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Energy for the masses? Exploring the political logics behind the Desertec vision

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Abstract

Desertec has become known as a label for a keen vision: the large-scale installation of solar thermal and wind-power plants in the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East to power this region and Europe with clean energy. In recent years, this vision has received considerable political attention. Especially strong was the project’s resonance at the level of the European Union, which integrated the idea of a renewable energy partnership as one of six priority projects into the Union for the Mediterranean founded in 2008. This article explores the question of how and why the private initiative of a few German scientists and minor solar businesses could finally be translated into a political project taken up by the EU. Applying the logics of critical explanations framework to the case of Desertec, this article studies the discursive strategies and storylines backing this project. It qualifies the success of the Desertec vision by studying its perception in public discourses on both sides of the Mediterranean and it discusses the impact of the recent political upheavals in the region. In doing so, it charts new ground by showing the merit of a discourse-analytical approach in a policy field seemingly dominated by strong material interests, such as energy policy.

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Notes

  1. For the sake of analytical clarity, this article distinguishes between the Desertec concept on the one hand and the Desertec project on the other. The first term refers to Desertec as a vision, a signifier or a set of storylines, in short the discursive dimension of the phenomenon. In turn, the Desertec project denotes the actors, or rather, the discourse coalition that promotes the concept.

  2. The label ‘interpretive’ is used here to denote the totality of constructivist and poststructuralist approaches that have emerged in IR since the end of the 1980s (the so-called interpretive turn). Being interpretive implies not only the adoption of a particular set of methods but also a commitment to a post-positivist epistemology, and it entails certain ontological assumptions like the relevance of knowledge and discourse in social and political practices (see also Methmann et al. 2013).

  3. By developing this perspective, the article situates itself in the field of contemporary poststructuralist scholarship in IR, which I call second wave poststructuralism. Early poststructuralist scholars in IR drew mainly on the thinking of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and other French philosophers to intervene in the (meta-)theoretical debates of the discipline and they focused on rather macro-political phenomena like sovereignty, international order or national security (e.g. Der Derian and Shapiro 1989; Campbell 1992; Walker 1993). The second wave of poststructuralist scholars in IR turned away from the grand debates of the discipline and rather used poststructuralist theories and concepts to understand and/or explain political processes in different (international) policy fields.

  4. Compared to the established definition of regimes in IR (Krasner 1982), the LCE thus follows a rather broad definition of regimes, which assigns the researcher an active role in the identification and definition of regimes. In this respect, a communal recycling system could be understood as a regime just like a national education system or a transnational governance network, depending on the very perspective of the investigator.

  5. Generative narratives are stories that organise discursive knowledge by relating discursive elements, establish correlations and causalities between them, generate explanations for empirical phenomena, provide normative judgements, etc. Storylines are short versions of these narratives that condense them to single emblematic short cues (Hajer 1995: 56).

  6. A list of the articles, sampled through a database (Lexis-Nexis) keyword search, can be accessed here: http://tinyurl.com/ntzazh5.

  7. The author is aware of the fact that studying media articles from MENA countries does not allow grasping the whole complexity of discourses in these countries. However, for the present case, this is not a major problem as the article does not claim to study the Southern discourse in detail but to sketch out its differences compared to European public discourses.

  8. See http://www.dii-eumena.com/about-us/partners.html (accessed 26 August, 2014).

  9. See http://www.dii-eumena.com/about-us/mission-vision.html (accessed 26 August, 2014).

  10. What makes their relation even more complex and opaque is that, in July 2013, an argument between the chairmen of the Dii and the Desertec Foundation led to a split between the two bodies. As a result, the Foundation withdrew from the Dii as a shareholder. Yet, both organisations continue their work under the label of Desertec.

  11. See http://www.ufmsecretariat.org/en/the-ufm-secretariat-in-menarec-for-the-first-time-the-mediterranean-solar-plan-reaches-a-new-stage/ (accessed 26 August, 2014).

  12. Important political projects of the EC/EU in this regard are the approach of a ‘global Mediterranean policy’ in the 1970s, which quickly collapsed due to the impact of the global oil crisis, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) or Barcelona Process launched in 1995, which was integrated into the European Neighbourhood Politics in 2004 and the UfM in 2008.

  13. With the climate change and energy package, the EU members obliged themselves to a common goal of a EU-wide emission reduction of 20 per cent compared to the baseline year 1990, as well as to reach a share of 20 per cent for renewables in the overall European energy-mix — the so called ‘20–20–20 goal’.

  14. See http://www.desertec.org/en/global-mission/milestones (accessed 26 August, 2014).

  15. See http://ec.europa.eu/energy/international/international_cooperation/doc/2010_02_10_mediterranean_solar_plan_strategy_paper.pdf (accessed 26 August, 2014).

  16. Neither the signifier EUMENA nor the signified, that is the designated region, existed prior to this invention. It thus represents a paradigmatic case of catachresis, which constitutes an object by naming it (Howarth and Griggs 2008).

  17. Chantal Mouffe has described post-politics as political forms that seek to overcome antagonisms through the establishment of consensual, participatory forms of governance. In the end, these attempts are an illusion as antagonisms are seen as a constitutive feature of the political and every consensual agreement always already presupposes the exclusion of some actors’ demands or interests (Mouffe 2005).

  18. For example, the Desertec concept was recently featured at a side event of the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (see UNCSD 2012).

  19. See http://ufmsecretariat.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/DISCUSSION-PAPER-MSP-Master-Plan.pdf (accessed 26 August, 2014).

  20. See http://www.desertec.org/en/global-mission/milestones (accessed 26 August, 2014).

  21. Gerhard Knies quoted in http://energlobe.de/archiv/wissenschaft/visionen/jetzt-erst-recht (accessed 26 August, 2014).

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Rothe, D. Energy for the masses? Exploring the political logics behind the Desertec vision. J Int Relat Dev 19, 392–419 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2014.17

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