Beyond the backyard: Scaling up of resistance to wind power in Sweden

Since 2009, when a municipal veto right was established, wind power in Sweden has become intensely politicised and questioned. Having been considered the key technology to drive the energy system transition by all parliamentary parties before 2010, the 2022 elections brought into power a government that promised an end to the “steel forests of wind turbines”. Based on a comprehensive analysis of media coverage of wind power conflicts on national and local levels, the study explains these developments as a discursive struggle. It shows how localised and fragmented resistance groups evolved into generalised opposition to wind power per se. These shifts are explained as enabled by political, legal and discursive opportunity structures.

The study shows how political, legal and discursive opportunities allow for the scaling up of localised resistance to wind power. It explains wind power resistance as embedded in socio-political structures by analysing the relationship between resistance claims on different institutional and geographic scales. While previous research has identified a need to look beyond formal planning processes and at wider sociopolitical contexts to understand the formation of wind power resistance, there is a lack of comprehensive, longitudinal studies of how local resistance shift scales into national resistance. We provide a theoretically informed and empirically grounded analysis of a national case of growing wind power resistance. By showing the speed with which a counter discourse was able to shift scales and gain an entrenched position in Swedish energy politics, the paper enables an understanding of similar developments around Europe.