Today, Assad Raza interviews Drew Biemer, an energy outreach strategist and senior advisor to the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission. Drew has experience leading domestic and international campaigns to support energy sector projects and came on the show to discuss how Civil and Public Affairs are key to building positive relationships between projects and the population.
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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at [email protected]
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
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Special Thanks to Sahraoui and Fadela for providing the sample of "Mani" from the album Arabic Groove. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCJI52eWDLw&list=PLloxRkIwt8TNujJnQFxjH7kJ0yjKJkpeg&index=7
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Transcript
00:00:03 Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail dot com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.
00:00:39 ASAD RAZA
I'm your host, Asad Raza, and today our guest is Drew Beamer. Drew is a management and communications professional with 20 years of experience in governmental, public, and civil affairs. He is the current administrator of the Site Evaluation Committee, SEC for short, the Agency Directorate for Energy Facility, Sitting, Permitting, and Enforcement of Compliance, in the U .S. state of New Hampshire. Thank you, Drew. I've been following your Baseload Power newsletter on LinkedIn for a while, and you touched on a broad list of topics from leadership to strategy to include civil affairs and information operations. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me.
00:01:12 DREW BEAMER
00:02:35 ASAD RAZA
Drew, I really like how you are applying civil affairs strategies and information operations to civilian sectors, specifically the infrastructure development. So why are civil affairs strategies important in energy resource development?
00:02:48 DREW BEAMER
Well, one thing that energy developers need to realize, every single boot on the ground, is an arm of this operation. Every single person who interacts with the local community, whether you're a line worker on a utility project or you're a soldier in theater, the tactical missteps can create massive strategic problems. And one of the things that energy developers do not take seriously is that even if you're working on a domestic energy project in the United States, the local population is going to view you as an occupying force. That doesn't mean they'll view you in a negative light. It just means that they will view you as an occupying force. Most of the time, your construction workers and your contractors are going to be new people to the region. They're going to have cultural differences that may rub locals the wrong way. And what you really need to focus on is how do we endear ourselves to the local population? How do we let them know that we're going to be good community partners? is not achieved by simply telling them things. You need to actually build that capital and you need to build that capital before you need it. Because a lot of projects will just parachute in and they'll say, hey, we're here to help support our project. And that's not an effective strategy. You need to be on the ground in advance. You need to be listening to folks. You need to be helping them address their problems. And then once you've built capital, then you can call on that capital when it comes time to build something and you need local support.
00:04:25 ASAD RAZA
Drew, I like the way how you frame that. When we were in Iraq and Afghanistan, they had a saying about the strategic corporal, that corporal that's on the ground engaging with the local population. Any actions that they're doing can have a strategic impact negatively or positively. So what are some of the common pitfalls that developers fall into during the process? There's a phrase called the engineer's fallacy.
00:04:47 DREW BEAMER
the engineer's fallacy. And the engineer's fallacy states that an engineer will interpret any lack of support, any deficit in support as the stakeholders not having all the facts. So what I mean by that is I propose a project. You're a local stakeholder. You oppose the project. The engineer's fallacy says that I will address your opposition with just more facts because I believe in the project so much that I believe. that any opposition from you is just a deficit of facts. I don't take into account that it might be an emotional argument. I don't take into account that I've failed to build capital with you. And this engineer's fallacy is inherent in a lot of civil affairs context. You certainly look at some of the hearts and minds campaigns that we've embarked on in the 20th century and the early 21st century. is you don't win hearts and minds by just telling people why your way of life is the best, right? You don't win hearts and minds on an energy project by going into the region and just selling people on facts alone. You need to build capital with people. So one of the pitfalls that developers fall into is, first of all, they're not in the field early enough. They show up when they support, not before. And then they don't take into account the fact that a lot of these arguments become cultural and or emotional arguments, not necessarily factual arguments. So you need to exercise a good bedside manner. You need to make sure that locals know that you are there to help them solve their problems, rather. And once you've done that effectively, then you're going to get support. or minimally you're going to mitigate opposition.
00:06:43 ASAD RAZA
Interesting when you're talking about the engineer fallacy, engineers motivated or driven by facts when other stakeholders, specifically the local populations, are probably viewing the problem through either emotions or some other interest versus just the facts alone. So how do you shift the mindsets for engineers that are focused on the facts and driven by their own views and help them to look at the problem through the local population's eyes? That's a good question. I would say that civil affairs,
00:07:09 DREW BEAMER
that civil affairs, public affairs, government affairs is important enough that the person running the entire project should be from one of those disciplines. They should not be an engineer. And this goes into a lot of corporate environments and a lot of governmental environments where people promote subject matter experts, the leadership positions. And there's a saying that when you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When you're an engineer in charge of a major. infrastructure project, every problem looks like an engineering problem. So one of the things that I did in the private sector as a consultant is I would get put over top of these big projects. They could be adjacent to energy development or they could be like disaster power restoration projects. We have to communicate real time with stakeholders in the community and you need to communicate with local elected officials and local governments to give them real time updates. So in those scenarios, they would call on people like me to lead an ad hoc team that we assembled. And that team would include people who are above my pay grade. I mean, they would have people who are directors and VPs of companies. You'd have external consultants. You'd have people who had more experience. And the way that you get them out of that engineer fallacy mindset, you need the person running it to understand the nuances of the campaigns. You need to demonstrate proof of life on your concepts. You need to be able to demonstrate how focusing on things like civil affairs and public affairs make everybody's life easier. Because when you avoid those small tactical missteps, you don't create major strategic blunders for yourself. And the other issue is once you've painted yourself or you've allowed opponents to paint you as an occupying force, anything you do positively or negatively will be held against you. I've worked in scenarios where we were trying to build an energy project and the developer had let the information space get away from them. And they would say things like, we may have to use eminent domain to get the property needed for this project. And people would say, well, that's corporations taking private property. Then the developer would say, well, we're just going to pay a lot of money. We're going to pay several times value for your project. And the opponents would say, now you're just paying people off. You want to avoid those damned if you do, damned if you don't situations. And one of the issues, circle back to the crux of your question, is the engineer's fallacy is avoidable for the same reason a lot of these types of issues are avoidable. I would recommend against putting a subject matter expert in charge of one of these projects. You need somebody who's more of a generalist and more of a manager. And just like a military operation, you want the commanding officer to understand all the different components. They don't have to be an expert in all the components, but they have to know how they work synergistically with one another to create a holistic operation. And an engineer, generally speaking, is not going to be very good at that.
00:10:13 ASAD RAZA
That makes sense. Engineers aren't developed to think like that. They're developed to be engineers and be subject matter experts within their field. So which makes sense. You hit something and you're talking about how your competitors can exploit these tactical mishaps. So how can some of these energy projects become proxy wars between their competitors or their meat peers? In the United States, you have a dynamic that's called astroturfing.
00:10:36 DREW BEAMER
a dynamic that's called astroturfing. I'm assuming it exists elsewhere in the world. But astroturfing is basically the manufacturing of grassroots, okay, through dark money. So when one company proposes an energy project, you'll see grassroots opposition crop up. They'll all be singing off the same sheet of music. The messaging will be dialed in. They'll have branded collateral materials. They'll have yard signs. They'll have t -shirts. And I would say nine times out of 10, that opposition is funded and ginned up by whoever your competitor is, usually an industry incumbent. Okay. So there's a dynamic that we've seen in proxy wars in the past hundred years anyway. And that is that In a proxy war, sometimes you want to defeat the enemy, but other times you just want to bog them down. You just want them to bleed out money forever and ever and ever. So you were building a hydroelectric project and your chief competitor in the market was a nuclear power plant. The operators of the nuclear power plant are going to have a cost assessment where they're going to say, if your hydro dam comes online, it's going to cost them X millions of dollars a month in lost revenue. So if it's going to cost X millions of dollars a month in lost revenue, then if they can delay you by a year, they've just made X times 12 in found money. So what they will do is they will hire political operatives to create a grassroots insurgency against your project. And bringing it back to the engineer's fallacy, the grassroots insurgency will be based primarily on emotion. It will be people who... at the grassroots level who've been convinced that your project is going to completely destroy their way of life for one reason or another. It's going to have environmental issues. It's going to have cultural issues. They're going to throw a lot of messages at the wall and they're going to see what sticks because one of these messages is going to saturate. And the engineer's fallacy is people will look at this grassroots opposition and they'll say, well, we can sway them on. facts and reason and logic. We're just going to tell them how clean the power is, how many jobs it's going to create, how it's going to improve energy security and lower energy prices. We keep telling them those facts. They'll have no other choice but to eventually support us. And that works almost as well as going into South Vietnam and telling people that the American way of life is the way everybody should live. absent cultural context, absent building capital, the facts are not going to matter, which is why one of the reasons I say, if you think you're going to build something somewhere, get in the field very, v