Abstract
This article furthers political geographic thinking on democracy by generating and employing a conceptualisation of ‘assemblage-democracy’. Bringing an assemblage perspective to democratic thinking brings to the fore three key dimensions: the co-constitution of material and non-material connections; connectivity and associations, in particular engagement with multiple heterogeneous ‘minoritarian’ publics; and the (re)construction of spatial configurations such as scale. We employ these three dimensions of materiality, publics, and scale, in combination with the concept of (de)territorialisation to produce a geographic conceptualisation of democracy as emergent, precarious, and plural.We operationalise and refine the concept of assemblage-democracy through an empirical analysis of democratic experiments with energy resources. Specifically, we analyse negotiations involved in emergent democratic energy experiments through in-depth qualitative empirical study of community-owned energy projects in the UK, asking what kind of democracy emerges with new technologies and how? In answering this question, we demonstrate the fragile, contingent, and contested nature of democratic practices and connections produced in the (re)enactment of energy infrastructures. In doing so, this article also shows how an assemblage lens can offer a renewed understanding of how democratic politics is configured through material resource governance.
Highlights
Across Europe and North America there is concern that existing democratic institutions are in a period of crisis
Having set out how we think the concept of territorialisation can complement STS approaches to the political to provide an analytical approach for the concept of democracy, we return to more established STS ground in thinking through different interrelated components, or territorialisation loops as we call them, that are at work in assemblage-democracy
In doing so we demonstrate how materiality is central to under standing democratic experiments in resource governance
Summary
Across Europe and North America there is concern that existing democratic institutions are in a period of crisis. Energy democracy literature (for example, Stephens, 2019; Szulecki, 2018; Van Veelen, 2018) has made important contributions, demonstrating opportunities for political change created through technological change, and providing legitimacy for alternative forms of energy ownership and control, while criti cally analysing the challenges in enacting this supposed revivification of democratic governance. It is not always clear what makes such a system democratic. In doing so we show how our conceptualisation provides a contingent, emergent and materially-oriented understanding of democratic experiments-in-action, while making a specific contribution to the growing field of work on energy democracy and energy transitions more broadly by seeking to pluralise how connections between energy and democracy can be conceptualised and investigated
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