Marianne Ryghaug

Making sense of global warming: Norwegians appropriating knowledge of anthropogenic climate change

This paper studies how people reason about and make sense of human-made global warming, based on ten focus group interviews with Norwegian citizens. It shows that the domestication of climate science knowledge was shaped through five sense-making devices: news media coverage of changes in nature, particularly the weather, the coverage of presumed experts’ disagreement about global warming, critical attitudes towards media, observations of political inaction, and considerations with respect to everyday life. These sense-making devices allowed for ambiguous outcomes, and the paper argues four main outcomes with respect to the domestication processes: the acceptors, the tempered acceptors, the uncertain and the sceptics.

The Global Warming of Climate Science: Climategate and the Construction of Scientific Facts

This article analyses 1,073 e‐mails that were hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November 2009. The incident was popularly dubbed ‘Climategate’, indicating that the e‐mails reveal a scientific scandal. Here we analyse them differently. Rather than objecting to the exchanges based on some idea about proper scientific conduct, we see them as a rare glimpse into a situation where scientists collectively prepare for participation in heated controversy, with much focus on methodology. This allows us to study how scientists communicate informally about framing propositions of facts in the best possible way. Through the eyes of science and technology studies, the e‐mails provide an opportunity to study communication as part of science in the making across disciplines and laboratories. Analysed as ‘written conversation’ the e‐mails provide information about processes of consensus formation through ‘agonistic evaluations’ of other scientists’ work and persuasion of others to support one’s own work. Also, the e‐mails contain judgements about other groups and individual scientists. Consensus‐forming appeared as a precarious activity. Controversies could be quite resilient in the course of this decade‐long exchange, probably reflecting the complexity of the methodological challenges involved.

Embedding smart energy technology in built environments: A comparative study of four smart grid demonstration projects

The smart grid has become important in energy discussions. Inspired by science and technology studies (STS), this article compares four smart grid demonstration projects that engage households in Norway, where much activity has been triggered by a mandatory roll-out of smart electricity meters by 2019. We ask how local actors across different sectors interpret the potential of smart electricity meters, and how different understandings lead to diverging innovation strategies. The result is four case studies illustrating how smart grid set-ups are constructed, and how new smart technologies are socialized into pre-existing localities or not. The four case studies highlight: (1) a constellation of healthcare and the electricity industry, resulting in a focus on simplicity and welfare. (2) A merger between the construction industry and the electricity industry, exploring how passive houses, PV-systems and smart technology influence collective practices. (3) How local authorities, research and industry interpreted smart grids differently, resulting in a focus on “greening”, grid optimization and user flexibility. (4) How organizational and disciplinary conflicts led to alienation from the smart grid concept, hindering socialization. This diversity within a small country suggests that smart grids should be treated as situated technology rather than a “catch-all” silver bullet.

The appropriation of the climate change problem among road managers: fighting in the trenches of the real world

This paper investigates how transportation sector managers perceive and utilize climate science, and subsequently, how they appropriate the climate change problem. The analysis focuses on which devices they qualify as useful for translating between knowledge, policy and practice concluding with a discussion of what this suggests in the development of efficient climate adaptation strategies. The paper demonstrates that although transportation sector managers accept the findings of climate science knowledge presented to them, their understanding of the climate change problem and the range of qualifying anchoring devices used in the development of climate adaption strategies are differentiated according to where they are located in the institutional context. For transportation sector managers on the regional and district level, the climate problem is largely perceived through the occurrence of extreme weather rather than through climate science. However, this knowledge basis is not considered sufficient to support ‘knowing how to act’ and has resulted in waiting for the authorities to make standards and regulations that would translate climate change knowledge into methods of practice. We argue that the development of standards and regulations might be underestimated in relation to user demands in climate adaptation work that involves reconciling scientific information.

Building on Norway’s Energy Goldmine: Policies for Expertise, Export, and Market Efficiencies

This chapter deals with the governance of renewable energy in Norway. The Norwegian case is a peculiar one. Norway has been blessed with an abundance of waterfalls, which for the past 100 years have been used to produce cheap and renewable electricity. In addition, Norway has vast oil resources which have been exported to generate national wealth. How does Norway’s odd position of on the one hand being one of the most renewable nations in Europe, while fuelling the world with hydrocarbons affect the governance of ‘new’ renewables? Does the fact that Norway is already one of Europe’s largest producers of renewable energy make a transition toward more renewable policy and production, easier or harder? What cultural, political, and financial factors seem to influence Norway’s strategies in the area of renewable energy production? Historically, energy in Norway has been both cheap and profitable, and Norwegian energy policies have traditionally been geared toward this goal: energy use and production should first and foremost be cost-effective. This situation has been challenging for the implementation of new renewable energy technologies. In the liberalized Norwegian electricity market, the governance of renewable energy has largely been left in the hands of the market participants. The low electricity prices over the past years have not attracted investment in renewables. In an attempt to mitigate this, Norway recently introduced electricity certificates in a joint market with Sweden, thereby creating a new class of incentives for investment in renewable energy generation. Further, to increase Norwegian renewable energy deployment, the Norwegian government has funded research and development projects and a number of large research centers for environmentally friendly technologies. However, there appears to be challenges in transferring the R&D activities to commercial products that could reach the market.

Creating energy citizenship through material participation

Transitions towards low-carbon energy systems will be comprehensive and demanding, requiring substantial public support. One important contribution from STS is to highlight the roles of citizens and public engagement. Until recently, energy users have often been treated as customers and passive market actors, or as recipients of technology at the margins of centralized systems. With respect to the latter role, critical or hesitant public action has been explained in terms of NIMBYism and knowledge deficits. This article focuses on the production of energy citizenship when considering public participation in low-carbon energy transitions. We draw upon the theory of ‘material participation’ to highlight how introducing and using emergent energy technologies may create new energy practices. We analyze an ongoing introduction of new material objects, highlighting the way these technologies can be seen as material interventions co-constructing temporalities of new and sustainable practices. We argue that artefacts such as the electric car, the smart meter and photovoltaic panels may become objects of participation and engagement, and that the introduction of such technologies may foster material participation and energy citizenship. The paper concludes with a discussion about the role of policies for low-carbon energy transitions on the making of energy citizenship, as well as limits of introducing a materially based energy citizenship.

Assembling climate knowledge. The role of local expertise

The difference between indigenous knowledge and western science continues to be a central theme in the social studies of science. This paper investigates the use of climate knowledge in climate adaptation activities. The analysis is based on a case study of indigenous experts involved in practical operations dealing with risk of avalanches in an area particularly vulnerable to avalanches in northern Norway. We find that indigenous knowledge held by local area experts and western science overlap. From this we develop two lines of argument. Firstly that assemblages of climate adaptation is produced as collaborative guesswork related to coupling and negotiation of different types of knowledge in a decision context. Secondly, we discuss what such a practice means for the understanding of the relationship between climate knowledge and climate policy. By following different assemblages of climate knowledge we point to an alternative way of understanding a process of policy shaping in relation to climate adaptation: a sideways policy shaping process where what gets included or excluded and what is considered internal or external to a decision making context becomes evident.

Nurturing a Regime Shift Toward Electro-mobility in Norway

Sales of electric vehicles (EVs) have exploded over the past several years in Norway, to the point that new EVs now outnumber new gas-driven cars in current sales. The popular narrative about how this transition came about suggests that it was the result of a targeted set of policies aiming to stimulate demand for EVs. In this chapter, we tell a different story. In looking at the history behind these ambitious policies, we aim to show that the policies were originally implemented to stimulate the development of a Norwegian EV industry. During the 1990s, much work was done among various industrial actors, NGOs, and policy-makers to establish a new Norwegian niche industry venture, which was partially inspired by local policies implemented in California. The venture did not come to fruition, but the policies eventually did, together with changes in mobility culture, creating one of the world’s strongest EV markets. The story illustrates the importance of understanding not only how policies work, but also how they are produced and how their effects travel across geographical borders.

With license to build: Chinese offshore wind firms rejecting European certificates

ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of six European certification firms attempt to position themselves in China’s offshore wind industry. We find that European certification firms lack attention to local needs and struggle with differences in risk perceptions. Chinese companies, on their part, stress the importance of first-hand experience rather than foreign involvement in project development, making the efforts of European certification companies redundant. We conclude that the Chinese development strategy is in opposition to established European certification practices: from a Chinese perspective, the European approach looks like over-engineered project development, whilst in China, taking risks and gaining access to necessary experienced and ‘independent’ knowledge is seen as a precondition for developing the offshore wind industry.