Dispute, discontent and displacement: exploring the intersections between discourse and scale in the governance of renewable energy

Wind power’s ‘planning problem’ is complex and multidimensional. Prominent aspects of this problem are issues surrounding social acceptance and how this is (mis)understood in the policy domain. Attempts to remedy such issues often rest on the assumption that ‘better information’ will generate consensus and thereby resolve disagreement. However, efforts at this have been largely unsuccessful as planning disputes over the quantum, size and location turbines have failed to dissipate with advances in assessment methods and engineering technologies. This begs the question as to how wind power’s planning problem can be better understood? We explore one possible response to this by investigating the ways different knowledges and knowledge holders seek to accumulate authority over the ‘facts’ of a situation. This is undertaken through an interpretive analysis of how agents to contentious windfarm proposals in Ireland strived to mobilise contending realities wherein they were advantageously positioned as credible sources of knowledge. We draw conclusions from this analysis regarding broader debates in environmental governance and suggest how wind power’s ‘planning problem’ should be reconceived. Symposium on Sub-national government & pathways to sustainable energy Cardiff University, 15-16 May, 2014 Dispute, Discontent and Displacement Lennon & Scott Page 2 of 34 Introduction A post-carbon world of energy security, affordability and environmental sustainability has long been part of discourses about a better future (Pasqualetti, 2011; Toke, 1998). However, debates concerning renewable energy, and wind energy in particular, are characterised by a ‘social gap’ between general support and local opposition (Bell, et al., 2013). For advocates of wind energy development, this provokes an unnecessary obstacle course of planning processes that must be negotiated in proposing new windfarms (Hadwin, 2009). For those opposed to such developments, planning is seen at best as an uncomfortable ally in helping them articulate objections (Cowell, 2007), and more commonly as an arena where unfair accusations of NIMBYism proliferate (Devine-Wright, 2009; van der Horst, 2007; Wolsink, 2012). These conflicts attest to the multidimensional nature of the ‘planning problem’ concerning wind power (Ellis, et al., 2009), ranging from perceptions of planning as a bureaucratic barrier to the renewables sector, to the inability of planning policy to effectively balance environmental trade-offs, such as promoting renewables that may negatively impact on ecological resources (habitats and wildlife). However, for Ellis et al. (2009) a more important dimension of the ‘planning problem’ relates to issues surrounding social acceptance and how this is (mis)understood in the policy domain. Among the issues highlighted by the authors included the following key research findings (p. 528):  Local discontent over wind power deployment may be accentuated by insensitive decision-making processes;  Issues over perceived or actual ownership of wind power schemes and the distribution of benefits are influential in shaping the level and nature of local opposition or acceptance;  Objectors have differential resources at different stages of the decision-making process such that they may exert influence unevenly;  Social acceptability of windfarms is inextricably linked to values, world views and the way localities are related to the wider global environment. Dispute, Discontent and Displacement Lennon & Scott Page 3 of 34 Remedying these problems have often rested on the assumption that ‘better information’ will generate consensus and thereby resolve dispute (Barry, et al., 2008). Despite criticism of this view (Owens, et al., 2004), the generation of such information in planning practice remains inured to linear-rational models of knowledge production that are assumed to provide the ‘facts’ of a situation by virtue of their internal merits (Adelle, et al., 2012; Cowell and Lennon, 2014). This disregards the variety of ways in which the world is interpreted and knowledge claims about reality are produced (Rydin, 2007). Consequently, efforts to identify, understand and solve the ‘planning problem’ of wind power may be handicapped by a blinkered epistemological commitment to an inherited bias in modes of knowledge