Performing Public Good: The Statecraft of Objective and Optimal FIT

Abstract

Technoscientific-legal rationality in policy-making is the statecraft of creating a ‘factual reality’ which in effect co-produces a combined technical and socio-political reality for people and institutions, and at the same time expresses the need for representation in politics. Concentrating on the deliberation proceedings and calculations of the Taiwanese Feed-In Tariff (FIT) Committee deciding on a ‘reasonable tariff’, this article explores the way that technoscientific knowledge-based deliberation, with tacitly enacted roles and boundaries, seriously constrains the possible forms and meanings of renewable energy (RE) and the notions of public interest emerging from the process. It argues the expert committee which is backed up by expert authority and manifests in a bureaucratic-managerial style is best portrayed as a mechanism of controversy settlement and depoliticisation, by distinguishing the ‘core technical issues’ from ‘the others’, and by calculating ‘relevant’ and ‘objective’ quantitative factors and values. The deliberation process reflects an incessant intention to purify the decision made by the committee and to eliminate the remaining discretion of the experts from wider visibility, which results in an overwhelming preference for mathematical technicality — the public’s ‘best interest’ is translated into the ‘reasonableness’ of the FIT, which is largely built on a designed formula for steering tariffs among the sea of uncertainty, by taking the average or median value of alternative FIT calculations. I argue this deliberation is democratically envisioned yet technocratically enacted, aiming to depoliticise the decisions made on tariff rates and thus preventing further controversy.