'No New Tech for the Energy Transition!' : An environmental analysis of Smart Meters and 5G controversies
Résumé
This paper brings an environmental perspective to the STS analysis of controversies. It deals with the case of recent technological innovations which, despite being a part of the political-industrial discourse on energy and environmental transition, are encountering critical assessment and resistance from a diversity of publics. Based on an in-depth analysis of the socio-technical controversies that have developed over smart meters and 5G in France, the paper will first show how these controversies have challenged the deployment trajectories of the targeted technologies, even contributing to the weakening of their ecological scope. It will also show how these controversies have become the arena for the emergence of a "sobriety" narrative, which is carried transversally by the various actors of the critique in opposition to the techno-solutionist narrative of the innovation’s promoters.
In conclusion, the paper will discuss the social productivity of public controversies over emerging technologies (Callon 1981; Rip 1986; Lascoumes 2002), and the importance of taking them seriously for the purposes of opening up technological development (Stirling 2012).
The proposed analysis is based on the exploitation of a heterogeneous corpus of quantitative and qualitative data, collected both through database mining (bibliographic, press, web pages) and through field and online surveys conducted within different arenas of debate (participant observation within institutional technology assessment bodies and public information meetings; interviews with key players in the controversies; content analysis of expert reports, municipal decisions and moratorium requests, discussion lists and citizen complaints).