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and reduction in energy use over traditional criteria for urban energy management. This deconstruction and historical contextualisation of current
trends that have brought about shifts in urban policy (in favour of a
municipal utility and decarbonisation) is a demonstrably constructive outcome of accountability analysis, in that it provides an evidenced basis to
inform in situ decision-making as well as to discuss and debate Berlin’s
energy transition at the present moment.
9.2.2
For Christian Lund
The case is changes in land use and in who has authority over land. This
concern inevitably accompanies debates about energy transitions, as all
energy sources have a land footprint, and most land use (in this case forestry
or agriculture) has direct or indirect implications for greenhouse gas emissions or carbon sequestration. The questions of accountability that Lund
unpacks, however, are chiefly concerned with power and social equity, and
competition over the legitimation of power by institutions at different scales
and with various degrees of formality. The accountability crises at play in
Indonesia’s hinterland are interrelated. On the one hand, there is the crisis
of villagers who are being dispossessed of their land being hard put to hold
a top-down state to account. The form of this state varies, as in 1978 when
formal authority over large parts of land in West Java that was de facto used
by agrarian villages shifted from the Provincial Forestry Service to the State
Forest Corporation with uniformed parastatal police as part of an authoritarian regime. On the other hand, there is the crisis of what constitutes the
state itself, with tussles over the scale at which authority is held. This surfaces
in the villagers’ recognition of the Sundanese Peasant’s Movement in 2006,
and more recently of the Village Office as the official local territorial administrative institution with authority over land, in order to counter the efforts
of national institutions that sought to take over the land for forestry. Lund
points out that the power to define subjecthood for oneself or to impose
subjecthood on others is an integral part of accountability, and that this
power is bidirectional (Fox 2018). Not only subjecthood, but also authority, can thus be re-purposed; making them visible in a given configuration
here becomes the relational work of politics over land.
This case features instances of discursive legitimation such as the State
Forest Corporation’s announcement of a planting ceremony of 1,000
mahogany seedlings in rows named after government institutions (which
the villagers promptly uprooted overnight), and its invocation of military
9 PRACTICES OF LEGITIMATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY CRISES…
and reduction in energy use over traditional criteria for urban energy management. This deconstruction and historical contextualisation of current
trends that have brought about shifts in urban policy (in favour of a
municipal utility and decarbonisation) is a demonstrably constructive outcome of accountability analysis, in that it provides an evidenced basis to
inform in situ decision-making as well as to discuss and debate Berlin’s
energy transition at the present moment.
9.2.2
For Christian Lund
The case is changes in land use and in who has authority over land. This
concern inevitably accompanies debates about energy transitions, as all
energy sources have a land footprint, and most land use (in this case forestry
or agriculture) has direct or indirect implications for greenhouse gas emissions or carbon sequestration. The questions of accountability that Lund
unpacks, however, are chiefly concerned with power and social equity, and
competition over the legitimation of power by institutions at different scales
and with various degrees of formality. The accountability crises at play in
Indonesia’s hinterland are interrelated. On the one hand, there is the crisis
of villagers who are being dispossessed of their land being hard put to hold
a top-down state to account. The form of this state varies, as in 1978 when
formal authority over large parts of land in West Java that was de facto used
by agrarian villages shifted from the Provincial Forestry Service to the State
Forest Corporation with uniformed parastatal police as part of an authoritarian regime. On the other hand, there is the crisis of what constitutes the
state itself, with tussles over the scale at which authority is held. This surfaces
in the villagers’ recognition of the Sundanese Peasant’s Movement in 2006,
and more recently of the Village Office as the official local territorial administrative institution with authority over land, in order to counter the efforts
of national institutions that sought to take over the land for forestry. Lund
points out that the power to define subjecthood for oneself or to impose
subjecthood on others is an integral part of accountability, and that this
power is bidirectional (Fox 2018). Not only subjecthood, but also authority, can thus be re-purposed; making them visible in a given configuration
here becomes the relational work of politics over land.
This case features instances of discursive legitimation such as the State
Forest Corporation’s announcement of a planting ceremony of 1,000
mahogany seedlings in rows named after government institutions (which
the villagers promptly uprooted overnight), and its invocation of military
9 PRACTICES OF LEGITIMATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY CRISES…