, the regional air districts' emissions inventory data are woefully incomplete, which further undermines the ability of residents concerned about particular industrial sources to determine their contributions to the cumulative emissions burden and thus justify regulatory restrictions on them. 30
The law's implementation has also been undermined by industry's overt efforts to limit the regional air districts' abilities to regulate certain industrial sections. For instance, oil and gas industry actors successfully lobbied state legislators to prohibit air districts from directly regulating oil refineries' GHG emissions. 31
These resource and regulatory issues help explain why a law with so much counter-neoliberal promise has thus far been implemented in neoliberal ways. Yet this does not fully explain this law's neoliberal implementation. As we show, the law's potential to counter neoliberalism has also been undermined through subtle interactive dynamics within the CSCs.
METHODS
We develop our argument through analysis of AB 617 implementation materials and qualitative fieldwork conducted largely at one AB 617 implementation site. 32 Per approval from the University of Colorado Boulder Institutional Review Board (#20-0367), to protect participants' confidentiality, we have withheld the location of our fieldwork site and do not include references that would reveal its location. Given the limited number of CSC members from any social group (e.g., industry and EJ organizations) at our research site, revealing the site's location would reveal the identity of our research participants.
For our document analysis, we reviewed materials from our study site (including meeting minutes, AB 617 project proposals, and AB 617 application materials), the final CERPs from other sites, and relevant statewide AB 617 policy documents.
Our fieldwork included ethnographic observation of 26 hours of our site's CSC meetings and 9 additional hours of other public meetings related to AB 617 (recordings of previous meetings and live broadcasts of meetings conducted through Zoom). Ethnographic research entails observing (and perhaps interacting with) people in their real-life environments to determine what they say and do, how they interact, and the sequences in which events unfold. We took detailed notes focusing on what people said and otherwise did, the context of discourse, and other relevant details such as tone and body language. These observations illuminated key patterns of discourse and interactive dynamics among participants.
We also conducted confidential interviews with nine members of our study site's CSC to learn their opinions and other reflections, including those that they might not share in a public setting. Purposively sampling for variation in professional affiliation, we interviewed industry representatives, regulatory actors, EJ organization representatives, and other residents who did not formally represent a business, agency, or organization.
Each interview took ∼90 minutes and was conducted through Zoom or phone. We asked about the participant's perception of the achievements and challenges of AB 617, while also allowing them to guide the conversation toward what they deemed significant. We also conducted informal conversations with several other regulatory agency representatives and academics familiar with AB 617 implementation.
We analyzed our fieldnotes inductively and manually. We triangulated our interview data with our observational data and document analysis, discovering that some participants expressed certain desires in confidential interviews but not in public committee meetings—namely, the desire for stronger regulatory restrictions on industrial sources of air pollution. Accordingly, we focused our analysis on identifying factors that contribute to this quiescence. The examples we provide are representative of broader patterns we found within our data.
To be clear, we focus on the discursive and other practices that contribute to quiescence on this topic—the work these discourses and other practices do. We do not make claims about actors' intentions except where those are clearly evident in the data.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: INTERACTIVE DYNAMICS WITHIN THE CSCS
Industry presence
In confidential interviews, many nonindustry CSC members emphasized wanting to design a CERP that imposed stronger regulatory restrictions on hazardous industrial activity. They characterized various hazardous local industries as major sources of pollution in their region and insufficiently regulated. Participants shared concerns about a wide range of hazards from industrial agriculture, including pesticide drift, agricultural burning, manure waste from large-scale animal agriculture, and excessive use of fertilizers.
Some also made comments about other hazardous industries in the region, highlighting smells and smoke coming from local facilities. The county has been out of attainment of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ozone for many years and is often out of attainment for PM 10 and PM 2.5. 33
In addition, in these confidential conversations, CSC members elaborated their dissatisfaction with the air district's insufficient regulation of hazardous industry actors and industries' political economic power in the region. Many expressed concerns that industry actors skirt environmental regulation and enforcement, that local industry had too much control over regulatory decision making, and that the air district is industry-supportive in its decisions.
For example, as one participant stated, “The air district [was] more there to serve the industry's needs…. The air district has not historically enforced weak policies or regulations. Weak regulations and weak implementation.” Another stated, “Prior to AB 617, these industry stakeholders could just call the air district and get their voice heard.” Some CSC members lamented that the air district only issues very small fines for environmental regulatory violations and that industry actors pay the fine instead of complying with environmental law.
That is, they feel that industry actors willfully ignore environmental policy and that the air district does not hold them accountable. Participants' concerns that political and regulatory officials are closely tied with industry actors have merit. 34 Local regulators in this area have a history of under-enforcing environmental law. Recently, local newspapers have published articles detailing conflicts of interest between local environmental regulatory officials, other political elites, and major industries in the region. 35
The CSC members described above and the others expressing such sentiments do not evince the neoliberal subjectivity scholars have observed among other actors who are focused on neoliberal approaches to environmental change. Instead, these activists and other residents individually support stronger regulatory restrictions and other counter-neoliberal remedies. However, these individual sentiments did not manifest as collective demands for a counter-neoliberal CERP. Instead, the committee they comprise has been subtly channeled into creating and supporting a neoliberal CERP.
CSC meeting discussions and the CERP focused on neoliberal projects that did not challenge hazardous industrial activity: encouraging diesel truck drivers to reduce their idling near sensitive sites, increasing public awareness about outdoor air quality conditions, using financial incentives to encourage the adoption of greener technology such as zero emission agricultural equipment, and funding the construction of environmental amenities such as planting trees. Thus, there was significant disconnect between what CSC members advocated for privately, and what they demanded in public CSC meetings.
During confidential interviews, some respondents reflected on this discrepancy unprompted and explained that the political economic power of some industry leaders may have deterred participants from speaking up. As an illustrative example, an interview participant explained,
When it comes to being more aggressive…no one has ever brought in our meetings things like pesticide drift…. I still feel like we are kind of playing it safe…. When we are talking about certain types of pollutants, we could be a little more critical of the agricultural industry…. I wish more committee members felt more emboldened…. It's just such a delicate—I mean, it's just the biggest industry in our area.
In this study, they explain that the industry's local economic prominence renders topics such as pesticide drift “delicate” and deters discussions about agricultural pollution in the CSC meetings. Others we interviewed added that these industries funded many benefits in their communities and that doing so makes people reticent to raise concerns about the industry. Indeed, agriculture is historically significant and is one of the largest employers, and the regional Farm Bureau donates to local charities, gives scholarships to students, and holds community events.
Likewise, the County Board of Supervisors has facilitated the growth of other hazardous industries with hopes of bringing in new jobs and revenue. To be clear, these industries do not effectively support most residents; despite these industries' economic prominence and job promises, this region continues to struggle with high rates of unemployment and poverty. 36 Regardless, some CSC members stated that industry actors' economic power in the region and presence on the CSC made some committee members uncomfortable challenging hazardous industry practices.
In turn, industry representatives on the CSC—and the regulatory actors widely seen as industry-supportive—hold an outsized influence over committee discussion and decision making, and the committee developed a CERP that contained few regulatory restrictions on air pollution from major industry sources.
“Community” discourse
We also found that certain narratives used by powerful actors contributed to residents' quiescence about the neoliberal implementation of AB 617. Industry and regulatory actors regularly used seemingly friendly discourse about “community” in ways that obscured this power inequality and industry's conflicts of interest on the CSC and silenced critiques during meetings. In one salient example that illustrates this pattern, during a brainstorming session for CSC members to determine the best locations for air monitoring, one resident on the committee noted that they thought that industry presence had a “chilling effect” on their discussions.
None of the CSC members who had articulated similar concerns in confidential interviews spoke up in supportive response to this comment during the meeting. Instead, an industry representative responded that he represented their “community” as well as worked in industry and that the “industries represented…are an important part of the community.” The industry representative explicitly utilized the discourse of “community” to discredit this member's assertion that the committee as currently structured could not challenge industry activity.
Furthermore, a senior member of the air district followed up by stating, “The goal of this committee is to find solutions…. We are not in the business of shutting down businesses…. We all have to work together to achieve that goal.” That is, this regulatory official asserted that the committee member who brought up concerns about industry presence's “chilling effect” is not trying to “find solutions”—that raising critical concerns about industry's power and environmental impacts constitutes unconstructive behavior.
The air district's comments about not shutting down business, even though that was not the resident's proposal, sent a message that the committee must work on “solutions” that are agreeable to industry leaders. Such narratives function similarly to some documented by other scholars, such as regulatory officials hailing community activist collaborations with industry and denigrating those who challenge industry practices. 37
During another meeting, when some community members requested that the committee be involved in policy and rule development, an air district official responded by asserting that policy and rule development must be “reflective of the community business activities and the community interests” and that “the marriage of those two activities make us as a community whole.” In this statement, the air district staff member asserted that being a “whole” community requires balancing economic interests with efforts to write environmental policies and rules. He utilized the language of “community” to compel members to honor business interests.
Although their intention might be to build consensus, such discourse has the effect of obscuring the political economic power of industry in AB 617 implementation and the conflicts of interest inherent in including business interests in the CSC. Regulatory and industry actors' narratives about “community”—regardless of their intentions—effectively curtailed discussion about regulatory restrictions on industry and, in turn, contributed to the CERP's focus on neoliberal measures that do little to restrict industrial sources' toxic air emissions.
Although the bulk of our research focused on the implementation of AB 617 in one site, we observed similar uses of “community” discourse in other AB 617 sites. For example, in London et al.'s evaluation of AB 617 implementation to date, an industry-affiliated member of another CSC criticized the fact that CSCs did not allow industry representatives to serve as committee chair: “One of the persons [on the committee] said, ‘I don't want the fox in the henhouse,’ considering themselves the hens, and anybody in industry being the evil, the dark side. So, then the committee did get formed with people from industry, and I don't know how the decision was made, but it's no one from industry can be a co-lead…. I'm a resident of this community. I work in this community. I moved here because of my job. It seems strange that you would exclude industry from a co-lead.” 38 This “community” framing disparages critiques of hazardous industrial activity and obscures industry's conflicts of interest on these committees.
CONCLUSION
Key aspects of California's AB 617 implementation—the development of the CERPs—have taken a markedly neoliberal form, prioritizing projects that provide some environmental benefits but containing few policy or regulatory restrictions on hazardous industrial activity. This pattern deviates from so many CSC members' privately stated assertions of the need for stronger regulatory restrictions on harmful industry practices as well as language in the bill itself that highlighted the need for such reform.
Whereas other observers have noted that such outcomes stem partly from insufficient resources devoted to implementation and certain regulatory constraints, we found that the anemic nature of the CERPs stems also from subtle interactive dynamics within the CSCs. Specifically, the mere presence of powerful industry actors in the steering committees has inhibited community members from challenging industry's environmental impacts.
In addition, powerful actors' “community” discourse obscures industry actors' conflicts of interest on these committees and their outsized influence over these committees' recommendations, and curtailed discussion of regulatory restrictions on hazardous industrial activity. Whereas AB 617 was ostensibly designed to empower residents who have historically been excluded from regulatory decision making, the inclusion of powerful industry actors in its implementation effectively reproduced its disproportionate influence over regulatory decision making.
These findings demonstrate hitherto under-recognized factors that compel residents and activists to be quiescent about the neoliberal implementation of a law that had substantial counter-neoliberal potential. Other scholars have found that industry actors help create sites of acceptance of neoliberalism by manufacturing community identity with the industry, making disingenuous claims about safety and employment, and pressuring political elites to enact neoliberal rollback that leads activists to pursue neoliberal practices as a strategy of least resistance and last resort.
In this study, we found that neoliberal environmentalism can emerge also through subtle interactional mechanisms that produce quiescence to a neoliberal policy agenda: the mere presence of industry actors in spaces of environmental decision making and powerful actors' use of “community” discourse that together silence calls for stronger regulatory restrictions on hazardous industrial activity. Importantly, this silencing makes the CERPs appear to reflect consensus, in turn legitimizing them to state officials and others.
These findings resonate with Ottinger's observation, noted earlier, that industry actors did not always need to overtly exert their authority to control an advisory committee that had ostensibly been designed to address community concerns about an oil refinery in Louisiana. 39 That said, whereas the industry actors in Ottinger's study held leading roles in these committees, our findings show how industry unduly influences such sites of deliberation and decision making even when it has been formally prohibited from occupying a leading role.
To be clear, powerful actors may be more overtly coercive at other AB 617 implementation sites; further research would be needed to catalogue the full array of practices that channel the various CERPs in neoliberal directions.
Finally, although sites of quiescence constitute a current lack of collective protest, they are sites with counter-neoliberal potential. Although many of our research participants are disappointed by the CERP's development thus far, some also view it as an instrumental step toward other non-neoliberal ends. Accordingly, akin to Ferguson, we call for scholars to treat acceptance and quiescence as contested, contingent, shifting, uneven, and incomplete. Future research should grapple with such tensions and explore how they might shed insights into possibilities for non-neoliberal futures. 40
Footnotes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors wish to thank our research participants for offering their time and knowledge; colleagues who offered feedback at the University of Colorado Boulder's Culture, Power, and Inequality Workshop; and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.
AUTHOR DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No competing financial interests exist.
FUNDING INFORMATION
This research was funded in part by the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder.