Introduction
Germany is an acknowledged world leader in renewable energy development and implementation. Its landmark federal energy law, the Renewable Energy Sources Act of 2000 (EEG), is considered a model for others. Germany has also set the standard with its accelerated timetable for transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables. 1 Impressive as these actions are, Germanyâs energy transition cannot be credited to the top levels of government alone. The impetus for renewables predated the federal legal infrastructure. The transition was pushed by a network of supporters that formed outside of, and largely in opposition to, the mainstream political, bureaucratic, and industrial centers of power.
The Energiewende (energy transition) represents an about-face in policy in a system where fossil fuel and nuclear interests are quite powerful. Energy planning has traditionally involved closed-door negotiations between federal and state economics bureaucracies and large energy utilities. 2 The major utilities were uninterested in developing renewables, and there was no big push from the federal government, either. The transition was prompted by ânot in my backyard (NIMBY)â protests against conventional energy sources, particularly nuclear power. At critical junctures, nuclear accidents and other environmental harms bolstered the case for renewable energies and weakened the arguments of their more established competitors. 3 Renewable energy development was a bottom-up phenomenon in a country where policy change normally comes from the top.
The critical role of grassroots mobilization in turning Germany away from nuclear power is documented elsewhere. 4 Less well researched is the connection between protest politics and technological innovation. Grassroots opposition is sometimes credited with making established technologies less politically viable, and that is certainly the case here, too. But, in Germany, the impact of mass mobilization transcended the rejection of particular technologies or facilities. The innovation in new, renewable energy technologies sprang, in part, from the protest movement itself and was pushed along by it at critical points. The German case may lead us to reassess the role of grassroots protest in technological change.
In this chapter, I analyze the evolution from citizen protest to networks of innovation for the iconic case of Wyhl in the Freiburg/Breisgau region of Baden-WĂŒrttemberg. The successful site occupations at Wyhl and neighboring facilities in the mid-1970s popularized new forms of citizen activism in Germany. They also gave rise to a regional movement for solar energy that ultimately helped revolutionize German energy policy.
Linking Protest and Innovation in NIMBY Theory
Community opposition to local environmental harms has often been characterized as NIMBY. The term has negative connotations; local protests against government-supported facilities, most notably hazardous waste-disposal sites and nuclear power plants, have often resulted in siting failures. 5 Partly for this reason, these local movements are criticized as parochial and detrimental to the public good. Social scientists, too, have commonly referred to NIMBY as a âsyndrome.â 6
Some scholarship on NIMBY since the 1990s has taken a more differentiated view, viewing local protest as a rational reaction to a flawed siting process. 7 Other studies focus on motivations of the protesters, such as risk perception and attitudes toward government, or demographic factors such as age, education, and income, as well as variations in support based on incentives offered by industry. 8 The literature on social movements has critiqued the concentration on latent community characteristics, focusing instead on active framing processes through which movement leaders mobilize community members to participate in grassroots protest. 9 Taken together, this scholarship gives us a more complex picture of citizen protest that treats all participants as rational, strategic actors. Still, most analyses of NIMBY treat the conflict itself as a negative to be avoided or minimized where possible.
Moreover, the results of NIMBY protest beyond the particular siting controversy are seldom analyzed. This is true even of studies that focus on NIMBY groups as social movements. These may try to account for the expansion or transformation of movement goals during the course of a conflict or demonstrate how protest may expand geographically over time. But even those that acknowledge that local resistance can evolve into a broader Systemkritik (critique of a political system) tend to treat the resistance as pathological, and its effects as limited to the immediate controversy. 10 Only a few focus on what David Hess calls the âgenerativeâ side of social movement action, the link to longer-term, positive societal change. 11 Such change may be difficult to measure. Nevertheless, the generative effects of NIMBY are an important part of the explanation for Germanyâs successful energy transition.
There are several ways in which NIMBY protest can lead to innovations in both technology and decision-making processes. For one, NIMBY protest often prevents the construction of projects that appear in retrospect to have been ill-advised. The delays caused by ongoing protest force industrial and political elites to rethink the scientific, economic, and demographic assumptions upon which the projects were originally based. In the case of hazardous waste disposal, changes in the production process may reduce the amount of waste, and thus eliminate the need for large offsite repositories. 12 In the German case analyzed here, cross-border protest mobilization prevented the construction of massive overcapacity in nuclear power.
Second, NIMBY protest may weaken the gatekeeping function of technical expertise in policymaking. 13 In the 1970s, local citizens throughout Germany began to challenge large industrial projects on technical and scientific grounds through the development of what they called âcounter-expertise.â Counter-expertise is knowledge generated in order to offer an alternative to an inaccurate or incomplete, but popularly accepted, scientific view. At Wyhl, anti-nuclear protesters organized informal presentations at the occupation site that raised questions about the safety and economic viability of nuclear power. A small group of Wyhl veterans later founded a non-profit institute dedicated to helping citizen groups muster the technical expertise to challenge similar projects in court. NIMBY groups throughout Germany built their own enduring network of counter-expertise, embedded in, and informed by, their own local cultures and resulting in a broader public discussion of alternatives.
NIMBY actors may also pose a deeper challenge to technocratic policymaking by asserting that the decision to pursue a particular project is fundamentally political, not technical, and, as such, should be decided not by elites but by the broader society. 14 At Wyhl, protesters recast energy policy choices as moral decisions over the direction of the whole society, a choice between a linear model of economic growth and an emerging alternative model that took into account effects on the environment and on future generations. Reformulating technological decisions as political ones may contribute to the democratization of decision processes and the empowerment of local citizens.
In addition to changing attitudes toward particular technologies, challenging non-participatory policymaking processes, and generating technical expertise, grassroots protest movements can engage in âcreative reconstructionâ by fostering a regional milieu conducive to innovation. 15 Werner Krauss shows how opposition to government-imposed regional planning combined with local wind power initiatives to create new âwind energy landscapesâ in northern Germany. 16 Ion Bogdan Vasi notes that social movements can help create an atmosphere conducive to investment in renewables in that they âshape entrepreneursâ perceptions of social and economic opportunities, as well as their motivation to take risks to exploit these opportunities.â 17
This creative reconstruction took the form of technological and political innovation in the Freiburg case. There are several dimensions to technological innovation. First, NIMBY protests at Wyhl led directly to the founding of an institution of counter-expertise dedicated to helping citizens challenge the dominant energy paradigm. Second, it helped foster the bottom-up development of a renewable energy industry, particularly in solar power. Participants in the Wyhl protests incorporated their activism into a wide variety of professions, which supported one another partly because of those old ties. Third, Wyhl veterans were also behind the establishment of strong public elementary, vocational, and continuing education programs to support a solar economy. Finally, the massive anti-nuclear protests in the Freiburg region, along with emerging grassroots experiments in solar energy design and implementation in a variety of fields, created a regional milieu in which key actors decided it was worthwhile to take the risk of advocating for solar research and development (R&D). The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems got its start this way.
Political innovation can also be part of the creative reconstruction fostered by NIMBY movements. Anti-nuclear protest throughout Germany led to the development of advocacy networks to push for renewable energy and to prevent any rollback in government support. In the Freiburg region, anti-nuclear protest was connected to the development of the nascent environmental organization Bund fĂŒr Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND; Friends of the Earth), which became a fixture among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and a strong advocate of renewable energy technologies. The protest was also connected to the founding of local green voting lists and to the greening of the established political parties. Activists worked from outside and inside government to push for the adoption of renewables.
A Note on Research Design
This study uses a process-tracing method for a single case, as described by Alexander George and Andrew Bennett. The in-depth analysis of a single case can identify factors important to the outcome that may not be obvious when the issue is viewed from greater distance. It also aids in identifying the mechanisms by which an identified change occurs. 18 Anti-nuclear activism in Germany is correlated with the development of renewable energy technologies; the process by which the one led to the other is a topic of great i...