Societal Decision-making

This text deals with societal decision-making relating to large-scale, major energy facilities (abbreviated hereafter as MEFs): hydro-power developments, nuclear power plants, and off-shore petroleum projects. In Norway, as in many other countries, national authorities have a major responsiblity for the planning, financing and construction of such projects. Construction of large-scale energy facilities is part of industrialization and modernization. MEF projects are often major engineering feats as well as symbols for advanced industrialization. However, in Western nations, decisions about MEFs have over the last decades become increasingly controversial. It is enough to mention planning and construction of nuclear power plants in West Germany, Austria, Sweden and the USA as well as Norway, and hydro-power projects in Austria and Norway. In many ways such projects transcend the scope of government or state decision-making. They affect the dynamic relationship between state decision-making, on the one hand, and the distributive effects of - and social reactions to - the decisions, on the other hand.
Such impacts of MEFs have led us to conceptualize decisions about MEF projects as societal decision-making. This type of decision-making extends beyond sector and even formal political institutions.