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Protests Against Energy Infrastructures. Legitimate Practices of Resistance or Threat to Democracy?

Civil Society
Conflict
Democracy
Social Movements
Protests
Energy
Energy Policy
P323
Eva Eichenauer
Universität Potsdam
Julia Zilles
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Patrick Scherhaufer
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences

Friday 09:00 - 10:45 BST (28/08/2020)

Abstract

The transition of the energy system is leading to profound societal and infrastructural challenges and changes. Struggles and protests over the future of the global energy supply appear on various scales and address numerous issues. They range from local conflicts over the extraction of tar sands to nation-wide protests on the phase-out of fossil energy. Infrastructure of the energy transition, such as wind turbines or transmission lines are accompanied by rigid activists, so are castor transports of nuclear waste. The protests also have a wide range of impacts: Some do have a significant impact on the social perception of energy infrastructure, but little political influence. Others have only a minor impact on the social acceptance of a technology, but strong political impact. On the other hand, energy infrastructure connects regions and distributes benefits and costs unevenly along its sphere of influence: both spatially and temporally. As physical infrastructure it leads to long-lasting path dependencies, both technologically and socially. Hence, questions of conflict management, social acceptance and justice within political research on energy infrastructure need to be addressed. The panel wants to theoretically discuss the justification and democratic potential of protest and its actions and examine it along with some empirical case studies in the field of energy infrastructure projects (e.g. renewable energy expansion, coal mining and power stations, fracking). The focus is on both the view of the actors and their perceptions on social acceptance and environmental justice as well as the legitimacy of these actions from the point of democratic theory.

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