Renewable energy has become, in recent years, an emblem of sustainability—an icon of the much-anticipated new ‘green economy’—and windmills and wind farms serve as one of its ideal types. Wind power is particularly attractive because it offers both a different basis for organizing energy supplies and a concrete alternative to the nuclear option for reducing anthropogenic CO₂ production. Advocating wind energy can be understood as part of a broader effort to liberate late-industrial political subjects from their dependence upon large scale, centralized (mainly nuclear and fossil fuel based) energy systems. Wind energy, which can be used on site or transferred to a central electricity grid, presents this subject with a chance to regain direct control of power production.

However, the dispersed, site-based character of wind energy production carries with it complications that highlight a basic, often underplayed aspect of sustainability problems: Suitable locations for wind farms can, and often do, conflict with other sustainability-oriented land use aspirations, such as the conservation of traditional landscapes and wildlife habitats. This type of clash between environmentalisms [1,2] has been repeatedly observed in wind energy studies, where general agreement on the need to promote wind energy is often found to turn into conflict during implementation [3].

Much attention has been given to public attitudes towards wind energy [4,5,6] and the motives behind the opposition to wind farms [7]. It is now generally agreed that these are not adequately explained by the Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) concept [4,8,9] and that there is a need to study the associated planning and decision making process more closely, in order to better understand the origin and logic of these conflicts [9,10]. Previous research has highlighted a tendency for wind energy siting policies to be framed around scientific arguments and disagreements about facts, prioritizing an instrumental type of rationality [1,10]. Here we pick up on that observation and endeavor to tease out its origins and implications by using a set of analytical categories developed with the help of theory drawn from Marcuse [11] and Hajer [12], which we use to examine the discourse concerning wind energy siting in Catalonia, Spain.

Following Marcuse, this tendency to rely only on facts can be understood as a de facto rejection of normative considerations that are not compatible with the “given state of affairs” [13]. In Catalonia that “given state” is centralized electricity distribution and a heavy reliance on nuclear technology: An archetypical example of late-industrial technological rationality. Based on our review of the wind energy siting debate in the region over the past 30 years, we propose that this discourse is both influenced by and reproducing what Marcuse [11] referred to as the 'one-dimensional thinking' of technology as ideology: Erasing the possibility of critical dialectical thought by subsuming the question of “what should be” under the question of “what is”. The erosion of dialectical thought can be observed in this case through a dearth of value-based argumentation and a strong tendency for the discourse to be centered around fact-based propositions, concerning what is technically or scientifically appropriate.

We structure this paper as follows: In Section 2 we present our theoretical points of reference and our analytical framework; Section 3 then provides details of our research design and empirical methods; Section 4 presents a short history of the wind energy siting process in Catalonia and the results of a discourse analysis inspired by Hajer’s concept of discourse coalitions [12]; in Section 5 we apply our analytical framework, classifying these discourse coalitions and the historical progression of the siting process according to types of argumentation; in Section 6 we then juxtapose the types of argumentation assigned to discourse coalitions with those assigned to the overall discourse on wind energy siting in Catalonia, in order to assess the influence and reproduction of “one-dimensional thinking”; in Section 7 we discuss our findings and in Section 8 we present our conclusions and some recommendations for future work.

We propose that deciding where to site wind farms can be understood as what Rittel and Webber [14] have called a “wicked problem”, which is persistent, complex, and difficult or perhaps even impossible to solve. Such problems are presumed to arise in late-industrial societies; where straightforward planning problems have largely been resolved; those that remain unsolved are presumed to be so because they are embedded in the logic of how late-industrial society operates. Here we find Hajer’s approach to the study of such problems, which he describes as “the new environmental conflict”, to be particularly helpful for guiding our work: it “should not be conceptualized as a conflict over a predefined unequivocal problem with competing actors pro and con, but is to be seen as a complex and continuous struggle over the definition and the meaning of the environmental problem itself” [15]. Bringing Hajer’s insights to bear here, we explore how interactions between four key discourse coalitions, and their relationships to the overall debate, have led to some languages of valuation being imposed over others [16].

The research reported here is based on data collected in the form of a case study, as described by Yin [19], targeting key affected localities, in order to build a general picture of the wind energy siting debate across Catalonia. Wind intensity in the study region is concentrated in two exceptionally strong wind corridors: One to the south, coming down from the southern extreme of the Catalanides mountains, in Tarragona, and the other at the northeastern extreme of the region, where the Catalanides end and the Pyrenees begin (see Figure 1). Although the first wind farm in Catalonia was close to Costa Brava, it was dismantled in August 2007 following adoption of the “Special Plan for the protection of the environment and landscape of the Natural Park of Cap de Creus” (“Pla especial de protecció del medi natural i el paisatge del Parc Natural del Cap de Creus”), which forbid wind farms in the Natural Park and therefore also the renovation of this wind farm, which had, by that time, become obsolete [20]. At the present time, all of the operating wind farms in Catalonia are located in the south corridor. Considering this skewed distribution of wind resources, we visited several key wind farm siting conflict areas in various comarques [21] located both throughout the southern (especially Priorat and Terra Alta) and northern (Alt Empordà) high-wind regions of Catalonia (see Figure 1). Criteria used to choose which siting areas to study were: the presence of social mobilization; the importance given to the case by both the media and gray documentation; and either the relatively high (Terra Alta) or low (Empordà and Priorat) degree of wind farm siting projects permitted and constructed in the area. In addition, wind farm projects identified either by the media or respondents as marking turning points in the wind energy siting discourse were studied, regardless of their location in Catalonia.

Methods of data collection included participant observation, informal interviews and semi-structured interviews, which were conducted with the aim of identifying the key elements in dispute. Local civil servants, local politicians, landowners in favor of wind farm development and representatives of local community platforms opposing the current siting policies were interviewed. We also conducted a second phase of semi-structured interviews with civil servants in the Catalan Department of Environment, environmentalist non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (including both conservationist-territorially focused and generalists pro-wind NGOs), representatives of the Catalan Institute for Energy (ICAEN), environmental consultants, members of the Catalan parliament, wind entrepreneurs and representatives of the wind industry lobby association Eoliccat. In total 68 interviews were conducted.

Interview data was examined using qualitative content analysis, as described by Bryman [25]. We identified key topics highlighted by interviewees and their perceptions of the relationships between these topics. Interview content was then compared and contrasted with relevant legal, gray and scientific documents on the topic. Further analysis of the collected data was then carried out through a discourse analysis inspired by Hajer [12], with the aim of identifying “social [discourse] coalitions on specific meanings” [26]. Here we understand discourse to mean “a specific ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorizations that are produced, reproduced, and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities” [26]. We presume that discourse coalitions are not necessarily based on formal alliances and that actors may be coordinating their arguments even in the absence of conscious intentions to do so. In order to identify discourse coalitions we looked first for story-lines—“narratives on social reality through which elements from many different domains are combined and that provide actors with a set of symbolic references that suggest a common understanding” [27]—and then identified the actors participating in their construction, based on the content of their interventions and the character of their actions [28]. We then applied the analytical framework outlined above by assigning types of argumentation to the statements comprising the storylines we had observed and to each of the four planning phases identified in our review of the history of the overall discourse. In a final stage we examined to what degree the types of argumentation employed by the various discourse coalitions were, or were not compatible with the types of argumentation found to be dominant in each of the four planning phases.

Catalonia, in the northeast of Spain, is one of the country’s most industrialized regions and consumes nearly 20% of the country’s electricity, placing it first among the regions in electricity consumption [29]. The majority of the region’s electricity (56%) comes from nuclear power, with three of Spain’s eight nuclear power plants located in the region. In 2010 renewable energy (comprised almost entirely of wind power) covered 3% of the region’s electricity demand, in contrast to 16% of Spain’s electricity demand being covered by wind energy in that same year and coverage rates between 25 and 40% in other Autonomous Communities such as Galicia, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla León, Navarra and La Rioja [29]. Power plant siting is heavily skewed towards the south. Energy consumption, by contrast, has always been highest in the central urban and northern touristic regions and anti-nuclear protests in the south have consistently included reference to this inequality.

The existence of two strong wind corridors (see Section 3 and Figure 1) and an uneven distribution of operating wind farms skewed towards the south have raised new political concerns that the existing uneven development is being reinforced through the locating of new infrastructure in the south. Both wind corridors overlap with regions of special environmental status. The southern corridor, in Tarragona, overlaps with the habitat of 8% of Europe’s endangered Bonelli’s Eagle (Aquila fasciata) population [30,31,32,33,34,35], 80% of which (920–1100 pairs [31]) is concentrated on the Iberian Peninsula, where this raptor has suffered an average decline of 50% over the last three Eagle generations [32]. Wind corridors also overlap with areas of touristic importance especially in the north, including the picturesque landscape of the foothills of the Pyrenees, which run along Spain’s world famous Costa Brava. In spite of having been one of the first regions to experiment with wind energy, with Spain’s first modern wind farms connected to the grid near Girona some thirty years ago, Catalonia currently has only 4.5% of the country’s total installed capacity [36].

The discourse coalitions we found are similar to those found in other studies, as is the general tendency for the argumentative language to become technical and rational [1,10,64,65,66]. By employing the analytical framework presented in Section 2, regarding types of argumentation, we are, over time, able to systematically analyze how this tendency has manifested, both within each of the respective discourse coalitions and across them. We do this first by considering which of the four types of argumentation presented in Table 1 (i.e. Facts-Ends; Facts-Means; Values-Ends; Values-Means) are being used by which coalitions, and then by looking at how they manifest in the overall discourse over time, across the four planning phases (further detail about the content of this section can be found in Annexes III and IV).

By juxtaposing our preceding analyses of storylines and planning phases, we can now evaluate the degree of discursive compatibility between each discourse coalition and each progressive phase of the overall wind farm siting process. As shown in Table 3, we use a simple four value ordinal scale to measure this compatibility and a simple weighting system of 0, 1, 2, or 3 *’s to indicate the degree of emphasis given to each type of argumentation within each discourse coalition. The dominant types of argumentation observed in each of the planning phase are listed to the right and the composition of each discourse, to the left. These qualitative indicators are based on the data reported in Annexes III and IV.

This historically contextualized representation of how the interactions between the four discourse coalitions and the overall site planning discourse have changed over time allows us to address our main proposition: that technology as ideology has influenced how the Catalan wind farm siting discourse is developing and that this influence has led to the suppression of value-based arguments in favor of fact-based ones that are compatible with “one-dimensional thinking”.

As indicated above, we found that Phase I of the planning discourse—“Wind mills as new wizard players”—was dominated by a Facts-Ends type of argumentation advanced mainly by the “Building a sustainable industry” coalition. During this first phase the “Building a sustainable industry” coalition had a strong compatibility with the prevalent type of argumentation as did the “100% renewables now!” coalition. “Protecting biodiversity” was not actively involved in the discourse during Phase I, arriving first during Phase II, when impacts on the Bonelli`s Eagle were detected. However, this coalition had a moderate compatibility with the Facts-Ends orientation of Phase I, which can be understood to have created opportunities for it to collaborate with the first two in pulling the overall discourse back toward a facts basis in Phase III. Similarly, many of the value-based arguments of the “Building a sustainable industry” coalition were easily converted into facts based ones (MW targets and selection of the most efficient sites) in later phases. The “Protecting the landscape” coalition, which came about as a response to the unregulated siting that took place during Phase I, not surprisingly, was found to employ types of argumentation that were not compatible with the prevalent discourse of that Phase.

The upheaval of value-based claims in Phase II—“Political fight around values” forced a shift in the prevailing type of argumentation towards final causes (Values-Ends). This favored mainly the “Protecting the landscape” coalition but it also provided a moderately compatible discursive context for the “100% renewables now!” coalition and a point of entry for the “Protecting biodiversity” coalition. During this phase, all four coalitions had some degree of compatibility with the prevailing type of argumentation, making it possible for each of them to hold a position within the discourse. However, only one, ”Protecting the landscape”, prioritized the Values-Ends type within their coalition, whereas all three of the others prioritized fact-based positions.

Among the two coalitions that were involved in Phase I, “100% renewables now!” had stronger compatibility with the Phase II discourse. It was also the only coalition to have two equally weighted top priorities in terms of argumentation type; one of which it shared with the “Building a sustainable industry” coalition (Facts-Ends), the other with “Protecting biodiversity” (Facts-Means). This suggests that there may be some logic to the shift toward a Facts-Means orientation in Phase III. Although the debate in Phase II was mainly about Values-Ends, a strong fact-based orientation remained present among these three discourse coalitions. With the entry of the “Protecting biodiversity” coalition, which strongly prioritized Facts-Means types of argumentation, this fact-based tendency was reinforced. For example, while the “Protecting biodiversity” coalition argued that there was a moral imperative to protect the Bonelli`s Eagle (Values-Ends), these actors also preferred that the discussion not be led by what they referred to as “subjective” landscape criteria. Instead, they favored developing tools that could objectively identify “the right thing to do”.

In Phase III—“Battle between “facts”: “rational siting” the discourse was dominated by arguments about facts. Rational siting was seen by all coalitions as an opportunity to achieve closure in the debate, finally making successful wind energy siting possible. However, this process of rationalization excluded democracy and justice value claims, which could not be justified in terms of efficiency or appropriateness. This favored coalitions with fact-based position and those that were able to translate their value-based arguments into facts-based ones. For example, Values-Means positions of the “100% renewables now!” and "Building a sustainable industry” coalitions, such as “Business and environmentalism should work together: green business is good” (“100% renewables now!” coalition) and “Wind farm siting should be facilitated through the mediation of the regional government. Local councils should not have the right to take the final decision.” (“Building a sustainable industry” coalition) can be found in the structure of the Priority Development Zones (ZDP in Catalan). There, prioritization of wind speed criteria, attention to grid connectivity and the centralized auctioning of permits are all justified as things that new sites need, in order to be economically competitive.

Although the main Values-Ends desire of these two coalitions—to have unrestricted wind energy development—was no longer an option after the political upheaval of Phase II, the core of this position could be converted into a Facts-Means criterion concerning the technical question of how to optimize renewable electricity generation. Similarly, the Values-Ends moral imperative of the "Protecting biodiversity" coalition—avoiding impacts on the Bonelli’s Eagle—could be articulated in the concrete, objective language of environmental impact assessment (Facts-Means), which had a clear place within this ‘rational siting’ discourse.

The “Protecting the landscape” coalition was less successful with this translating work. For example, while the ZDP eventually included rules regarding the minimum distance of new sites from villages and of new sites from existing wind farms, this did little to address the concerns of southern communities regarding uneven development, which was a region-wide, not a local matter. Their arguments for distributed energy generation and more local democratic participation in the siting process were left largely unaddressed or vaguely formulated in the ZDP (see Annex IV). Where these were incorporated, it was in terms that were compliant with the “given state of affairs”, such as the agreement negotiated on the coalition’s behalf by the Left Republicans of Catalonia (ERC: Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya) political party, which guaranteed local representation in the form of two local councils members who were to sit on the commission responsible for project selection at the permit auction (see Annex IV).

During Phase III claims that the planning procedures were legally wrong and threatened the existence of endangered species (Facts-Means) were viewed by actors as strategically more effective than appeals based on value-based motivations, such as respect for local communities or protecting the environment. Several interviews with actors inclined toward the “Building a sustainable industry” and “100% renewables now!” storylines included the accusation that local platforms were “dressing visual impacts as environmental impacts that don`t exist”. Actors involved in the “Protecting the landscape” discourse, for their part, found that emphasizing increased efficiency, brought about through distributed energy generation, was more important than addressing the political aspects of decentralization because this made it easier for them to reach agreement with others. A similar pattern could be seen in the argumentative strategy of the “100% renewables now!” coalition. Although their value-based argument regarding changing “the given state of affairs” by breaking up the Catalan energy supply oligopoly was a primary motivation for this coalition, these actors chose to argue in Phase III with the comparative environmental and economic benefits of wind energy as compared to other technologies. Value-based arguments about generating qualitative changes were progressively marginalized during Phase III and the discourse concerning what should be the place of wind energy in the Catalan economy turned into a discussion about how to improve the traditional electricity sector. As stated by a politician that we interviewed, this was because the electricity sector “is, logically, in reality, dedicated to energy generation” and therefore the appropriate context for talking about wind power.

Phase IV—Reasserting “Values”?, as discussed above, has been characterized by political deadlock and a number of interventions by the courts. Here the Values-Means arguments of the “Protecting the landscape” coalition, regarding the democratic accountability of the siting process, have been brought back into the discourse, through the help of the Facts-Means intervention of a court decision, in which it was ruled that the ZDP map was not prepared in a manner compliant with Catalan law. However, as can be deduced from Table 3, the other three discourse coalitions, whose argumentation tends to be more toward fact-based positions, have preferred to push the discourse back towards Phase III. We can understand Phase IV as an attempt to reassert value based positions that had been silenced in Phases II and III. However, the Ends orientation of earlier arguments has now been translated into Means (e.g., critiques that the ZDP map development procedure was not participatory) and values-based arguments have been translated into fact-based ones (e.g. the environmental impacts associated with prioritizing energy efficiency). For the “Protecting the landscape” coalition, the result of Phase III meant that a change in the argumentation type of the overall discourse would be required before they could once again achieve standing for their values. Their claims in Phase IV can be understood, following Marcuse [11], as an attempt to express a refusal of the political fait accompli resulting from Phase III. However, even this refusal has now been translated into a type of argumentation that is more compatible with technology as ideology, with their interventions now making reference to what is allowed under existing law and what can be proven based on scientific studies (Fact-Means).

The results reported in Section 6 support our original proposition: that the wind farm siting discourse in Catalonia has both been influenced by and is reproducing what Marcuse [11] referred to as the ‘one-dimensional thinking’ of technology as ideology. Political concerns raised in Phase II, which were subordinated to the technical criteria of ‘rational siting’ in Phase III, have now, in Phase IV, been replaced by technical and juridical arguments, with facts and the ‘given state of affairs’ serving as reference points. We understand this tendency—to replace disagreements about values with disagreements about facts—as an indication that the politics of the siting discourse are being shaped by technology as ideology. Technological rationality is bearing such a strong influence on how the discourse is proceeding that it may be understood to be functioning as an ideology in its own right [11,75,76,77], leading to a discourse focused almost entirely on facts and things, dominated by what Marcuse has called an ‘overwhelming concreteness’ [78].

In the Catalan discourse upon which we report here, being pro or con wind mills has become a synonym for agreeing with, or opposing the wind energy model that is technically possible today: grid-based and commercially cost efficient. Inside this technical debate there is no space for discussion of social-environmental goals such as using wind power as the basis for building an alternative energy system. Nor is it possible to place the existential question of how to manage the balance between human and non-human uses of natural resources onto the table for discussion. Within a discourse where argumentation is performed in fact-based language, these value-based interventions are classified as complaints rather than valid standpoints: egoist NIMBY; human hating bird lover; utopian cooperativist. Our findings suggest that there is a need for studies of wind farm siting conflicts to give closer attention to the dynamics, both temporal and spatial, of relationships between facts and values in the associated discourse(s). This also has implications for determining the sustainability of planning decisions taken under such conditions. In particular, it raises the possibility that the existential question of how a society chooses to manage its relationship with the non-human environment is being reduced to a mere technical problem.

Assuming that value-based positions should have a standing in the Catalan wind energy siting discourse, which we do, we are then left with the question: How might this be possible? In his classic text One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse proposed that a New Science, a new idea of what constitutes Reason, originating from within the scientific logic that brought technology as ideology into being, might offer a route of escape from ‘one-dimensional thinking’ [79]. His discussion of this New Science can be interpreted as an anticipation of the recently developing discourse on post-normal science [17,75,76,80,81]. Post-normal science takes its name from the Kuhnian concepts of normal-science and scientific revolution [82], with the revolutionary proposition of post-normal science being that “under certain conditions, ‘‘normal’’ puzzle-solving science is not a scientific approach, because sometimes the puzzle in question cannot be solved” [14,75,83]. Coming from within the fact-based discourse of science, the ensuing proposition, that it is necessary to democratize expertise concerning some types of complex, late-industrial scientific problems [81,84], presents a logically grounded position from which to resist the tendency of hard scientific facts to achieve the kind of discursive closure we observed in this case. If the assessment of fact claims employed in the wind energy siting discourse in Catalonia were to be opened up to an extended community of actors, beyond the experts, who were allowed to participate in the work of determining what constituted a valid fact [17,81,85], then the guiding presumption of Phase III of this discourse—that scientific arguments are automatically right and uncomplicated—would need to be abandoned. By creating a discursive context where fact and value-based arguments can be discussed side by side, such an ‘extended’ peer-review process could perhaps help open up new possibilities for Catalonia to think and go beyond the “given state of affairs”.

Our findings suggest that the analytical framework we developed, using Marcuse`s concept technology as ideology and Hajer’s definition of discourse coalitions, can indeed provide new understanding regarding the logic of conflicts about wind energy development. We began with a proposition: that wind energy siting can be understood as a “wicked problem” without a definitive formulation or solution [14], where environmental conflicts are performed as disputes over discourse hegemony and discursive closure [12]. Following Hajer [12], we conducted a discourse analysis of the last 30 years of wind energy siting in the Spanish region of Catalonia, through which we identified four key discourse coalitions and four key historical phases within the overall siting discourse in the region. Based on four analytical categories of types of argumentation (Facts-Ends; Facts-Means; Values-Ends; Values-Means), inspired by Marcuse’s concept of “one-dimensional thinking”, we analyzed the argument styles of each discourse coalition and each phase of the discourse. We then juxtaposed these results, one against the other, in order to study the patterns of compatibilities across discourse coalitions, and between coalitions and the overall discourse over time.

We found that actors have coalesced around four reasonably clear storylines that are similar to those found in other wind and renewable energy studies [64,65,66]: “Building a sustainable industry”; “100% renewables now!”; “Protecting the landscape”; and “Protecting biodiversity”. We also found that the dynamics of interactions between these discourse coalitions during the different planning phases showed a tendency towards increasing “disagreements about facts” [1], which favored reliance upon the instrumental types of rationality (Facts-Ends; Facts-Means) [10] that are most compatible with technology as ideology.

We proposed, at the close of our discussion, that Marcuse’s idea of a New Science [79], as manifested in the discourse on post-normal science [81], might provide ways to avoid the trap of “one-dimensional thinking” in wind energy siting and we have recommended further research in this direction. More generally, we find that considering the place of the value-based propositions in discourses concerning wicked problems may help reveal ways to escape the ‘overwhelming concreteness’ [78] of discourses that are focused only on what is ‘true’ and possible according to the ‘given state of affairs’[13]. We believe that this approach could help to advance democracy and environmental protection in energy planning because it would allow both scholars and political subjects to raise questions concerning: (1) what constitutes fair democratic control over the production of power and (2) what is the appropriate balance between human and non-human use of natural resources.