Seventeenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Islands are unique heritage landscapes, shaped through the ongoing interaction of humans, non-humans, and territories. They have historically been hubs of resilience and autarky, as populations needed to adapt to the constant alterations between isolation and connectivity. Today, islands in Europe are often in the fringe of their national territories, facing challenges of over tourism and peripherality. The ambitions for the transition to renewable energy bring changes for the landscapes of islands:the abstract global discussion is being locally expressed in urgent and material ways. This paper discusses the cases of three archipelagos: the Wadden islands in the Netherlands, the Cyclades in Greece, and the Orkney islands in Scotland. There, big scale infrastructure projects involving the islandic elements of sun, sea, and wind, are being variously contested. The parallelization of the three projects illustrates how the change of valuable landscapes relates to different interactions between local actors, the market, and the national state. Renewable energy infrastructure seemingly concerns the contested concept of common good. However, the same technology can be seen as a welcome addition to place heritage and identity, or as a major threat, depending on the different planning frameworks, geopolitical interests, and local conditions. Using a combination of discourse analysis and empirical methods, this paper draws parallels between the three local cases, and maps the opposing or aligned meanings of heritage and sustainability.