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Chapitre d'ouvrage Année : 2012

Planning with the missing masses: innovative wind power planning in France

Résumé

The recent deployment of wind energy in many countries is raising acceptance issues, especially in relation to landscape issues in some countries. This has been the case in France or the UK and, more recently, Denmark and Germany, two countries which were famous for their successful wind power development. The role of land and landscape planning has been questioned in this process as regards to its procedural efficiency in easing wind power deployment. This resulted in what has been termed a "planning problem", a perspective which tends to overlook the qualitative and potentially innovative dimension of wind power planning processes. The chapter aims at contributing in reversing the "planning problem" perspective by looking at the way in which wind power planning processes contributed in renewing the social representations and practices of landscape in different parts of, hence contributing to the deployment of this technology. Academic research on wind power has highlighted important dimensions of planning processes, such as the role of civil society and social networks during the implementation phase. Yet what these analyses have suggested, but not made sufficiently clear, is that implementation goes beyond (merely) applying a pre-given and stable framework. As Waterton (2003) has shown, even implementing a mere botanical classification entails performance and innovation: depending on whether you are a dancer or a social scientist, you will not end up with the same categorization. In other words, implementation leads to innovation in the sense of a transformation of existing norms and institutions in accordance with a situated experience. Such innovation underlies technological development because it is the social process of assembling heterogeneous networks. In this chapter, I shall elaborate this argument and contextualize it by looking at the way in which wind power planning processes helped innovate social representations and practices of landscape in two parts of France - Aveyron and Narbonnaise. The case studies will examine the ways in which the potential of wind power technology is constructed through the situated process of planning wind power in these different places. They illustrate the capacity of planning to evolve from a rather administrative and normative approach to more open and innovative approaches so as to address issues raised by wind power deployment (§1). I then use these cases to discuss lessons for the analysis of the energy transition and the role of planning (§2). Finally, I conclude by briefly considering the extent to which the lessons learned from wind power deployment might be relevant for the governance of the broader energy transition.

Domaines

Sociologie
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Dates et versions

halshs-00762312, version 1 (06-12-2012)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-00762312 , version 1

Citer

Alain Nadaï. Planning with the missing masses: innovative wind power planning in France. Palgrave Macmillan. Learning from Wind Power: Governance, Societal and Policy Perspectives on Sustainable Energy, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.108-132, 2012. ⟨halshs-00762312⟩
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