More than deliberation is needed: Potential for agonistic moments in community wind energy planning

Abstract

Although community project planning is widely understood as crucial to equitable wind energy infrastructure planning, involved members of the public nevertheless perceive such participatory interventions as merely pseudo-participatory. Drawing on agonistic planning literature, we argue that this disposition towards tokenism can only be tackled with a (re)politization of community project planning practices. This includes an explicit (re)integration and cultivation of dissent and the potential overthrow of traditionally consensus-oriented formats that follow the deliberative paradigm. For radically political community energy project planning, however, public discourses must be fluid and participants must be open towards dissent, which largely contradicts the typical postures of a deliberative citizen who is supposed to argue in a rational and objective way, using the best arguments to convince others. To examine the feasibility of agonistic approaches for community wind energy planning, we conducted a quantitative discourse analysis on the data set of a large regional survey of an on-going wind energy planning project in Switzerland. We focused on estimating the degree of hegemony of public wind energy discourses and the willingness of residents to engage in participatory settings that can facilitate radically political community project planning (e.g., substantive participation settings). Our results show that for planning individual wind energy projects, the potential for agonistic planning approaches is low, not only because the discourses are already too hegemonic, but also because there is no real willingness to engage in radically political community wind energy project planning. In the context of early, comprehensive, and integrated community planning, however, agonistic approaches could provide the ground for open and innovative participatory planning of renewable energies.