SAI-P: Designing Just Futures for Public Engagement in Petrochemical Pipeline Infrastructure

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

Petrochemical pipelines are at the center of debates about the importance of public participation in the planning, construction, and operation of large-scale energy infrastructure. For diverse stakeholders, effective participation can result in safer and more resilient projects, while minimizing negative impacts. However, participation can also be hindered by informational gaps and other procedural inequities.

This planning project investigates how public interest groups use mapping, mobile apps, environmental monitoring, and data transparency resources to engage with pipeline infrastructure. A series of workshops explore how these groups imagine their projects leading to more robust forms of participation. Interviews with pipeline operators and regulators examine the industry’s plans to adopt new standards for how pipeline operators engage with the public.

Findings provide guidance for more effective public use of technological resources for proactive engagements with energy infrastructure. Findings also inform industry and regulatory processes in the adoption of new standards for maximizing equitable participation. This SAI planning project positions the research team to develop larger-scale future research projects.

Speculative design methods from the field of Human-Computer Interactions are used to advance research in the field of Science, Technology, and Society on public uses of “civic technoscience”. The supported planning activities focus on the ways in which pipeline-related stakeholders differently imagine the usefulness of new standards for expanding public participation.

The project also considers how civic technoscience can capitalize on these new opportunities through collaborative platforms and toolkits. A justice-based lens to sustainability studies of socio-ecological-technical systems aims to produce a model for analyzing the systems that shape the present use of civic technoscience in public engagements with pipelines, and how these may change as a result of new industry standards.

These intellectual convergences produce new knowledge identifying the conditions necessary for achieving equitable and sustainable infrastructure while laying the groundwork for future implementations of civic technoscience projects designed by project participants. This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.