Investigating the multi-scalar production and contestation of wind energy futures. Relating spatial and sociotechnical imaginaries in national and local wind energy controversies in France

Abstract

Energy transitions are deeply socio-spatial processes: they create new geographies of living with and producing energy, while being shaped by past and present socio-spatial patterns, relations, and identities. Having long remained secondary in energy research and policy, these issues have received growing attention. Simultaneously, the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (STIs) has been brought into energy social science, reframing energy transitions as sociotechnical projects involving specific understandings of socio-political and economic order. While research in this vein has increasingly touched on spatial concepts, the relationships between STIs and space have yet to be fully addressed. This thesis remedies this gap by proposing a conceptualisation of the spatial dimensions of STIs, draws on the concept of spatial imaginaries (SIs) to formalise this and proposes a framework holding that spatial imaginaries and STIs are co-constituted.

This framework is empirically operationalised through the prism of wind energy in France. Two research questions are addressed. First, whether and how competing wind energy STIs are co-constituted with different SIs at the national scale. Then, whether and how these national wind energy STIs circulate in local scales and contexts, and how SIs influence their uptake, negotiation, and contestation by stakeholders. The research design is multi-scalar and comparative. A first phase examines the STIs and SIs mobilised by actors involved in producing, negotiating or contesting the deployment of wind energy at the national scale through the analysis of a corpus of 170 documents. A second phase compares two offshore wind energy siting controversies, one in the rural and tourist area of Oléron (O), the other in the port-industrial city of Dunkirk (D). It draws on the analysis of documents (O=111, D=96), meeting transcripts (O=19, D=16) and interviews with key stakeholders (O=22, D=20). The approach is qualitative and uses thematic analysis.

Findings from phase one identify four predominant wind energy STIs at the national scale. These reveal the ambivalent status of wind energy, both integrated into dominant visions of state-led and hard-path ecological modernisation (dominant STI) as well as alternative decentralised, soft path energy transitions (citizen energy STI), faced with contestations on both sides of the political spectrum (conservative and anti-capitalist STIs). Constructs of territories and rurality represent a major element of differentiation between these visions, crystallising salient political and socio-economic issues. This provides the building blocks for phase two. Findings show that the SIs associated with the dominant STI have impact on the local level, informing project design, siting processes, location choices, and influencing how developers and local actors draw on local SIs. Alternative national STIs provide strategic resources for local stakeholders to challenge the projects and the dominant STI. Analysing more finely the interactions between these STIs and local SIs, the research shows that, while ecological and maritime geographies of interconnections challenge the dominant STI in both locations, beyond this the cases are almost diametrically opposed. In Dunkirk, local SIs are a resource for anchoring the dominant STI, precluding the imagination of alternatives. By contrast, in Oléron, local SIs are a constraint on the dominant STI and need to be circumvented or defused. Conversely, they a resource for envisioning alternative futures.

The thesis advances two primary areas of research. First, the STIs/SIs framework refines analyses of STIs, allows for better comparison between different STIs in a similar context and scale, and helps in capturing dynamics of differentiation and co-optation between them. Then, the thesis empirically illustrates how (in)compatibilities between local SIs and national STIs help explain why the latter extend more or less easily in different locales. It also scrutinises how stakeholders strategically create these (in)compatibilities by (re)formulating different types of SIs and provides a typology of interactions between STIs and SIs at the local scale, offering a starting point for future research. Finally, it highlights the role of SIs in local coalition building, which can facilitate or hinder the local anchoring of STIs. Second, the thesis makes three broader contributions to energy social science, energy geographies and research on the social acceptance of renewable energy deployment. First, the STIs/SIs framework allows for a better understanding of the production and contestation of energy projects at both national and local scales by contextualising them within sociotechnical and socio-spatial pathways. Second, the operationalisation of the framework to bridge the national and local offers novel insights on the spatio-temporal unfolding of sociotechnical change. It shows that SIs are pre-activated in national STIs, which then bear down on local contexts and encounter local SIs, shaping local responses and outcomes. Third, the framework challenges and extends research on the community acceptance of energy projects by reframing siting controversies as multi-scalar conversations in which the encounter between a dominant STI and local contexts stimulates the envisioning of general energy futures while simultaneously eliciting reformulations of local SIs. Overall, the main contribution of the thesis is to demonstrate the value of the STIs/SIs framework in analysing the co-production of energy and socio-spatial futures at multiple scales. Its flexibility makes it applicable to a variety of socio-spatial constructs and scales, and highly culturally transferable. Further research is needed to develop the framework to investigate different technologies and scalar relationships, in diverse geographical and cultural settings.