Political Decisions Gone with the Wind? Windpower Politics and Administration in Norway

The conflict and potential trade-off between renewable energy development and nature protection is clearly seen in policies aimed at promoting windpower. While both renewable energy development and nature protection are widely regarded as legitimate and important political objectives, combining these objectives may be challenging, particularly in geographical regions under high pressure from human activities. While there is strong momentum for more windpower in Norway, there is also increasing opposition from nature conservation organizations, recreational interests, and local communities. Political decisions presumably provide some guidance as to the prioritization of different objectives and interests, but it is up to the windpower licensing authority to implement political decisions, handle conflicting interests, and ultimately decide whether to grant or reject windpower development applications. This paper examines how political decisions and conflicting interests are handled by the licensing authority NVE (the energy agency) in the Norwegian licensing process for windpower development. We find that NVE has significant discretion in interpreting and implementing political decisions and signals, as well as decisive influence over the licensing process and outcomes. There is a discrepancy between the formal licensing requirements and the more informal practices established by the NVE, which gives a special role to the host municipalities, project developers and landowners in the licensing process. Unclear and shifting political signals help to explain the development of informal practices by NVE and the agency’s significant discretion in weighting different interests in the licensing process. Based on our study, we cannot conclude that NVE gives priority to windpower development at the expense of nature protection, but we do find that it is hard to determine the weight given to nature conservation concerns when NVE decides to grant or reject licensing applications. More generally, our study shows that research into the politics of windpower need to go beyond studies of how policies are adopted at the political level or measuring outcomes by studying actual expansion of wind power farms. The missing link between policies and outcomes is implementation, which remains an understudied topic. Hence, future research on energy transition processes could usefully focus on the way that adopted legislation is executed by the bureaucracy and how it is implemented at the operational level of the regulatory agency.