Land Use Policy 27 (2010) 222–232 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Land Use Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/landusepol Wind power, landscape and strategic, spatial planning—The construction of ‘acceptable locations’ in Wales Richard Cowell * School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3WA United Kingdom article info Article history: Received 4 February 2008 Received in revised form 21 January 2009 Accepted 24 January 2009 Keywords: Planning Wind energy Landscape Wales Siting Reflexivity abstract A number of analysts have argued that decisions about renewable energy technologies and targets need to be reconciled with the social and environmental contexts in which those technologies are adopted. How- ever, an unresolved issue is how the contextually-embedded qualities of landscape might be represented at the national level, alongside other energy policy considerations like resource availability, economic efficiency and technical feasibility. To explore the dilemmas of this enterprise, this work examines the efforts of the Welsh Assembly Government to develop a spatial planning framework for wind energy. The work examines how particular landscapes became identified as ‘acceptable locations’ for wind farms, and the consequences. Four sets of findings are discussed: the selectivity with which landscape qualities enter strategic planning rationalities, favouring qualities that are formally demarcated and measurable ‘at a dis- tance’; the tendency of the identified strategic search areas for wind to reinforce the degraded status of afforested upland areas; the extent to which the planning framework has rendered certain environmen- tal qualities malleable; and the way that drawing boundaries around acceptable locations for large-scale wind energy development may restrict the scope for future reflexivity in energy policy. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction In a thought-provoking article, Shove (1998) takes issue with the ‘web of taken for granted beliefs’ (p. 1107) about the role of research in energy policy and its relationship to practice. She summarises the conventional view in which policy processes are driven by analyses of the ‘technical potential’ of a given technol- ogy, based on resource availability, or the potential for saving costs, energy or carbon, which then inform ‘the setting and realisation of energy ... targets’ (p. 1106). For Shove, a key problem with this conventional view is the split between the technical and the social. While technically-derived policy goals are seen as unproblematic, rational and immutable, the ‘surrounding social and political con- text is rendered irrational, soft and open to manipulation in order to achieve particular policy outcomes’ (Bulkeley et al., 2005, p. 14). Altogether, there is a failure ‘to appreciate ... the social con- texts of ... action’ and ‘the socially situated character of technical knowledge’ (Shove, 1998, p. 1108). A further problem with this con- ventional view is that it privileges technical researchers, in defining the technical fixes for future energy development, leaving social sci- entists with the ‘secondary tasks of removing blockages’ (p. 1108) to achieving them. * Tel.: +44 29 20876684; fax: +44 29 20874845. E-mail address: cowellrj@cardiff.ac.uk. Shove was writing about energy conservation, but her critique is pertinent to the way in which policy for renewable energy has been constructed in the UK, especially for wind energy. For almost two decades, industry, government and environmental groups have routinely prefaced the case for expanding wind power with asser- tions that the UK has the best wind energy resources in Europe. Arguments proceed from statements about the technical capac- ity and economic viability of wind energy to the identification of policy targets. For all that policy discourse acknowledges the importance of reconciling renewable energy with other environ- mental values like landscape and ecology, a central feature of policy approaches has been the positioning of the various envi- ronmental and social effects bound up with the wind energy as downstream, exogenous factors, relegated to ‘local’, siting issues (Owens, 2004). As a corollary, if wind farm development attracts resistance, and targets prove difficult to achieve, then protagonists bemoan the planning system and call for the barriers to new renew- able energy capacity to be overcome (see, for example, Beddoe and Chamberlain, 2003; Department of Trade and Industry, 2003, 2007). The logic of Shove’s argument is that society needs more reflexive deliberation between the technical potential of different renewable energy technologies and the contextual conditions in which they might be deployed. Indeed, such arguments have wider relevance to debates about environmental policy integration, espe- cially for renewable energy where coordinating policies for energy 0264-8377/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2009.01.006