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against protecting the sage-grouse under a federal Endangered Species
Act. The habitat exchange served as a mechanism to perform and uphold
hollow accountability without changing substantive relations on the
ground. Bureaucratic legitimation plays a performative role in the
Norwegian case, where Norway’s policies consistently reference a 2 °C
target to limit global warming and have worked this into a range of
national documents and strategies; this can also be seen as prefigurative in
Sub-Sect. 10.2.4.
Technocratic legitimation is at work within the performative dimension
in the Colorado case in terms of the strategy of championing a market
mechanism to circumvent critique of coercive bureaucracy and benefit
from efficiencies like low transaction costs. This strategy brings the Habitat
Exchange and Habitat Quantification Tool into being. Financial legitimation is performative in the same case: questions of finance are used to
delegitimate the whole exercise as the subject of controversy when the oil
and gas industry protests the debits assigned to them based on the modelled cost calculations, as well as when it resigns from the governance
board of the habitat exchange.
10.2.6
The Power-play Dimension
Here, discursive legitimation is in evidence in the Nordic electric mobility
transition case. People’s scepticism about hybrid vehicles surfaces in concerns that these allow their owners to cash in on incentives (for adopting
low-emission vehicles) without affording the means to monitor their
actual usage of electricity rather than the internal combustion engines. In
the Indonesian land conflict case, the State Forest Corporation invokes
military terms such as ‘illegal loggers’ and ‘subversive’ to draw equivalence
between the villagers’ land occupation and organised crime, another
instance of power-play through discursive delegitimation. Bureaucratic
legitimation operates as power-play in the Nordic case, when Norway
offers all-inclusive incentive packages and Denmark maintains lower duties
(40% instead of 150%) for electric vehicles, but incentive schemes to electrify public transport remain far less substantial.
Technocratic legitimation manifests within the power-play dimension
in the Indonesian land conflict case, where the State Forest Corporation
uses the formal characterisation and protocols associated with national
security to evict villagers as ‘forest security disturbances’. This legitimation
allows the state to levy its might against claim-making subjects. Financial
10 CONCLUSION: LEGITIMATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN ENERGY…
against protecting the sage-grouse under a federal Endangered Species
Act. The habitat exchange served as a mechanism to perform and uphold
hollow accountability without changing substantive relations on the
ground. Bureaucratic legitimation plays a performative role in the
Norwegian case, where Norway’s policies consistently reference a 2 °C
target to limit global warming and have worked this into a range of
national documents and strategies; this can also be seen as prefigurative in
Sub-Sect. 10.2.4.
Technocratic legitimation is at work within the performative dimension
in the Colorado case in terms of the strategy of championing a market
mechanism to circumvent critique of coercive bureaucracy and benefit
from efficiencies like low transaction costs. This strategy brings the Habitat
Exchange and Habitat Quantification Tool into being. Financial legitimation is performative in the same case: questions of finance are used to
delegitimate the whole exercise as the subject of controversy when the oil
and gas industry protests the debits assigned to them based on the modelled cost calculations, as well as when it resigns from the governance
board of the habitat exchange.
10.2.6
The Power-play Dimension
Here, discursive legitimation is in evidence in the Nordic electric mobility
transition case. People’s scepticism about hybrid vehicles surfaces in concerns that these allow their owners to cash in on incentives (for adopting
low-emission vehicles) without affording the means to monitor their
actual usage of electricity rather than the internal combustion engines. In
the Indonesian land conflict case, the State Forest Corporation invokes
military terms such as ‘illegal loggers’ and ‘subversive’ to draw equivalence
between the villagers’ land occupation and organised crime, another
instance of power-play through discursive delegitimation. Bureaucratic
legitimation operates as power-play in the Nordic case, when Norway
offers all-inclusive incentive packages and Denmark maintains lower duties
(40% instead of 150%) for electric vehicles, but incentive schemes to electrify public transport remain far less substantial.
Technocratic legitimation manifests within the power-play dimension
in the Indonesian land conflict case, where the State Forest Corporation
uses the formal characterisation and protocols associated with national
security to evict villagers as ‘forest security disturbances’. This legitimation
allows the state to levy its might against claim-making subjects. Financial
10 CONCLUSION: LEGITIMATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN ENERGY…