Patrick Devine-Wright

This chapter examines the competing visions of sociotechnical and spatial order that structure the national controversy over wind energy deployment in France between 2015 and 2022. In recent years, national wind energy policies have elicited controversy, prompting actors to articulate contrasting visions of (un)desirable energy futures crystallizing in competing sociotechnical imaginaries (STIs). Based on the analysis of a corpus of 170 documents from government, industry and civil society actors, the chapter identifies four STIs struggling for traction. It highlights the ambivalent status of wind energy, integrated into a dominant STI of ecological modernization shared by government and industry actors and a more transformative STI propagated by citizen energy actors, faced with contestation on both flanks of the political spectrum by an anti-capitalist STI and a more conservative STI. Each of these STIs is co-constituted with spatial imaginaries, coalescing into divergent visions of (un)desirable socio-spatial orders. Spatial imaginaries are strategic in emphasizing the (un)desirability of wind energy, but also contribute to a deeper contrast between localist STIs rejecting centralization and neoliberalism (anti-capitalist and citizen energy STIs), and centralized visions of socio-spatial order that reproduce existing modes of energy, political and economic organization (dominant STI and conservative STI). The chapter concludes that it is important not to confine the geographical analysis of STIs to the local scale but to interrogate the spatial imaginaries implicated in technological development at the national level to capture how sociotechnical and spatial orders are co-constituted and negotiated.

Proposed energy projects across rural working landscapes play an important role in energy transitions. While community engagement has been increasingly a part of these projects, instrumental motivations for engagement and the emphasis placed on achieving social acceptance has remained uncritically examined. Here, we aim to highlight relationships between actor rationale, the structuring of engagement processes, and how communities perceive the driving forces behind engagement practices. To do so, we draw on lived experiences of communities facing proposed shale gas and wind energy projects across rural working landscapes in the UK and Canada, respectively. We find that engagement is often perceived by community members as insincere, insufficient, ineffective and instrumentally-driven. We suggest that a more community-centered approach to engagement is necessary and will require a move beyond existing engagement and acceptance practice and frameworks. This can include creating more inclusive decision-making processes where powers are balanced and designing community engagement to incorporate multiple rationales beyond achieving social acceptance of energy projects.