Living with Forever Pollution and the Dilemma of Responsibility
Tracing how responsibility changes for historic toxic PFAS pollution, leaving communities to bear the consequences for collectively produced harms
Lead Supervisor: David Whyte
Degree Programme: Law School
Co-Supervisor:
Eleanor Godwin (School of Law)
Project Description
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) present a fundamental challenge for environmental governance. Their extreme persistence means that contamination can endure for generations, long after the activities, regulatory decisions and corporate practices responsible for producing it. There needs to be more understanding of what it means to live with pollution that cannot easily be undone. Therein lies a central dilemma; who is responsible for pollution when harm is produced not simply through regulatory violation, but through activities that have been legally permitted, inadequately regulated or left outside effective regulatory control?
The research topic proposes to challenge the conventional accounts that distinguish clearly between lawful economic activity and environmental wrongdoing. Instead, it will draw on the concept of the regimes of permission to examine how environmental law can simultaneously regulate pollution while creating the legal and institutional conditions through which harmful practices continue. PFAS provides a particularly important case because scientific knowledge of persistence and toxicity has developed alongside fragmented chemical regulation, uncertain liability and the enormous practical and financial difficulties associated with remediation.
Through a mixed-methods analysis including interviews, examining environmental data and legislative analysis, the proposed topic would trace how responsibility for PFAS contamination has been constructed, contested and displaced over time in the UK. Rather than conceptualising regulatory collapse simply as the absence of regulation, the research will ask how under-resourcing, fragmented responsibilities, evidentiary thresholds, regulatory delay and permissive legal frameworks can normalise continuing exposure. It will examine how responsibility moves between chemical producers, downstream users, regulators, governments, landowners and individuals, potentially leaving communities to bear the consequences of collectively produced harms.
What we're looking for in a student
1) The project is, by definition, interdisciplinary. Applicants should have a undergraduate degree in Arts/Humanities and be able to demonstrate some understanding of social and/or historical research methods. 2) Students will have access to the doctoral training resources in research methods provided in the School of Law and the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, and in the Living with Waste Doctoral Programme. Students will be fully integrated into the academic activities of the Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice, including the Centre's research conferences and seminars.
Key words: PFAS pollution; Toxic communities; Accountability; Chemical Waste Regulation; Responsibility