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Wind power production is expanding globally and with this comes social resistance. In this article, we study controversies concerning the expansion of wind power in Sweden between 2009 and 2022. To this end, we study national press coverage and local press coverage from Sweden's 290 municipalities. Despite previous studies showing that Swedish people are generally in favour of expanding wind power, our results show that this policy is controversial and often is met with significant local resistance. We identify a clash between two environmental concerns: developing national policies to mitigate the effects of climate change and local opinions calling for the preservation of natural landscapes, which are often coupled with concerns about whether expansion of wind power leads to positive climate effects. We analyse national and local discourses through a multi-level governance perspective, a view that argues Sweden's market-oriented and decentralized wind power planning regime feeds the controversy. In conclusion, the dispersal of power throughout the planning system facilitates scaling up of local resistance to an energy policy issue of national concern, creating significant uncertainty about the expansion of wind power in Sweden. • Material on the debate on wind power resistance in the case of Sweden is analysed focusing on national and local actors. • A national opinion in support for wind power development is challenged by local resistance towards the same energy source. • The controversy threatens climate objectives as well as the electrification of Swedish industry and transportation sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of rapid urbanisation, understanding how marginalised groups shape and are shaped by planning has never been more urgent. Here, we focus on the political capability of marginalised groups, centring analysis on the control (or lack of control) that they have over their livelihoods and environment. Focused on the politics of participatory planning that surround the Kirtipur and Baan Mankong Housing Projects in Nepal and Thailand, we develop a post-foundational approach to explore how the political capabilities of informal settlers and their representatives are bound up in the realisation of conflict. Crucially, our analysis reveals the discourses, alliances, and expertise – referred to as knowledge infrastructures – that are mobilised by constituted and constituent forms of power to construct and contest urban development. Building upon this framework, we demonstrate how technocratic knowledge infrastructures support hegemonic encroachment discourses that, in turn, condition the emergence of insurgent knowledge infrastructures. In doing so, we show that the political capabilities of informal settlers are fundamentally tied to how these insurgent knowledge infrastructures support participatory planning processes conducive to political subjectivisation. Ultimately, we reveal how participatory planning generates struggles for equality and rights that shape the urban as an arena of conflictual coproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spanish far-right party Vox has undergone, together with other similar forces in Europe, an "ecological turn". To analyze this case, the article starts from the premise of the need to understand better the far-right parties' discursive mechanisms and their engagement with environmental issues. Theoretically, we criticize the ideological and ontological approaches to the current wave of national populism; instead, we argue that the dominant form of authoritarian national populism is more usefully analyzed in terms of embodied narratives, metaphorical imagination, mythmaking, and affective intensification. Empirically, using discourse analysis (Laclau, 2005) and drawing on the affective turn in political ecology, first, we argue that Vox's eco-narrative is interpretable as a combination of national populism and biopolitical imaginary pitting a "culture of death" against the "culture of life". Vox's key rhetorical mechanisms, we intimate, are hyperbolical metaphorization and rhetorical inversion, have an intensifying effect at two interconnected levels: fear and indignation concerning the degeneration of Spain, pride and hope regarding Vox's and its male hero's promise of salvation and the Reconquista of the Spanish way of life. Second, by looking into key policy areas (energy and water), we argue that Vox has systematically chosen the former in conflicts between capitalist interests and environmental issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]