ABSTRACT
Critical scholarship suggests that environmental populism is either an expression of radical democracy beyond the paternalistic liberalism of mainstream environmentalism (Meyer 2008) or that it is paranoid, irrational, and merely reactive to elite technocratic governance (Swyngedouw 2010). Because both frameworks take populism to instrumentalize knowledge production, they miss how practices of counterexpertise might condition the emergence of left-populist oppositional identities. I argue that counterexpertise is a political activity not by producing an alternative epistemology but as a minor science that contests science from within and in the process shapes left-populist political coalitions. This is illustrated through research on populist responses to the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines in the Great Plains region of North America, where environmentalists, landowners, and grassroots organizers sought to position themselves as experts. Through public participation in environmental review, pipeline mapping projects, and construction monitoring, environmental populists created an educational campaign concerning topics as diverse as hydrology, economics, and archaeology. Developing counterexpertise not only contested the evidence produced by oil infrastructure firms and the state but also consolidated the oppositional identity of “the people.” By examining populist knowledge production within the broader field of contentious politics, I argue that we can better understand it as neither an irrational reaction nor transparently democratic but as part of a processual production of identities of resentment and resistance. One implication is that climate change denial and disinformation spread by the oil industry might be challenged by resituating science for political ends rather than renewing neutral objectivity.
