The role of infrastructural visibility for social innovation processes: Stabilising new sociomaterial relations through infrastructuring

Significant changes are underway to increase citizens’ and local actors’ participation in Germany’s energy transition. This raises questions about the potential for cooperation between municipalities and citizens, as well as the role of energy infrastructure in facilitating it. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in two municipalities in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, this paper illustrates how various approaches to social innovation in energy (SIE) and infrastructure visibility interact to create distinct opportunities for cooperation. Drawing on literature on SIE and a relational understanding of infrastructure, this paper discusses the role of infrastructuring, emphasising how sociomaterial relations both give shape to, and are shaped by new ways of doing, organising, and thinking about energy. We understand infrastructuring as the ongoing, situated formation of sociomaterial relations. It is a means of bringing about or coping with social change at the local level that can either enable or restrict participation. We examine two approaches to infrastructuring. In the first, renewable energy infrastructures were made invisible to citizens in a former mining village. In the second, the visibility of a wind farm was used to experiment with new forms of participation in three ‘wind villages’. These approaches give rise to different patterns of cooperation by rendering sociomaterial infrastructures visible or invisible to local actors. Our analysis shows that visible infrastructure stabilises sociomaterial relations, encouraging active cooperation between citizens and municipalities during local energy transitions. It also clarifies the role of artefacts and objects in shaping and stabilising SIE in rural areas. • Provides insights into the peculiarities of social innovation processes in energy transitions in rural areas in eastern Germany. • Expands the perspective on social innovation as a sociomaterial phenomenon. • Illustrates how infrastructures are made visible or invisible within social innovation processes. • Highlights the role of infrastructural visibility for social innovation processes, their relational networks and their cooperations.