Moving beyond products to material culture

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BLOG 2

Prototyping or debating sustainable developments in makerspaces?

Adrian Smith, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex

September 2015

In the previous blog I introduced some of the diverse ways that makerspaces are helping cultivate sustainable developments. Admittedly, these initiatives do not represent the totality of makerspaces, where many projects and activities are oblivious to demands for sustainable developments. In this blog I discuss some of the challenges I see in making sustainable developments more prevalent in makerspaces and in expanding the influence makerspace sustainability initiatives have in the wider world.

In my previous blog I pointed out that my work situates the details of making within a larger picture, sometimes at the expense of the important details. As such, the challenges and questions I set out below are only part of story. I invite you to raise issues in your own blogs and messages, before and after the event, and which can be shared on Twitter via #sustmake.

Sustainable developments: from words to action

What do I mean by sustainable developments? What, if anything, holds together the diversity of initiatives in making and fixing for sustainability noted in the previous blog? The principles for sustainable developments were set down formally in 1987, after a global consultation by the UN World Commission on Environment and Development:

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

  • The concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and
  • The idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organisation on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.”

Environmental integrity and social justice are at the heart of these principles. The UN is reinvigorating these principles through its Sustainable Development Goals. They require people to develop future-oriented capacities for appropriating technologies and capacities for inclusive social organisation.

These principles may appear dull and academic. Yet they come to life when people design and demonstrate vivid, accessible initiatives. Arguably, makerspaces can develop capabilities and organisational forms for people to appropriate various technologies, traditional and high-tech, for new forms of prototyping, production, care and repair, and consumption. Makerspaces can open new possibilities for exploring sustainable developments.

Tools for people: lessons from history

Although, perhaps not so new? Giving tools to people has been a theme for environment and development movements since their emergence in the 1960s. Examples include, social ecologist Murray Bookchin’s ideas for liberatory technologies; the Whole Earth Catalog’s ‘access to tools’ ethos; appropriate technology sourcebooks for development; and, most remarkably, Technology Networks in London in the early 1980s.

Again, these histories can appear to be of academic interest only. Yet recalling them connects current activity to the deep social roots of grassroots innovation. What we see in some makerspaces today reinvigorates an enduring social reality: when encouraged, people demonstrate inherent creativity and find meaning in making things; when opportunities arise for sustainable developments, then a vibrant burst of initiatives fills that space. But then what? Where to go with these inspiring initiatives?

Sustaining and expanding initiatives

Few makerspaces activities currently are dedicated to sustainable developments. Will makerspaces drift into intensified consumption, through endless, customised fabrication and throwaway making? Or can they be harnessed for sustainable developments in societies? So the first challenge is how to cultivate wider attention to sustainability initiatives within makerspaces and amongst maker movements?

Sustainability initiatives in makerspaces try to inject fun, conviviality and community into their initiatives, and in doing so transform sustainability from dry principles into meaningful activities. But organising initiatives is hard work, particularly for organisers. These are as much emotional matters of recognition, commitment and energy, as they are of materials and finance.

Strategies for sustaining initiatives and recruiting wider participation and support need developing. Promoting sustainability as a core ethos and explicit commitment in makerspaces is one possibility. It might be possible to expand initiatives through support from institutions interested in training, entrepreneurship, or outreach for sustainability, for instance; but might support bring constraining expectations and requirements? Perhaps maintaining autonomy, if that is important, means keeping things small?

  • How to sustain and expand commitment to sustainable developments in makerspaces?

Moving from prototyping to products

Historical reflection offers cautionary lessons. Initiatives can come under some pressure to demonstrate quick fixes for sustainability: to perfect devices or product services that can be scaled-up and marketed widely. The journey from prototype to product is challenging. It requires participants to win considerable financial investment, and sometimes policy help to create markets for sustainable goods and services. As sustainable development mainstreams, however, then incubation opportunities open up that help mobilise investment and moves into production. But this still begs questions; such as, how sustainable developments arising in makerspaces link into manufacturing systems, many of which are increasingly globalised, or how they bypass such systems and build alternatives?

It is possible to align making with wider campaigns for support and attention. Grassroots designers of wind turbines in Denmark aligned with social movements for whom wind energy became emblematic in the 1970s, and collectively this alliance gradually won policy support and industrial backing that transformed back-yard technologies into a world leading industry. Such a strategy requires allies with political and economic capacities absent amongst hard-pressed practitioners working flat out to keep their particular initiative going. Some might be unhappy about such politicisation.

Developing activities into business form means connecting with market values currently, and whose commercial logics still lag behind principles for sustainable developments. Compromises and trade-offs have to be confronted.

When the chief merit of initiatives is that they are fun, creative, engaging, and open to all, then expansion and mainstreaming strategies can raise considerable dilemmas.

  • Should sustainability initiatives scale-up or circulate more widely, and if so, how to retain core aims when moving beyond protoyping?

Moving beyond products to material culture

Limiting attention to developing sustainable products and services risks overlooking makerspaces roles that are more subtle, diffuse and profound. Earlier grassroots initiatives pioneered ideas about materials use, accessibility, scale, and participation. They contributed demands and practices in participatory design, for example, that have became relatively commonplace today. Might makerspaces participants be propagating marginal ideas and practices for future sustainable developments, say in collaborative prototyping, or critical making, and that may come to have wider influence in future?

The immediate task of trying to get past a proprietary screw head, when repairing a product at a meet-up, say, may lead to discussion about the way things are made, and why they are made so poorly. Such discussions are vital for democracy in increasingly technological societies. Why does technology have to be so seamless and closed, and why shouldn’t it be designed for people to hack and fix? Innocent questions may stir revolutionary answers?

At the same time, whilst many people care about sustainability, not everyone is in a position to make it the central organising principle in their work, home or communities. Nor does everyone have the time or inclination to participate in making. Should makerspaces address these limitations? Or perhaps turn them around as opportunities for critical creativity? What kind of social world would enable widespread participation in sustainable design and production? Are such worlds desirable, and how to generate the conditions for them? Makerspaces are weakly positioned relative to a host of powerful institutions, such as those reproducing vested economic interests, or positions of political authority, or cultural norms, or design standards, skill sets, and research agendas.

  • How can makerspaces work with others to generate conditions for sustainable developments in the wider world?

Spaces for debating the doing

Even the most personal projects, sustainable or otherwise, in aggregate have social consequences. Should project participants be encouraged to think about the social meaning of their making activities?

Makerspaces provide unusual, even deviant, ways of manifesting emerging ideas and practices in, say, open hardware, or peer production, or social entrepreneurialism. Alongside the hustle of crowd-funding a prototyping initiative, might there be resources and platforms in makerspaces for wider reflection and social learning?

Makerspaces exploit deeper-seated changes in society (be it in new technologies, shifting cultures, restructuring economies, and new social movements); thereby providing very practical arenas for debating and giving form and direction to inchoate social and economic change and possibility. Arguably, this is a valuable service for societies. Yet, it is a service that is impossible to audit. Do demands from investors or funders for ‘impact’ undermine more open ended roles in social change? Of course, membership funded makerspaces are less exposed to these issues. But for makerspace initiatives seeking to transform the conditions for sustainable developments in the wider world, then the terms of engagement with outside institutions becomes important.

Summing up for the event and beyond …

Makerspaces are helping to cultivate sustainable developments in many ways. Initiatives create a wealth of experience concerning the development of artefacts, methodologies, public awareness, identities, social relationships, networks, organisation, ideas and concepts. However, making the most of the possibilities requires a strategic working out of critical questions, including:

  • How to sustain and expand commitment to sustainable developments in makerspaces?
  • Should sustainability initiatives scale-up or circulate more widely, and if so, how to retain core aims when moving beyond protoyping?
  • How can makerspaces work with others to generate conditions for sustainable developments in the wider world?

Fixed answers to these questions are neither feasible nor desirable. The questions arise from enduring dilemmas rather than discrete tests. People working with these dilemmas need opportunities to share their own successes, struggles, experiences and insight in the face of these dilemmas, and reflect upon working with them more effectively. Please contribute your own questions, dilemmas and experiences via #sustmake. That way we become clued up as well as tooled up.

Adrian Smith, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex

September 2015

This is the second blog post on makerspaces and sustainable development by Adrian Smith. The first part on ‘Why should we seek sustainable developments in makerspaces?’ is also available to read.

Prof Adrian Smith, CIED, SEG

Prof Adrian Smith, CIED, SEG

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Why should we seek sustainable developments in makerspaces?

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BLOG 1

Why should we seek sustainable developments in makerspaces?

Adrian Smith, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex

Community-based workshops like hackerspaces, fablabs and makerspaces, equipped with design, prototyping and fabrication tools have spread rapidly in recent years. Interest in the social, economic and environmental possibilities of these spaces has grown too. Amidst the claims and aims people bring to this collaborative flourishing of tool-based creativity is an argument that makerspaces can become experimental sites for the pursuit of sustainable developments. Which begs the question,

What strategies exist for makerspaces to promote sustainable developments in society?

An event within a wider discussion …

In this blog I introduce some observations motivating an event CIED and STEPS are holding on makerspaces and sustainability at the Machines Room in London on Monday 26th October. The aim of the event is to raise issues and identify strategies for makerspaces in sustainable developments.

What sustainable developments are already arising in makerspaces?

Still more of an aspiration than a widespread reality, there are nevertheless growing varieties of activity aimed at environmental sustainability and social justice in makerspaces, and which include:

  • Prototyping sustainable designs and systems
  • Exploring issues of sustainable energy through hacking solar panels and building DIY home energy systems
  • Incubating upcyling businesses and furnishing creative hubs for closed loop materials cycles
  • Hosting Repair Cafés and Restart Parties
  • Building communities interested in making, repair, repurposing and sustainability
  • Hosting citizen science initiatives and building environmental monitoring systems
  • Critical making that connects people to the political economies and material realities of production and consumption, and that explores alternative, more desirable futures
  • Organising workshops for the social innovation of local sustainability
  • Outreach activities that connect other sustainable development groups, and mobilising new thinking and action about technologies, sustainability and people
  • Cultivating post-consumer identities, values and material cultures

Collectively, speakers at the event pioneer all these activities.

Some speakers come from established workshops committed, amongst other things to grassroots involvement and sustainability, such as Diana Wildschit and Harmen Zijp from FabLab Amersfoort, and Richard Clifford from MAKLab. The RSA Great Recovery initiative for the circular economy chose to locate at FabLab London, and we have Sophie Thomas speaking about links between the two.

Other speakers create temporary facilities for rapidly prototyping low carbon innovation, such as Justyna Swat from POC21 and Max Wakefield from Demand Energy Equality.

We have speakers located in education and research institutes, such as Susana Nascimento formerly of Vitruvius FabLab in Lisbon, where she ran a summer school on makerspaces and sustainability, and who now investigates citizen science for the European Commission. Liz Corbin comes from the Institute of Making at UCL, whose outreach activities include education in sustainable materials.

There are speakers whose initiatives try to build specific communities, such as Trystan Lea from Open Energy Monitor, and Janet Gunter from the Restart Project. And we have Didac Ferrer from Tarpuna Co-operative, whose work with neighbourhood groups in Barcelona opens public fablabs to local sustainability issues.

Finally, providing her reflections on the day will be Ann Light, Professor of Creative Technologies at Sussex University. Ann brings longstanding experience in community design, sustainability and technology.

But I hope others will provide reflections too, whether through Twitter or blogging, on the day, afterwards, or beforehand, as I do here.

It is clear from the initiatives that the event uses a wider notion of makerspaces than usual. In addition to fixed makerspaces, busily creating communities of users, the event includes initiatives that go out to communities and neighbourhood meeting places, and set up temporary making spaces. The latter includes running workshops in community centres or in schools, or holding repair activities in workplaces and shopping centres, as well as nurturing online communities. The broader point – whether building communities around tools or taking tools to communities – is whether and how making can engage people in sustainable developments?

In a related blog I discuss some strategic challenges for makerspaces doing sustainable developments. That discussion raises the following questions:

  • How to sustain and expand commitment to sustainable developments in makerspaces?
  • Should sustainability initiatives scale-up or circulate more widely, and if so, how to retain core aims when moving beyond protoyping?
  • How can makerspaces work with others to generate conditions for sustainable developments in the wider world?

My work researches relations between societies and their technologies, and how pursuit of sustainable developments demands changed relations between the two. My perspective tends towards the bigger picture. It overlooks some of the richer and vital details, including practices in design and fabrication, environmental life cycles, project management, users relations, entrepreneurship, community building, and more.

Such oversight is both provocation and invitation for different viewpoints. The presenters at the event bring important variety, and I invite you to raise questions and issues in your own blogs and messages, before and after the event, and which can be shared on Twitter via #sustmake. If you have films, websites, projects or anything relating to the event, then please do bring it to participants’ attention via the hashtag.

To read Adrian’s follow-up blog article on ‘Moving beyond products to material culture’, please click here.

By Adrian Smith, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex

September 2015

Prof Adrian Smith, CIED, SEG

Prof Adrian Smith, CIED, SEG

 

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Insights on climate and environmental policy evaluation from the 4th European Environmental Evaluators Network Forum in Florence, 17-18 September 2015

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Dr Paula Kivimaa at EEEN2015

EEEN2015 conference

The European Environmental Evaluators Network (EEEN) kicked off over three years ago, in 2012, in an event organised by the University of Leuven and by the now director of the European Environment Agency (EEA), Hans Bruyninckx. Taking example of the Environmental Evaluators Network (EEN) in North America, and endorsed by Matt Keene at the US EPA, the idea of EEEN has focused on bringing together those who develop, carry out or with an interest in environmental policy evaluation to exchange experiences. The informal advisory group of the network is composed of members from several European countries and the US.

Last week, a fourth EEEN forum was organised over the course of two days in the beautiful city of Florence in Tuscany, Italy.  It was hosted by the European University Institute and organised by the EEA. The theme of this year’s event was Knowledge from Climate & Environment Policy Evaluation Supporting the Road from Paris to 2020.

What was particularly great about the event, similarly to last year, was that it stimulated discussions between not only academics, but people working in European institutions such as the Commission, the Parliament and the EEA, in national government bodies such as the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK and Mistra and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency in Sweden, the private sector including Endesa, and academics from over a dozen universities and research institutes. The joint discussions produced many insights on various different angles related to knowledge, transitions and evaluation methods.

The key insights for me were the following:
• There is an increasing interest in and need for evaluating public policies from a transitional and transformative perspective, but for this we need to develop new evaluation methods and criteria, and undertake evaluations from a more complex system dynamics perspective.

  • A great deal of very systematic and rigorous evaluation work is being done in different national government departments and agencies, including DECC and the Department for International Development and the EEA alike (paying attention to the above point). This offers valuable sources for knowledge exchange between evaluators and a potential for learning, also for the academics.
  • Although governance innovation and policy experiments are recognised as necessary to complement or even replace the existing means of (ineffective) climate governance, not much attention has yet been paid to evaluating policy experiments and particularly producing aggregated evaluations or meta-analyses of multiple policy or governance experiments (linking to the work being done in the context of the EU COST INOGOV network).
Photograph of paula kivimaa

Dr Paula Kivimaa

Dr. Paula Kivimaa is a Senior Research Fellow at SPRU, University of Sussex, Senior Researcher in the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) and a substitute management committee member of the EU COST INOGOV network. She is also part of the Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand, looking at the interplay of policy and low energy innovations in the building sector.

 

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A slip of the tongue – the language of climate science

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A blog post by Nick Gallie on the language of climate science following the Tyndall Assembly 2015

Hopes for a legally binding “hard” international agreement amongst nations attending the 21st COP in Paris in December are fading. A more likely outcome is a “strong symbolic agreement” with a built in review mechanism that would allow the “Paris Treaty” to be revisited and updated on a regular basis. As the prospects for a binding agreement slip away, so does optimism that the world can keep within the so-called 2 degrees of warming “safe Limit” that is the nominal policy objective of the UNFCCC. That limit itself, from a climate science perspective looks increasingly inappropriate. At last week’s Tyndall Assembly – a gathering of climate scientists, policy academics, psychologists, energy industry and UK Government representatives, held at the University of Sussex, the mood was very much that even with a global warming target of 1.5 degrees over pre-industrial temperatures, the world would be pushing its luck.

What language then, would be appropriate to describe the impacts of climate change and their risk of occurrence should the world, as looks increasingly likely, find itself committed to “somewhere between three and five degrees” of warming by the end of the century? Language matters a great deal, because policy and action consequent upon policy are determined by it. Policy is constructed and construed within language; it matters profoundly, for example, whether science advice to policy makers is couched in terms of “danger” or in terms of “adverse or negative consequences”.

Climate science, understandably enough, is concerned with being able to make measurable observations of real world events and quantify probabilities, but policy makers (who are people) and people at large lead their lives in terms of quality, and they respond only to qualitative threats to life as they know it or would have it. Quantity is only of interest as a bearing on quality. We forget this. The “negative impact” that a risk assessment seeks to evaluate is a qualitative event, not a quantity. A 2 degrees of warming notional boundary is set with respect to increasing likelihoods of qualitatively devastating events occurring as the climate changes in response massive energy build-ups within the global atmosphere.

The language of carbon, carbon dioxide, two degrees, mitigation, adaptation, even the term climate change itself, are hopelessly abstract and completely fail to express or capture quality. The focus on a chemical element (carbon) takes the eye off the interests behind the daily decisions that ensure the planet’s energy balance is thrown ever more out of kilter. This is a major reason why ‘climate change” has so significantly failed to engage policy makers and the public at large in the sense of triggering dramatic action and fundamental change necessary to avert a global lock-in to a catastrophic future.

But the linguistic problem, surely the most easy to solve among this problem of problems that constitutes climate change, turns out not to be not so easy at all. The scale – the global framing, the futurity, the imponderability of climate negotiation mechanisms, all these ways of talking about it, drag climate change out of the reach of lives lived now and crucially, out of reach of qualitative affect. Unless of course one’s life is visited by a climate induced event that shatters one’s sense of place in the world. But for the vast majority of us who live in advanced economies, this has not the case.

How about systemic threat? How about the combined effects of crop failure, mass starvation, heat stroke, water stress, economic collapse, endemic conflict, enforced mass migration (refugees or economic migrants?), new pandemics, of which we are witnessing only the tip of the iceberg (to use a very unfortunate metaphor) today? Does it help to take a systems view of climate change impacts if one-off events don’t cut it? But then we are driven to the limit of language to even begin to describe what all this might mean in terms of quality, of suffering, of consequence.

Where is this driving? In the Tyndall Assembly it was noted how the language of climate science and policy is already sliding further and further into the abstract, necessary perhaps to ameliorate the collective failure (not ours, surely) to address the reality unfolding before us; language whose quantity is multiplying exponentially along with the number of aspects and avenues of the problematique that analysis reveals, while its quality is more and more sifted of affective potential. A sliding language that retreats lock step with sliding policy goals and the determination to meet them. We are like the hare, caught in the headlamps of the thing that is bearing down upon us but which we can neither describe nor react to because, like the hare, we don’t have the language for it.

We ask, what can we do right now, we who are dumbstruck in the face our finitude? And the answer is speak . To pull climate change into the present, to bring it down to our size, we have first to make it present in our lives so that it touches and hurts. Take a leaf out of Chris Rapley’s book (subject of a brilliant Royal Court Theatre performance earlier this year)  2071, The world we will leave our grandchildren, or go for a walk among wildflowers and chase butterflies whose fate is already sealed – and weep. Our first duty is to make this thing real in our own lives, by whatever means, and then from that feeling, from that realisation of quality – act within our own spheres of influence, limited though these most certainly are. Action has a strange quality. In the presentness of action, boundaries dissolve and the nature of what is possible opens up. Anyone who has taken “political” action will tell you this is true.

Did I say something inappropriate. A slip of the tongue, surely? Does feeling really have a place in an academic science policy forum? This was the subject of a debate in the University of Sussex’s Politics of Nature forum that ran simultaneously with the Tyndall Assembly. A great pity there was no cross over between the events. Without feeling, the forum mused, how are the people to rise up – us in whose name the world is being consigned to oblivion.

 

Nick Gallie is a Doctoral Researcher (PhD Candidate) at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), Sussex University

A photograph of Nick GallieBorn and Educated in Scotland, Nick attained an MA Hons in Economic Science from the University of Aberdeen in 1970 before moving to London and taking up a career in advertising, new product development and organisational communications. During the ’80s and ’90s Nick worked at Greenpeace in the UK, first as fundraiser then Creative Director, Campaigns and Communications Director and finally Logistics (Direct Action) Director. In 2000 He set up a consultancy specializing in campaign and communications design before returning to academia in 2010 to study Human Rights and Science Policy.  Nick enjoys hill walking and horse riding and both practicing and studying tai chi and meditation.  Nick tweets at @nickgtweet

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Why Germany is dumping nuclear power – and Britain isn’t

Posted on by Philip Johnstone — 1 Comment ↓

Philip Johnstone, University of Sussex and Andy Stirling, University of Sussex

The starkly differing nuclear policies of Germany and the UK present perhaps the clearest divergence in developed world energy strategies. Under the current major Energy Transition (Energiewende), Germany is seeking to entirely phase out nuclear power by 2022. Yet the UK has for many years advocated a “nuclear renaissance”, promoting the most ambitious new nuclear construction programme in Western Europe. A close look at what’s happening makes the contrast look very odd indeed.

Nowhere is that difference more obvious than in the impending decision of British energy minister Amber Rudd, over arguably the most expensive single infrastructure project in British history: the Hinkley Point C power station.

Both nuclear and renewables offer low carbon strategies. But the performance of renewable energy is now manifestly superior to nuclear power and continuing to improve. The position of nuclear power, by contrast, is rapidly declining worldwide. In 2013, new global investments in renewable electricity capacity overtook those in all fossil fuels combined. So, why does UK policy making and public debate on these issues remain so distinctively biased towards nuclear?

“Who says?”

Recent research at SPRU has investigated a key aspect of this conundrum. It began with a simple yet fundamental question: how to understand these massively contrasting developments in the two such otherwise similar countries as the UK and Germany? There is no shortage of academic theory about why particular technologies are developed and others abandoned, but these turn out to be interestingly incomplete.

What is clear at the outset, is that technological progress in any given sector – like electricity – is not a one-track “race to the future”. In these simplistic terms, so-called pro-innovation policies reduce the debate to the level of “how fast?”, “what’s the risk?”; and “who’s leading?”. Instead, general understandings developed across history, economics, philosophy and social science show the real questions are about “which way?”; “who says?”; and “why?” Technological choices like those for and against nuclear power are as much a matter for democracy as for technical expertise. In other words, these should be treated as openly as other political issues, to be decided in ways that are responsible, open and transparent. To deal with such issues democratically also means that decisions are accountable to all those who stand to be affected and in whose name they have been taken.

The Isar II nuclear plant in Bavaria, Germany
brewbooks, CC BY-SA

But specific theories about how to achieve such technological transitions, do not tend to emphasise this democratic aspect. Highlighted instead are ways to encourage technological niches (like renewables) and how to stabilise these into an updated regime, in this case existing electricity systems. Until recently, less attention has been given to the roles played by deliberate efforts to discontinue an entrenched old regime, which (like the German nuclear industry) it is the aim of government to replace.

So what we get instead of a public debate is a host of much more detailed technical policy interventions in areas such as regulation, research, subsidies, market structure, contracts and training. This tends to lead only to incremental and conservative adjustments rather than ambitious transformation.

The German Alternative

To investigate these dilemmas, we considered thirty different parameters variously mentioned across all the different theories, to see which ones best explained the contrasting directions of policy in the UK and Germany. We grouped these into nine broadly relevant criteria addressing issues like: general market conditions; nuclear contributions to electricity mixes; strengths in nuclear engineering; costs and potential of renewables; strengths in renewable industries; scales of military nuclear interests; general political characteristics; public opinion and social movements; and contrasts in overall “qualities of democracy” (as measured in a burgeoning field of political science).

Some findings seem potentially quite important, and in direct practical ways for nuclear policy. In short, the criteria wrongly predict that it would be the UK, rather than Germany, which should be more likely to steer electricity systems away from nuclear power. After all, before the Energiewende, it was the UK that had: a relatively weak civil nuclear industry; a low nuclear fraction in the electricity mix; the best renewable energy resources; and a strong offshore industry that might gain from the harnessing renewables.

German activists at a rally to support energy policy changes .
REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Until recently, Germany hosted the most successful nuclear engineering industry in the world. It had a high proportion of its electricity from nuclear and the more statist German style of capitalism is also more favourable to nuclear (with its need for government support). Patterns of public opinion have long been pretty similar in the two countries. All those criteria conventionally emphasised in mainstream theory predict the opposite of the observed pattern.

In fact, only two criteria clearly predict a move in Germany rather than the UK. Firsstrong UK military nuclear interests and the unanimous verdict in the political science literature, that Germany ranks markedly higher than the UK in terms of key “qualities of democracy” like those mentioned above. But these broader political qualities – including transparency, participation and accountability – are excluded from normal policy analysis in this field.

Rudderless

It is remarkable that military implications remain virtually unmentioned not only in official UK nuclear policy documents, but in wider media and even critical debate. If this is a factor in the internationally unusual British enthusiasm for nuclear power, then this public silence itself raises issues of democratic accountability. We investigate this issue in a recent separate article.

Amber Rudd at tidal energy project.
Department of Energy and Climate Change, CC BY-ND

But whatever might be this specific military dimension, the key message from our analysis is very clear. It is extraordinarily difficult to understand why Germany rather than the UK should be moving away from nuclear power, without being drawn to the relative qualities of democracy in the two countries. Whether this is right or wrong, it is very significant that it is Germany that has been able to mount an effective challenge to the concentrated power and entrenched interests around nuclear energy. Also perhaps relevant, is the fact that Germany has a track record of consistently making these kinds of enlightened decision earlier than the UK (on issues like acid rain, pesticides, recycling and clean production) – whilst remaining arguably the world’s most successful industrial economy.

So the practical message seems quite profound. General British debates over directions for innovation – around nuclear energy as in other areas like GMOs – are presently not primarily seen as matters for democracy; in effect they are not deemed suitable for public debate. Yet the troubled history of nuclear power itself – as with other technological issues like asbestos, phthalidomide and chemical pollution – shows how accountabilities neglected earlier, have a habit of being strongly asserted later. Perhaps this is something Amber Rudd might bear in mind, when making her impending momentous decision on Hinkley Point.

The Conversation

Philip Johnstone, Research Fellow, SPRU, University of Sussex and Andy Stirling, Professor of Science & Technology Policy, SPRU and co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre, University of Sussex

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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