Valuing energy and nature in bureaucratic practice

To sufficiently respond to climate change and environmental degradation, governing bodies need to value natural resources and environments differently. This is a guiding intuition for my research on the role of the bureaucracy in 'green transitions'. In this talk I engage with how municipal and state bureaucracies experiment with formats for valuing nature. The notion of bureaucracy evokes a sense of rigidity, and scholars have in various ways described how decision making processes in many states are dominated by neoclassical economic reasoning. Such reasoning takes value as natural given and thus limits how bureaucracies may modify valuing practices. But bureaucracies in practice are also sites of continuous change, experimentation, and adaptation, where multiple voices and reasonings circulate. Drawing on ethnographic work in urban- and energy planning offices in Denmark, I describe how nature is valued differently through various tools such as energy system models, stakeholder consultation formats, spreadsheets, reports and policy documents, and GIS data. Taking bureaucratic practice as material, fluid, multiple, and deeply involved in the enactment of value, opens an interesting space for research on and intervention in how nature is valued -- but the intervention part is tricky! So I will end with some reflections on my limited successes in that regard and hope for an engaged discussion.