Be ye transformed by renewable energy policy

On the flow of a different kind of power in the energy system

Dec 11, 2019

Transitions are not peaceable affairs. They shake things up, go against incumbent interests, open up new fields of action, and demand new roles. It is strange therefore that power has only been obliquely addressed in many of the main currents of transition science. We’ve had reason to echo a similar observation in an earlier issue on the role of the state. Today, I want to call attention to the forces that impact how citizens, whether as energy consumers, energy producers (prosumers), or stakeholders in decentralized energy infrastructure can carve out a new place for themselves within this changing energy system.

When you think about how power shapes us, Michel Foucault should come immediately to mind. Can his insights into modern power help us explicate how we can create the best conditions for ordinary folks to fashion a new role for themselves?

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Foucault has been a seductive and productive author to think with for many anthropologists. As scientists of the everyday (and as intellectuals who like to think of themselves as critical), Foucault’s suggestion that power infuses the intimate details of our public and private lives was quite welcome, especially for those working in the 1980s to breathe new life into ‘anthropology as cultural critique’. How so? Firstly, Foucault laid bare the (often naturalized and thus unperceived) exercise of power in knowledge production. Institutions of science and the modernizing state organized who was able to speak, how, and about whom. Secondly, and more directly relevant for our question today, he showed how governing has become more intimate and pervasive over the centuries. States became increasingly involved in shaping their subjects (incidentally, by producing knowledge about them) – through education, law and order, health, and in response to various Social Questions. To Foucault, these practices acutely posed the question of how we respond to the regulation of ever-expanding domains of our lives. Do we internalize it, resist it, work around it? What in other words do they mean for the conditions to fashion a role for ourselves?

There, now that I have explained Foucault, let’s see how we can bring him to bear on energy transitions.

Neoliberal transitions in Eastern Germany

For this, I’ll be turning to Bues and Gailing’s (2017) examination of wind energy in former East Germany’s Berlin-Brandenburg, where former agricultural land was slashed and sacrificed to the god of capitalism after the Wende and which has since been rediscovered as an “installation landscape” for Germany’s follow-up Wende to renewable energy (as discussed in its full symbolic significance in this issue, we see marginalized regions becoming prime energy real-estate, generally with relatively few benefits to locals, but we’ll get back to that a bit further down.)

Rye and wind in Brandenburg (Photo by Patrick Pleul / Newscom / HH).

Bues and Gailing draw out a couple of characteristics. First is the neoliberal context. As part of EU harmonization as well as the facilitation of new players in renewable energy, energy markets have been liberalized and market logics reign supreme. This also made space for the prosumer. Second is the depoliticization of energy policy by delegating (wind) energy policy-making to ‘expert’ bodies like regional planning agencies. This kind of policy-making is generally “technocratic and lacking in transparency” (86). Finally, the ideological hegemony of The Energy Transition makes it unclear on what basis people might oppose these installations. This actually represents a second kind of depoliticization, which draws an issue into the “realm of necessity” (77) and out of the realm of legitimate contestation.

What conditions does this create for people to fashion their role in the energy system? The authors conclude that there are few “subject positions” open to people. There’s the ‘entrepreneurial’ land-owner who’d like to opt in, and lease or rent their land to energy investors (as a true homo oeconomicus). (75) For those who want to opt out, however, this constellation does not leave much besides “laggard” or “NIMBYist”.

Environmental subjects

Bues and Gailing’s article is written as a call for more research into what spaces we are creating for people in our energy transitions. How people actually occupy those spaces is not quite developed yet. A classic article (2005) by Arun Agrawal shows a few glimpses of what we might expect to find when it is. Agrawal traces how people come to care about ‘the environment’ in northern rural India. More specifically, he traces how some people, who live near and off of forests, shift from seeing the forest purely as a resource for their households and livelihoods to considering it as needing protection (from too many people simply using it as a resource for their households and livelihoods).

Showing this… transition requires the perspective of the longue durée. Like a century’s worth of durée. Around the turn to the 20th century, the colonial government asserted control over the forests and told people to take their hands off it. For some reason, that didn’t work. In the 1930s, the government changed tack and gave the forests back into community ownership. That made a big difference, but when you take your own hands off your forest, that still hurts your individual household and livelihood. So the really interesting question is: how come certain people, headmen among them, despite the personal economic drawbacks, started hugging these trees? (Big shout-out to the tree huggers, important friends of this publication.) Agrawal finds the answer in practice. He discovered a quasi-significant correlation between pro-environmental attitudes, on the one hand, and participation in the councils that were erected to protect the forests, on the other. That participation in environmental practices necessitated people to redefine their interests, even when they conflict with pre-existing interests.

Agrawal therefore supplies us with

The Proposition of the Week
“beliefs are formulated in response to experiences” (163).

We take action and then we make sense of whatever happens as a consequence.

Speaking of taking action. (Though somehow I get the feeling he’s not grinning over the prospect for biofuels.)

Energy democracy and citizenship

The answer to the Ultimate Question of Energy, Citizenship and the Sustainability is therefore 42. No, wait. I mean, participation. Why? Because people change. Give them a venue to meaningfully participate and they will reflexively evolve their beliefs and opinions. Against all technocratic institutional instincts therefore, we should involve people early on in any new initiative. In the spirit of Bues and Gailing: we need to offer people a subject position other than just the entrepreneur or the NIMBYist. What kind of ‘framework’ do we offer people to understand their role, that is, what space for action and influence? We should not be afraid of the (local) politics of energy: it is the process through which we must become ‘energy citizens’.

If we are willing to upset some neoliberal conventions and we figure out how to align people’s current – perceived, material – interests (think: revenue sharing) with the interests of a sustainable existence on this planet, we should be able to go quite far.

Upsetting neoliberal conventions: Berlin 1974 (Photo by Wilfried Glienke, for Ullstein and Getty).

Still, it also seems unlikely that we can bet on building consensus to get us there every time. What Agrawal’s piece also makes clear is that while people may incorporate new environmental values and practices in the engagement with new policy, they’ll likely lag behind the required time-line. We therefore still need to do the hard work of determining what must remain in the realm of necessity and what should go to the realm of deliberation. We just know that at least the boundary should be redrawn in favour of the latter.

Aight, this was a nice one to write, hope you enjoyed it and till next time! Heart it if you liked it, share it if you loved it, lodge a formal complaint if you hated it!

Sources

Agrawal, A. 2005. "Environmentality: Community, Intimate Government, and the Making of Environmental Subjects in Kumaon, India". Current Anthropology. 46 (2): 161-190. https://doi.org/10.1086/427122

Bues, Andrea, and Ludger Gailing. 2016. "Energy Transitions and Power: Between Governmentality and Depoliticization". In: Gailing, Ludger, and Timothy Moss (eds). Conceptualizing Germany’s Energy Transition Institutions, Materiality, Power, Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137505927

Previous issues in the series “Lessons from the History of Anthropology”

The gender of renewable energy (lessons from feminism)
A Global Green New Deal (lessons from Marxism)
The Symbolic Life of Energy (lessons from British symbolic anthropology)
Everything is connected (lessons from structuralism)
Check this one out if you want to know more about how we become the citizen-consumers we are through practice (with the help of Bourdieu, another thinker of the powers that shape us).
The energy system (lessons from structural functionalism)
Where does the power of community energy come from? (lessons from The Gift)
(R)evolutionary change (lessons from evolutionism)

The Social Life of Energy

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