Consulting Energy: From Judgment to Decision-Making

This book examines a shift in the terrain of energy politics that has given rise to consultant experts as new types of intermediaries capable of orienting crucial decision-making, influencing energy politics, steering governance, and envisioning energy futures.

Drawing on fieldwork at executive roundtables in global cities across North America and Europe, the book examines the development and consolidation of consultant expertise, as well as the opulent settings in which it is distributed. By exploring the role of aesthetics and judgment in market-oriented decision-making, the book explores elites, expertise, and ethics by highlighting the relationship between credibility and luxury. The book also considers the enrolment of the expert in a kind of virtue ethics, whereby adherence to neoclassical economic principles is taken to be a character trait worthy of emulation. By adopting this analytic, this book sheds light on the confidence that clients place in experts by drawing out the relationship between depersonalized, quantitative approaches to energy markets and the virtue of the persons who propose them. In turn, the book discusses the implications of relying upon consultant experts to determine, envision, and govern energy futures.

This book will be useful for academics, researchers, and students interested in energy studies, energy and environmental politics and policy, energy and environmental governance, anthropology, and political science.

Arthur Mason is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Social Anthropology at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. He also holds positions as Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK, and Research Affiliate at the Centre for Energy Ethics at University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland.