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Short abstract:

This paper investigates the types of institutional work through which energy transitions can be realigned with social justice outcomes. Drawing on a contentious case study of a wind farm and a data center, it shows how the relationship between infrastructure and justice is continuously remade.

Long abstract:

A key question for academics and practitioners alike is how values, including those pertaining to social justice, can be ‘written’ into the financing of energy infrastructures. This question of ‘coding’ infrastructure is not well understood and, as we will show, hardly studied in the literature on sustainability transitions. Drawing on a conceptual framework connecting discourse, policy and infrastructure, we try and make sense of how this process of coding infrastructure works.

The empirical focus of this paper is on a national controversy over the parallel planning of a large-scale, community owned wind park and a hyperscale data center in the municipality of Zeewolde, The Netherlands. In the past years, The Netherlands has witnessed a significant growth of investments in renewable energy, especially for large-scale infrastructures. This ‘scaling up’ raises new questions about the geographic spread of energy production and (industrial) consumption. In our paper we consider the wind park and data center not as neutral technologies, but as actively shaped ‘infrastructure configurations’. The analytical starting point forms identification of the material, spatial, financial and social forms of the wind park and the planned data center. Theoretically, we draw on the Triple Re-Cycle (Hoffman et al 2020) to ‘follow’ and analyze how these ‘configurations’ and their social justice outcomes are the products of the institutional work involved in i) reimagining the direction of the energy transition, ii) the recoding of policies and iii) the actual reconfiguring of infrastructure. Methodologically, we trace back in time how these configurations have come about and continue to be the object of institutional work.

We find that the political dynamics around the ‘coding’ of the infrastructures involved center stretch back in time as far as 25 years. In this case, the nature of these dynamics had everything be explained by the initial absence of a stable policy regime; one capable of stabilizing certain codes in the rules and processes guiding investment decisions. Interestingly, the absence of a stable regime was not just a problem, it also came with the creative potential, which regional policy actors could draw upon to strategically reposition themselves.