Projects / Programmes
Social acceptability of territorial effects in RES scenarios
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 5.08.00 |
Social sciences |
Urbanism |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| T260 |
Technological sciences |
Physical planning |
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| 5.07 |
Social Sciences |
Social and economic geography |
renewable energy sources, social acceptability, scenarios, landscape quality
Researchers (14)
Organisations (4)
Abstract
Political agreements and severity of climate change predictions call for urgent improvement of energy production and use. Amongst the many measures to address this problem, one of the most perspective besides consumption decrease is also increase in share of energy produced from renewable energy sources (RES). While technological progress is swift, political support high and market conditions relatively favourable, RES use implementation faced considerable social opposition. The public generally supports increase in use of RES but finds concrete projects unacceptable. Research shows that main reason for opposition stems from changes and impacts on landscape and distributions of benefits and damages, perceived as unjust by local communities. The proposed project addresses this issue with an interdisciplinary contextualized approach on multiple levels. Setting EU and Slovenia’s RES targets as our basis, we will construct scenarios of reaching them by combining different RES technologies. For each scenario will design a spatial model, showing the most appropriate areas in Slovenia to implement those RES facilities. We will choose reference areas for which visualizations will be made to show landscape consequences of the implementation. This will allow us to link together national targets, which generally have high public support, with concrete local consequences of achieving them, which often evoke opposition. Social acceptability of scenarios, spatial models and visualizations will be explored using a public opinion survey conducted on a representative sample. We will also include various compensations and ownership schemes of RES facilities, which were shown to have a beneficial effect on social acceptability. We will employ focus groups to further study the results of the survey in order to better understand motivation for (un)acceptance. Survey and focus group findings will explain the relative importance of landscape and economic factors for social acceptability as well as reveal the socially most acceptable scenario. By understanding the publics value system we will also be able to improve the spatial models. Results will be gathered in recommendations for ensuring higher social acceptance of RES facilities, paying special attention to impacts of compensations and ownership. They will also reveal in which landscape types the use of RES and which technology is most acceptable to the public. Using the described approach we will address some of the key questions in the research of social aspects of energy transition. We will link together acceptability on multiple levels, test effects of compensation and ownership and connect the perception of national RES targets and local consequences of their fulfilment. Besides the crucial knowledge for development of RES in Slovenia, this will also bring together issues that are mostly studied separately and set a common framework to ground existing research in a common perspective.
Significance for science
Changes of social paradigms, which energy transition is, require comprehensive interdisciplinary approaches, involving natural and social science and research on multiple levels. Using this kind of approach our project will address some of the open questions in the field of increasing renewable energy use.
(1) By linking acceptability of national RES targets and local (landscape) impacts caused by realizing them, we will address the so called behavioural gap between large general public support and local opposition to RES developments.
(2) Inclusion of socio-economic variables will also allow us to explain the relationship between the perceived landscape impacts and benefits that RES implementation can bring to local communities and individuals, such as co-ownership, rents, lower electricity bill etc. We will thus connect several issues that have this far been mostly studied separately, while in praxis they are inextricable.
(3) The project will create a methodological framework that will enable a comprehensive study of social acceptability of RES through various scales (from general acceptability of RES use by global population to acceptability of concrete projects by local communities) and include expert knowledge as well as public opinion.
(4) Besides the general scientific benefits, the project will importantly contribute to understanding of social acceptability of RES scenarios and their impacts in Slovenian context, as we do not yet have such knowledge. Development of public discussion and reaching a social agreement on infrastructure siting is also one of the aims of the Energy concept of Slovenia.
(5) The influence of ownership and compensation we might find, will also reveal possible mechanisms that could be used in national policies to secure greater social acceptability and quicken our progress towards fulfilling our energy and climate obligations, to which we have committed.
Significance for the country
Changes of social paradigms, which energy transition is, require comprehensive interdisciplinary approaches, involving natural and social science and research on multiple levels. Using this kind of approach our project will address some of the open questions in the field of increasing renewable energy use.
(1) By linking acceptability of national RES targets and local (landscape) impacts caused by realizing them, we will address the so called behavioural gap between large general public support and local opposition to RES developments.
(2) Inclusion of socio-economic variables will also allow us to explain the relationship between the perceived landscape impacts and benefits that RES implementation can bring to local communities and individuals, such as co-ownership, rents, lower electricity bill etc. We will thus connect several issues that have this far been mostly studied separately, while in praxis they are inextricable.
(3) The project will create a methodological framework that will enable a comprehensive study of social acceptability of RES through various scales (from general acceptability of RES use by global population to acceptability of concrete projects by local communities) and include expert knowledge as well as public opinion.
(4) Besides the general scientific benefits, the project will importantly contribute to understanding of social acceptability of RES scenarios and their impacts in Slovenian context, as we do not yet have such knowledge. Development of public discussion and reaching a social agreement on infrastructure siting is also one of the aims of the Energy concept of Slovenia.
(5) The influence of ownership and compensation we might find, will also reveal possible mechanisms that could be used in national policies to secure greater social acceptability and quicken our progress towards fulfilling our energy and climate obligations, to which we have committed.
Most important scientific results
Interim report,
final report
Most important socioeconomically and culturally relevant results
Final report
