Pilot Society and the Energy Transition by Marianne Ryghaug & Tomas Moe Skjølsvold

Author:Marianne Ryghaug & Tomas Moe Skjølsvold
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030611842
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Orchestration of Participation in Pilot and Demonstration Projects

As discussed in Chap. 2, many pilot and demonstration projects reflects the involved actors strong focus on technology development and deployment, with a limited focus on potentially transformative effects such as the ability to scale up, or what Marres highlights as the potential to actively tinker with political and societal aspects. Many projects only marginally focus on ‘real’ technology users, which means, that insights from users do not feed into further technology development. One consequence of this that has been observed in the research literature is that prospective “publics” or “users” are cast as groups that strongly resemble the technology developers (Strengers 2014; Skjølsvold and Lindkvist 2015). In instances when publics are imagined differently, they tend to be envisaged as barriers to success, with the preferred scenario often being automated technological solutions that work in the background without being noticed (see also Fjellså et al. forthcoming). Such projects, it seems, rejects all models of participation proposed by Callon (1999).

Despite of such observations, much of the rhetoric surrounding pilot and demonstration projects tends to be anchored in notions of involvement, active engagement and user centric design. These are signifiers that all point towards high levels of participation. Funding bodies increasingly also demand that technology developers take measures to include knowledge from technology users in new projects. This is reflected more broadly in European energy policy, which highlights that a key goal of the energy transition is to make future energy systems ‘citizen centric’ (Ingeborgrud et al. 2020). Yet, citizenship promoted through such rhetoric tends to be reduced to finding new ways of making people act as rational agents in economic markets (e.g. Wallsten and Galis 2019). How can we begin an analytical and normative process of working towards alternative models of participation?

Our account is inspired by recent scholarship within STS, which highlights that participation is co-constructed, relational, emergent and in the making (Chilvers and Kearnes 2015). Within such an understanding, participation is not the individual act of opting into or opting out of a particular technology trial, but an outcome of a process involving a wide array of actors and objects (see also Marres 2016). Participation, then, emerges in interaction between actors, in-situ, which amplifies a long-standing point made by STS-scholars that participation is not external to technoscientific endeavours, but rather an integral aspect constituted by scientific practice (e.g. Shapin and Schaffer 1985). A metaphor that makes this point explicit is that of orchestration. Orchestration points to how the work of actors who conduct pilot and demonstration projects seeks to produce specific types of participation. In sum, our interest here is in “participation in the making”, and especially the ways that participation-making entail attempts at producing new forms of social and political order.

This interest leads us to ask what the consequences of such a move would be. On the one hand, participation within such a framework is a phenomenon that is subject to the same processes of shaping and construction that we discussed for technologies in Chap.

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