Landscapes of Power: Deliberating the New Energy Economy

Macalester College, Saint Paul MN

Investigators

Abstract

While national opinion polls often demonstrate unequivocal support for a new energy economy, there is a strong countermovement emerging across rural America against wind energy development. Communities from North Carolina to California are in the midst of furious battles to limit new installations through sweeping legislative acts and zoning ordinances. This political response is in part a consequence of outdated modes of public participation that fail to fully capture the socio-cultural dislocations and vulnerabilities that occur when vast new energy geographies emerge. The objective of this project is to advance understandings of the role of public deliberation in the design of the new American energy economy. With a focus on wind energy, this project seeks to design, test and evaluate a deliberative model that engages diverse publics toward envisioning a new energy landscape in regions of active development. The research will be performed over three phases. Phase I refines the landscape symposia approach so that it represents emerging best practices in deliberative planning, including the use of landscape visualization and foresight planning techniques. In Phase II, three test symposia will be conducted at diverse geographical locations at the county level involving samples of community residents. Phase III will comparatively examine the deliberative processes and outcomes of these test symposia. The comparative analysis will inform the production of a Community Guide for wind energy planning that will make results accessible to industry, agency and advocacy groups. The project?s intellectual merit lies in its extension of largely European STS models and insights on participatory science and technology assessment toward critical American environmental policy concerns. The project will also design and test a set of visualization techniques that elicit socio-cultural concerns about landscape change, including the use of dynamic mapping tools, field tours and photographic analyses. The project?s broader impacts focus on catalyzing participatory deliberation about the new energy technologies that are reshaping American communities and landscapes. In addition to academic and industry publications and presentations, the outreach components of the project include the training of undergraduate researchers, a science café, large public lecture, and the production of a national Community Guide for industry, NGO and agency professionals