Sociotechnical Imaginaries and National Energy Policies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes We use "ownership" here both in the subjective sense of an actor's willing assumption of responsibility for an issue or problem, and in the objective sense that, when things go wrong, responsibility lies with the presumptive "owner". The financial crisis of 2008 prompted a very similar, though much more visible, post hoc assumption of risks by the public, while a poorly regulated private financial market reaped huge profits before, and some have argued after, the meltdown. Some have called this a "heads you win, tails we lose" approach to managing large financial institutions. The imaginary of private ownership of opportunity and public ownership of loss appears to apply forcefully in this risky technological sector as well. This was clearly stated in a 1978 Federal Constitutional Court decision concerning the adequacy of the statutory provisions relating to the licensing of nuclear power plants, specifically, the fast breeder reactor at Kalkar, BVerfGE 49, 89 (126–27) (1978). The reactor was never started up because protests kept the government of North Rhine-Westphalia from ever issuing the final permit. The German Federal Republic has been sensitive to jobs and economic security issues perhaps more than any other major European power, and this sensitivity extends to the energy sector. In particular, Germany massively subsidized its coal mining industry through 40 years of downsizing, encouraging mining companies and workers to retrain, retool, and redirect their energies into other forms of work. Though highly relevant to German energy imaginaries, the topic of coal mining would take us far beyond the scope of this brief think piece. In early 2010, the Environment Minister, Norbert Röttgen, a member of the Chancellor's own party, indicated a possible weakening of the government's position, suggesting that the policy lacked sufficient public backing to be workable in the long term (Auckland, Citation2010). Lacking political legitimacy, the military regime in this period desperately needed US endorsement and had to be receptive to American economic demands. Further, a new generation of policy technocrats, many of whom were US-trained economists, began to advocate neoliberal policies (Park, Citation2009). The oil industry, however, was privatized as early as in the mid-1960s, though in the form of foreign-invested joint-venture and under strict control by the government. South Korea's relatively more cautious approach to the social and environmental dimensions of biofuel production, a reflection perhaps of a growing public concern about vulnerability to risks, does not seem to signal a major shift in the national development imaginary either.