Local mobilisation against windfarm developments in Spanish rural areas: New actors in the regulation arena

Abstract

The region of Valencia has a marked territorial duality: an urbanised, populated and high-income coastal line, and mountain and depressed inland rural areas. This territorial duality also derives in a functional duality, so that market and regulation drivers seem to assign rural areas specific roles for the provision of raw materials, energy, water, and the like. One of the clearest examples can be found in the design and development of the Wing Energy Plan passed by the Regional Government in 2001, which designated areas for the installation of windmills. However, this regulation has resulted in an outstanding emergence of associations that have organised at several levels (from the local to the national) as a strong opposition movement to the local developments of the Plan. With this background, the objective of this paper is to analyze, from a set of case studies, the processes of emergence and the evolution of collective actors (associations) which have been arising in many rural areas as a response to the local applications of the Wind Energy Plan. Attention will be paid to understand the tactics used, the process of adaptation to the participation mechanisms, and the role played by local and non-local networks.