Developing wind power in France. The hidden potential of past / present local communities

International audienceWind power is commonly considered as being part of the short term solutions to greenhouse gas reduction. Yet, its deployment has remained uneven at the national level. This has triggered a growing literature interested in the social and institutional factors underlying this development. The role of community involvement in planning and project development has been emphasized from various perspectives such as: institutional learning, social networks, project ownership, co-benefits, the need for early public consultation, fairness and trust-building. Our contribution aims at discussing the role of inherited spatial and territorial structures. The knowledge about these structures can be conveyed through community involvement in planning processes and can contribute to the identification of unknown potential for socially acceptable wind power development. The analysis will draw upon the comparison of three local case studies of wind power planning or development processes in France - Aveyron ; Narbonnaise and Eure-et-Loir - in order to discuss the role of local opposition, community involvement and inherited spatial structures in the construction of a wind power potential. In Aveyron (South France), the shift from (administrative) sieve-map planning to a politically more open planning process (based on the design of wind power development zones by local inter-communalities) led to pointing at former "haut-plateaux", historically used as common agricultural land for grazing, as potential places for wind power development. In the Narbonnaise, a local wind power planning process involving local actors led to unexpected collaboration between hunters, bird protectors and wind power developers in order to reintroduce sheep grazing under wind farms, and with the economic support of wind power benefits, in former common agricultural lands (guarrigues hauts-plateaux). Different from this, in the open field landscape of Eure-et-Loir (Centre France), industrial farmers owning most of the territory have framed, through their involvement in local politics, wind power development as matter of private business