Beyond Consensus

By better understanding the "genre" of environmental public hearings, one can challenge ideas of effectiveness and consensus so that citizens can learn to advocate more effectively for their concerns about environmental issues.

This book addresses how public hearing genre conventions are established and how those conventions inform and often govern tensions that arise in public discourse about a contested environmental project. The two questions driving the author's inquiry are: one, how do citizens and institutions interpret, prepare for, respond to, and engage with the public hearing genre? And two, what role and effect do public hearings have on both the community and the contested project’s overall process? The case study delves into public comments from two Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) 401 Water Quality Certification public hearings that were held in August 2017 and hosted by Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VA DEQ). The author argues that there are ways we might reimagine ideas of effectiveness, consensus, and the public hearing genre, specifically in the case of the 401 Public Hearings and more generally in other public hearings where public discourses center on a contested environmental project like the MVP.