Opportunities for cross-national comparisons and creation of dis/trust

During the last two weeks I have been presenting my ongoing work at two different conferences. The first was the Nordic Environmental Social Science conference (NESS) which took place in London, and the second was a Cultural Studies conference called ACSIS which took place in Norrköping. My presentations came to focus on the individualization that I described at Earth Day in Buenos Aires, but moreover it came to concern trust, and the possibilities – and of course challenges – concerning comparisons of two different countries when it comes to environmental trust and distrust. What sparked my interest was among other things that two Swedish municipalities recently have been competing about the opportunity to get to store nuclear waste. Opportunity is a word that doesn’t match at all with environmental justice arguments and ideas about Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY). One of the interviewees in a national newspaper that covered the story about the municipality which finally got the contract, stated something very interesting. He was about 25 years old and said “I am not the least concerned about this since I do not believe that the authorities would let us live above something which is dangerous”. This struck me as completely different from the arguments I have come across in Argentina. Obviously it is not possible to build any academic argument out of this one statement, but it indicates something about discussions about risk awareness and trust in authorities. Most likely there are other more critical voices in Östhammar, which the municipality is called. However, at the NESS conference I got the opportunity to discuss this with a sociologist, Mark Elam, who has studied the processes around nuclear power in these municipalities for quite some time. When I asked him about the trust, his explanation was that it is the result of continuous work by the authorities and companies that are involved in the nuclear power production to get the local population to participate in these processes and feel a sense of ownership. I cannot give any elaborated description here, but my follow up question was whether Elam believes that it is fruitful to use the Actor Network Theory (ANT) that they use in their analysis, for applied (political) work. This was not something which he seemed to find attractive, even if I still believe that this would be fertile.

Then let me tie this back to my initial question about whether it is possible to discuss these processes of participation, dis/trust and political efficacy from a cross-national point of comparison. While some studies have shown that people tend to disregard environmental risks that are located close to where they live (while others have shown how local concerns are disregarded!), I would like to investigate whether the general trust in authorities have any influence on how environmental risks are perceived. My general impression is that Swedes feel less threatened by environmental risks since they have greater trust in authorities than the Argentinean community which I am currently studying. However, here I need to be cautious about the choice of words which indicate what analytical and epistemological perspective I have. I am not aiming to perform any quantitative comparison, so, will it not be possible to make comparisons between Sweden and Argentina? In Argentina I am studying a “segment” of society which actively works to instigate environmental awareness among the rest of the population, while the case study in Sweden was made up of people who were not recruited because they were part of environmental organizations. Moreover, the organization of water distribution, waste management and industrial production differ between the countries, which makes comparisons difficult as well. So, in conclusion I can state that the results from the two case studies I have performed, and am performing, show differences when it comes to trust, but this can most likely not just be connected to the national political context.