Rescaling the borderland: cross-border bioenergy production patterns facing spatial policies

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

The utilisation of renewable energies (RE) can be seen as one of the most important aspects of mitigation of climate change. Implementing them in decentralised structures additionally enhances the positive effects on environment, economy, and society. By that, RE development is a major asset for sustainability in regional development contexts. To achieve it, collaboration and cooperation of various regional actors is necessary. These actors differ in their perspectives on challenges for energy development as well as on the region itself. Hence, questions of space and scale are rising: If sustainable regional development can be achieved by the decentralised utilisation of RE, which “region” develops? Or to put it vice versa: Which processes of regionalisations are initiated through the use of RE (energetic regionalisations)? The paper contributes to the conference’s theme “Scales, territories and networks”. The particular elements of rescaling, different geographical scales and the region as open space are subject of this article. The interplay of governmental and economic constructions of scales is point of interest. One focus lies on bioenergy production and related processes of regionalisations in the cross-border context of Germany and Luxembourg. On the one hand, the evolution of and transition to bioenergy production is focus of the theoretical analysis. Which institutional and structural (pre)conditions are fundamental for processes of regionalisations in the biomass industry? In which ways are they connected to the socio-technical development? These questions are addressed with the conceptual approaches of evolutionary institutionalism and socio-technical transition. The first building block concentrates on institutionalisations, relevance of structures for individual actions and impacts of individual behaviours on institutions. The latter building block focuses changes in technology and their social implications, social changes and their potentials for technological changes, and ‘spheres’ of socio-technical changes among niches, regimes and landscapes – all aspects with respect to bioenergy development. On the other hand the day-to-day practices of individual actors in the bioenergy market are focused. In which ways do practices influence regionalisations? The research motivation shifts to processes of constitution and reproduction of bioenergy-regions. “The bioenergy-regions” are produced through embodied practices and reproduce themself within these practices. Hence, bioenergy-¬regions and -spaces do not exist per se, but are socially constructed. So on the one hand, the social use of spatial categories and contexts regarding bioenergy are analytical objects. On the other hand, the relation among society, practice and spatial connotations will be addressed. The paper focuses on the conceptual framework of an ongoing research project and discusses the underlying theoretical perspectives, their operationalisation as well as the methodological research design. In empirical terms, preliminary results from an exploratory pilot study (data analysis, expert interviews) in the cross-border area of Germany and Luxembourg will be presented.