Energy landscape as a polity. Wind power practices in Northern Friesland (Germany)

The success of wind power development in Northern Friesland (Germany) is mainly due to its ‘citizen wind parks’. However, their historical emergence, as well as their astonishing scale-up from small to large wind farms, is little understood from the inside. Following the critical approach of assemblage thinking, this paper’s proposal is to revise the notion of ‘assembly’ to investigate collective processes of ‘attunement’. The paper stresses the practical work of valuating ‘things’ and making them commensurable in the light of the relations (inherited practices, place attachments, project perspectives) grounded in a place. This approach makes it possible to identify the ways in which assemblies from Northern Friesland have negotiated and transformed an inherited landscape into a shared wind power landscape. We call this activity in which local assemblies engage ‘a polity’. Finally, we illustrate the term’s conceptual potential by discussing its scope and links to techniques of power that follow from environmental ‘governmentality’.