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municipal utility, our power grid, our Berlin’ for a referendum). Priorities
and their discursive justification change over time in ways that reveal an
evolving basis for accountability claims. Bureaucratic legitimation also
makes sense of temporal patterns such as in the Berlin case with high security standards built into the urban energy system in the 1970s, including
three months’ worth of primary energy reserves. This artefact of geopolitics has temporal legacies that shape subsequent energy infrastructure.
Technocratic legitimation exhibits a temporal dimension in the same
case with Berlin’s requirements for cascading generating capacity during
the security-oriented strategy of the 1970s. These embed particular protocols into energy infrastructure that extend into current sectoral standards.
In the Indonesian land conflict case, the transfer of nearly one million
hectares of official forestland in West Java to the State Forest Corporation
in 1978 centralises authority away from the province in a manner that
gains significance during land ownership conflicts three decades later.
Financial legitimation expresses temporally as a highlighted singularity in
the Berlin case where, in contrast to urban politics shaping energy infrastructure investments, financing simply did not require validation at the
urban scale during the Cold War years of prioritised energy security and
West German government subsidies to Berlin.
10.2.3
The Opportunism Dimension
Within this dimension, discursive legitimation comes into play in the
Indonesian land conflict case when the State Forest Corporation announces
a planting ceremony of 1000 mahogany seedlings in rows named after
government institutions, as well as when the villagers promptly uproot
them overnight, both channelling the occasion into the purposive reframing of where authority rests, through imposition and resistance.
Bureaucratic legitimation is notable within this dimension in the same case
when the villagers request (and are granted) new ID cards from the Village
Office as the local territorial administration, which renders their settlements official sub-villages in the territorial area claimed by the State Forest
Corporation.
Technocratic legitimation exhibits an opportunistic dimension in the
Norwegian zero growth target-setting case, when the National Transport
Plan Working Group reasons that ‘zero’ is a very easy target to measure
and thus useful in holding cities to account, and in subsequent agreements
signed by Norway’s largest cities with indicators to track performance on
10 CONCLUSION: LEGITIMATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN ENERGY…
municipal utility, our power grid, our Berlin’ for a referendum). Priorities
and their discursive justification change over time in ways that reveal an
evolving basis for accountability claims. Bureaucratic legitimation also
makes sense of temporal patterns such as in the Berlin case with high security standards built into the urban energy system in the 1970s, including
three months’ worth of primary energy reserves. This artefact of geopolitics has temporal legacies that shape subsequent energy infrastructure.
Technocratic legitimation exhibits a temporal dimension in the same
case with Berlin’s requirements for cascading generating capacity during
the security-oriented strategy of the 1970s. These embed particular protocols into energy infrastructure that extend into current sectoral standards.
In the Indonesian land conflict case, the transfer of nearly one million
hectares of official forestland in West Java to the State Forest Corporation
in 1978 centralises authority away from the province in a manner that
gains significance during land ownership conflicts three decades later.
Financial legitimation expresses temporally as a highlighted singularity in
the Berlin case where, in contrast to urban politics shaping energy infrastructure investments, financing simply did not require validation at the
urban scale during the Cold War years of prioritised energy security and
West German government subsidies to Berlin.
10.2.3
The Opportunism Dimension
Within this dimension, discursive legitimation comes into play in the
Indonesian land conflict case when the State Forest Corporation announces
a planting ceremony of 1000 mahogany seedlings in rows named after
government institutions, as well as when the villagers promptly uproot
them overnight, both channelling the occasion into the purposive reframing of where authority rests, through imposition and resistance.
Bureaucratic legitimation is notable within this dimension in the same case
when the villagers request (and are granted) new ID cards from the Village
Office as the local territorial administration, which renders their settlements official sub-villages in the territorial area claimed by the State Forest
Corporation.
Technocratic legitimation exhibits an opportunistic dimension in the
Norwegian zero growth target-setting case, when the National Transport
Plan Working Group reasons that ‘zero’ is a very easy target to measure
and thus useful in holding cities to account, and in subsequent agreements
signed by Norway’s largest cities with indicators to track performance on
10 CONCLUSION: LEGITIMATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN ENERGY…