Landscape and birds are an important cause of blocking wind power projects. This paper investigates the question of whether birds and wind power can be part of a same landscape and what type of landscape this could compose. We do so by following birds, birdwatchers and wind power developers in their attempt to compose such a landscape in the South of France. Our perspective focuses on the attachments that animals or landscape might develop or entice humans to develop. We show that the process by which such a wind power landscape is composed engages birds into successive translations, which ultimately translate bird intelligence in composing with the wind into a quality of the landscape. As a result, such a landscape emerges from a net of relations and has a quality which is not necessarily visually readable: it is accountable to the entities which have been brought into representation through/for its making.

a b s t r a c tThe development of wind energy in France presents an exemplary case of contrast between the policy instrument and its effectiveness in terms of installed wind power capacity. After 7 years of one of the highest feed-in tariffs in the world, the installed capacity in France is still very low. This is notably due to a diffuse pattern of administrative landscape protection which impacts on the construction of wind power potential. In turn, the pace of wind power development can be understood only by looking in more detail at the way in which landscape is dealt with in local planning processes. This paper examines the question using the case of Aveyron in southern France. We follow the shifting ways in which landscape is enrolled in wind power planning, in a context where new planning instruments favor an incipient decentralization in wind power policy. The case points to a change in both the networks and the concepts involved in the design of landscape representations that underlie the construction of wind power potential. We show that this change has been forced by the far-reaching and decentralized visual impacts of wind power technology, suggesting that technology is recomposing the social as part of its development process and questioning the very meaning and perception that is given to landscape.

The paper bears witness to the emergence of a French energy policy localism. It presents a sample of significant local rural experiences in the climate energy domain in rural France. These experiences are risky, trial-and-error transcalar processes. They amount to a different way of doing energy policy. French localism surfs on these innovative territories while remaining ambiguous about the status that it confers on them. a b s t r a c tThis paper is interested in sustainable energy initiatives in French rural areas. It follows up the UK debate about 'localism'. UK policy localism has been cast as neoliberal, framing communities as competent and competitive actors, morally responsible and accountable for their destiny.In France, the emerging policy localism is surfing on an ongoing political structuration of innovative rural territories -'Positive Energie Territories' (TEPOS). The paper presents and discusses the results of a rough census (undertaken in 2012) of significant experiences in this domain. It points to a few experiences and depicts them as risky, trial-and-error transcalar processes that endow locally emergent energy issues with a political dimension. To this extent, they amount to a different way of doing energy policy.The analysis points to an ambiguity in French policy localism. This localism may pave the way for an upscaling of the ongoing TEPOS political structuration, or tend to make TEPOS into demonstration territories within a neoliberal RTD policy approach. In the latter case, it may not necessarily fit territories to pursue their political structuration with a view to the energy transition.

International audienceThe deployment of wind power induces deep changes in landscapes and territories. The politicization of wind power generates new ad hoc collectives. In the French case, because of the institutional framing resulting from landscape and wind power policies (centralization, feed-in tariffs, private developers), collectives of emerging wind power landscapes are regularly set apart from wind power planning processes. This paper explores the extent to which these recompositions and new collectives could be part of emerging wind power potentials. The empirical evidence stemming from our case studies shows that wind power technology, like any other technology, is not endowed with a potential per se. Wind power potentials differ – ‘capitalistic’, ‘controversial’, ‘negotiated’, ‘conditional’ – depending on planning processes and inherited configurations. The notions of striated space and smooth space enable us to adopt a relational perspective on these emerging collectives and to account for the role of inherited socio-geographical configurations and planning processes