Congested spaces, contested scales – A review of spatial planning for wind energy in Ireland

• Achievement of wind energy targets poses strategic spatial planning challenges.
• Scale is used to crystallise key governmental political strategies.
• A review of Irish wind energy strategies reveals inconsistent policy and methods.
• Rescaling local assessment criteria can facilitate a coordinated national framework.
• Systematic spatial assessment can enhance strategic renewable planning.

The achievement of Ireland's renewable energy targets requires an approximate doubling of installed onshore wind capacity by 2020. However, the growing accumulation of new wind energy networks in the landscape is encountering increasingly trenchant social and political resistance. This dilemma suggests an enhanced role for national scale strategic spatial planning to tighten centralised spatial control in order to more precisely steer developments to selected locations. However, to date the Irish government has avoided greater centralised coordination, preferring instead to devolve planning responsibilities to the local scale, which has resulted in highly disjointed and heterogeneous policy settings. Drawing on recent academic interest in the depoliticisation of strategic spatial planning, this paper seeks to interrogate why Ireland has adopted this particular scale of governance for wind energy planning. It is argued that the approach is a deliberate scalar strategy designed to disavow and displace a contentious public policy issue as part of a wider post-political management of dissent. In order to explore the opportunities for more repoliticised and reflexive scalar deliberation in framing national renewable energy technology and strategic policy choices, a structured review of local wind energy strategies is presented. It is concluded that by bringing a focus on the differentiated socio-spatial contexts of particular places, it could serve to trigger much wider political debate around the spatial challenges associated with the roll-out of onshore wind energy networks in highly congested and contested spaces, and the possibilities for alternative energy pathways.