Chronicle of a disaster foretold: scientific risk assessment, public participation, and the politics of imperilment in Bristol Bay, Alaska

Abstract

Like many environmental controversies today, the debate over the proposed Pebble Mine in a salmon‐producing region of Alaska centres on the development and contestation of scientific projections of risk. This paper traces the participatory public process surrounding a risk assessment of potential mining impacts to examine how forums that join expert and lay knowledge shape scenarios of future imperilment and influence environmental politics in the present. It draws on ethnographic research to analyse how risk assessments demand the delineation of spatial, social, and temporal boundaries that provoke tensions, or ‘overflows’, which reveal the constraints of existing frameworks. In the Pebble debate, the public process generated overflows that expose conflicting claims to knowledge and authority, reflecting the risk assessment's overarching, if often frustrated, effort to separate scientific and technical truths from political contestations. The paper shows how these overflows spurred generative effects, new visions that remake spatial, social, and temporal relations in the face of imperilment. It argues that despite the limitations of common consultative processes and discourses of risk, the negotiation of multiple forms of knowledge and authority in the public view can nevertheless open new spaces and social formations for the exercise of politics.