Citizen wind parks in the German district of Northern Friesland are a well-known example of the citizen-funded development of wind power. This paper follows the careful (and successful) collective structuring of wind power in Northern Friesland, along with the State of Schleswig-Holstein's attempt, which was challenged and ultimately overturned, to replicate and generalize participation as a basis for scaling up wind power in the region through planning.In so doing, the paper explores the processes of fair public participation and the modalities through which a shared sense of fairness is constructed. Following John Dewey's theory of valuation (1939), fairness is considered here as a value that emerges from collective practices. Furthermore, by approaching fairness as a 2 dimension of the wind energy assemblage, we capture the finer details of how it is constructed and embedded in everyday life. We argue that this enmeshment of practices and values challenges our definition of energy justice because it requires the making of norms to be connected with shared values. Finally, the recognition of differences among territories plays an important role as wind power scales up.Number of words: 9955 (without abstract and references)

International audienceThe success of wind power development in Northern Friesland (Germany) is mainly due to its ‘citizen wind parks’. However, their historical emergence, as well as their astonishing scale-up from small to large wind farms, is little understood from the inside. Following the critical approach of assemblage thinking, this paper’s proposal is to revise the notion of ‘assembly’ to investigate collective processes of ‘attunement’. The paper stresses the practical work of valuating ‘things’ and making them commensurable in the light of the relations (inherited practices, place attachments, project perspectives) grounded in a place. This approach makes it possible to identify the ways in which assemblies from Northern Friesland have negotiated and transformed an inherited landscape into a shared wind power landscape. We call this activity in which local assemblies engage ‘a polity’. Finally, we illustrate the term’s conceptual potential by discussing its scope and links to techniques of power that follow from environmental ‘governmentality’

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