Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the political processes of making climate neutrality projects valuable. Drawing on ethnographic research and a collaborative community evaluation workshop it examines how hegemonic economic, political and scientific values are assembled, contested solidified in a pilot project.

Paper Abstract:

Pilot projects and the bureaucratic technological fixes they promise are increasingly valued in the design, planning and implementation of climate neutrality policies. Although pilot projects are often promoted as depoliticised initiatives that have ‘intrinsic’ and uncontested value there has been increasing recognition that pilot projects are inherently political and that they help enact and frame what future socio-technical values should matter. Pilot projects can therefore be seen as sites where political, economic and scientific hegemonic values are assembled, contested and potentially reified. Furthermore, STS and anthropological work on valuation processes have highlighted the inherently relational and processual nature of values by showing how valuations are situated in practices that enact and maintain entangled claims of knowledge, objectivity and valuation. This raises the question of how the value of pilot climate neutrality projects is maintained and contested and what implications this has for climate neutrality policies.

This paper seeks to examine the question by exploring the valuation processes of an EU climate change project on Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS). Based on ethnographic fieldwork and a collaborative community evaluation workshop the paper illustrates how project members everyday practices enabled the sorting of multiple, diverse and conflicting lived realities into singular written realities that aligned with hegemonic political, economic and scientific orders. Although these valuation processes were largely successful, we will demonstrate that designing collaborative workshops where community members can unwrite and re-evaluate the value of the project can open up spaces for more diverse valuation processes.