Reassembling Energy Policy

Stefan Cihan Aykut

doi:10.23987/sts.65324

Abstract

Ongoing debates about the need to deeply transform energy systems worldwide have spurred renewed scholarly interest in the role of future-visions and foreknowledge in energy policy. Forecasts and scenarios are in fact ubiquitous in energy debates: commonly calculated using energy models, they are employed by governments, administrations and civil society actors to identify problems, choose between potential solutions, and justify specific forms of political intervention. This article contributes to these debates through a historic study of foreknowledge-making – modelling, forecasting, and scenario-building – and its relationship to the structuring of ‘energy policy’ as an autonomous policy domain in France and Germany. It brings together two strands of literature: work in the anthropology of politics on ‘policy assemblages’, and STS research on the ‘performative’ effects of foreknowledge. The main argument is that new ways of assembling energy systems in energy modelling, and of bringing together policy networks in scenario-building and forecasting exercises, can contribute to policy change. To analyse the conditions under which such change occurs, the article focuses on two periods: the making of national energy policies as ‘energy supply policies’ in the post-war decades; and challenges to dominant approaches to energy policy and energy modelling in the 1970s and 1980s. It concludes by arguing that further research should not only focus on the effects of foreknowledge on expectations and beliefs (‘discursive performativity’), but also take into account how new models ‘equip’ political, administrative and market actors (‘material performativity’), and how forecasting practices recompose and shape wider policy worlds (‘social performativity’).

Highlights

In a section entitled “The War of the Models” in Adults in the Room, a book on his time in office as the Greek finance minister during the European debt crisis, Yanis Varoufakis (2017: 603) recalls the following situation:... whenever I argued that in a struggling economy marred by poverty and tax evasion the best way to increase the state’s revenues from VAT or from corporate tax was to reduce VAT and corporate tax rates, the troika would retort that their models showed the opposite: only by increasing the rate of VAT and corporate tax would tax revenue rise
The workings of the Energie-Enquete contributed to further structuring and stabilising the dominant predictive policy assemblage, which in turn ensured the reception and uptake of the report by relevant actors: in the preceding years, economic institutes with close ties to industry and government10 had begun to establish energy forecasts based on econometric models that became increasingly complex over time, and could only be understood and challenged by a handful of actors (Seefried, 2010a)
Energy controversies unfold as political or ideological struggles about the problems of energy production and suitable ways of dealing with such problems; I have argued here that they can be understood as struggles between competing ‘predictive policy assemblages’, in which new actors, their problemframings and predictive practices challenge both how established models compose energy systems and how major anticipatory exercises include relevant actors in the production of energy futures

Summary

Introduction

In a section entitled “The War of the Models” in Adults in the Room, a book on his time in office as the Greek finance minister during the European debt crisis, Yanis Varoufakis (2017: 603) recalls the following situation:... whenever I argued that in a struggling economy marred by poverty and tax evasion the best way to increase the state’s revenues from VAT or from corporate tax was to reduce VAT and corporate tax rates, the troika would retort that their models showed the opposite: only by increasing the rate of VAT and corporate tax would tax revenue rise. Placing predictive policy assemblages at the centre of the study of energy policy-making allows capturing both the central role and ‘performative’ effects of predictive practices, and the ways in which different actor-coalitions use models and forecasts in their quest for public attention and political influence.

Results

Conclusion