Béatrice Cointe

Managing political market agencements: solar photovoltaic policy in France

ABSTRACT The development of renewable energy is one manifestation of current transformations in the organisation of European energy production and markets. To illuminate the changes triggered by renewable energy policy, the evolution of solar photovoltaic policy in France is analysed with a focus on its central instrument, feed-in tariffs (FITs). FITs for photovoltaics raised difficulties in many countries, but their effects were particularly dramatic in France. Market sociology and science and technology studies are employed to describe FITs as agencements organising the markets and politics of electricity production. FITs are considered as inherently unpredictable insofar as they encourage innovation and the emergence of new actors. The ways in which three successive agencements of FITs for photovoltaics framed the politics and economy of photovoltaics in France, and how they addressed unanticipated effects, are discussed. This is suggestive of transformations and tensions in the construction of French energy policy.

Mutualising sunshine: economic and territorial entanglements in a local photovoltaic project

ABSTRACT Focusing on a successful local photovoltaic project in France, this paper retraces the emergence and constitution of a territorial capacity to take part in the development of renewable energy as driven by a private actor (an agricultural cooperative) that relied on the combination of policy support, of a tradition of mutualisation, and of its territorial implantation. A relational perspective on innovation and entrepreneurship is adopted to describe the various entanglements that hold this project together. The development of a local renewable energy project and its community is seen as a collective endeavour that requires to establish and consolidate relationships between people and things; relationships are negotiated, tested and shaped through series of trials. I pay particular attention to the material and cognitive devices that are used to articulate the market policy framework and the territory (understood as a geographical, patrimonial and social entity), particularly by organising mutualisation. This enables me to explore how supporting policies and the territory are mobilised and enacted in the course of the project, and the extent to which both are transformed in the process. Supporting policies are turned into a tool for territorial innovation and development, while the tradition of territorial mutualisation that is constitutive of the cooperative that promoted the project becomes a way to provide access to a market and to maximise and redistribute associated profits. This highlights the entanglements through which a specific conception of equity is enacted in a project, and redistributive concerns are incorporated into an economics-centred policy device.