All around the world projects are being developed as part of the move to more renewable systems of energy production and consumption, also known as the renewable energy transition. As global temperatures are reaching record levels there is an urgency to speed up progress. Unfortunately, numbers show that renewable energy developments are lagging behind and renewable energy ambitions on national levels are insufficient.

The realization of renewable energy transitions worldwide is not purely a technical affair – the use of new technologies by society comes with many challenges. For example, energy systems based on renewable energy become more decentralized compared to large-scale central energy production based on fossil resources. Renewable energy infrastructures are often large, technically complex installations with both social and environmental impact. This means that shifts in energy infrastructure have a substantial impact on our society, lifestyles and living environment. As a consequence of these changes and processes public conflict often occurs. Renewable energy controversies are a common part of renewable energy transitions.

Renewable energy controversies are social conflicts that articulate the values that are at stake for actors affected by new energy development, such as the establishment of a new location for wind turbines. As a controversy develops it reveals (hidden) social dimensions of the development and shows societal and ethical risks, costs and benefits that might have been unanticipated. The values that lead to conflict can concern the energy technology in question, the decision-making procedures or to those involved in or organizing these processes. As such, controversies can also be seen as a form of political engagement that has democratic value.

Conflicts over the planning and development of renewable energy and infrastructure, such as on- and offshore wind, solar, green hydrogen, geothermal, and transmission lines have been prominent over the past decades. These renewable energy controversies emerge when citizens, local residents, action groups or other stakeholders oppose plans or developments. Many controversies have resulted in delay or cancellation of projects. Controversies often end in unconstructive outcomes such as lengthy legal battles between project promoters and the challengers. As ongoing policy and societal efforts are put in effect to advance the global energy transition, it is likely that they will continue to arise in the years to come. As controversies are not a temporary phenomenon, but occur again and again, there is a need for better understanding controversies as well as searching for constructive ways to deal with them - especially given their democratic value.16

Controversies have three general characteristics: (1) they are publicly salient meaning they take place in the public sphere, are covered in the media and have peaks in which the conflict heats up; (2) controversies are complex and dynamic as they involve a multitude of actors and issues which often change over time. Conflicts from the past, in other places or on other technologies can also become intertwined with or fuel renewable energy controversies; and (3) controversies consist of a series of discursive interactions: project developers, government representatives, local residents, the general public, NGO’s and other stakeholders communicate and engage with each other in some kind of way. This means that the language used can be a starting point for further understanding.

These three characteristics reveal the strong relational nature of controversies. They comprise a cycle of interactions between a wide range of actors involved, their expectations of others feeding into engagement strategies and actions, which in turn shape interactions, and so on.

Over the past decades, renewable energy controversies have been widely studied by social science researchers from a variety of fields. The dominant approach here has been to approach controversies as lack of social acceptance, and renewable energy technology (RET) in need of social acceptance, which revolves around attitudes to and engagement with renewable energy technologies and infrastructure. In general, most research focuses on opposition or support of the general public, local residents and communities.

Despite the ongoing attention and developments in research focus within this field since the 80s, the investigation of renewable energy controversies generally (still) revolves around the perspectives, actions and experiences of the general public, local communities and opponents. This has resulted in the neglect of other important stakeholders involved in the development of renewable energy.

This dissertation seeks to address this important gap by focusing on the category of people representing organisations working on or supporting the renewable energy projects themselves in the context of renewable energy controversies. These actors are known as renewable energy technology actors (RET actors). The category of RET actors includes the project developers, their CEOs, engineers and communications managers, the consultants that are hired, trade associations as well as manufacturers and financiers of energy technologies. RET actors can be both private and public actors: depending on their role in projects, governments can be RET actors as well...
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Local governments are at the heart of implementing increasingly ambitious national plans for wind energy. While support by local governments for these plans has been studied extensively, only few studies have looked into local governments’ contestation of wind energy development. In this paper we analyze contentious governance processes in which local governments join efforts with citizen action groups to oppose projects proposed by developers or the national government. We focus on the strategic dilemmas that local governments face while engaging in contentious governance. Uncovering strategic dilemmas helps to see contestation by local governments as part of a web of governance relationships, thus moving beyond dichotomous understandings of the players involved in wind farm conflicts. Strategic dilemmas also allow understanding of how stances of local governments and their citizen allies change over time, and how strategic and tactical considerations emerge from interaction patterns. ... Read more

Energy controversies have been widely studied. Such studies are, however, generally based on either single case studies, providing rich and in-depth understanding of (local) dynamics of planning and implementation processes, or they focus on understanding responses to a specific technology (not bound to a location). Therefore these studies tend to overlook a key dynamic in controversy, namely that publics respond to projects by drawing on earlier experiences with a similar technology elsewhere, or with earlier experiences with other technologies in their vicinity. We refer to this dynamic as controversy spillover. The notion of controversy spillover helps to understand how the discursive space of controversy changes over time. In case studies, other controversies are usually considered as context, i.e. as an external condition. However, in order to understand the temporal dynamics of public engagement with energy projects, spillover from other controversies deserves to be investigated more as an object of interest, rather than as an external condition. The aim of this paper is to conceptualize controversy spillover as an important dynamic in controversies and to develop a research agenda. We identify three different types of spillover: 1) geographical (i.e. between the same energy technology in different locations), 2) historical (i.e. with respect to earlier experiences at the same location), 3) technology (i.e. between different technologies). Three empirical examples serve to illustrate the three types of spillover. We finalize the paper with a research agenda for further conceptualization and empirical analysis of the notion of controversy spillover. ... Read more

Most literature on community engagement (CE) focuses on why and how local communities respond to energy projects or technologies. There has been very limited attention to project developers and the way they shape CE in the literature. We address this gap by focusing on the work of professionals active within or for energy companies, who are responsible for engaging communities in the development of energy projects: so-called ‘community engagement professionals’ (CEPs). Using Q methodology, we explore how CEPs see their role as front-line workers operating on the boundary between their own organization and the local community.

Our analysis results in three perspectives of their own work amongst CEPs. Perspective 1 views CE as co-creation and their position as one of an intermediary between their organization and the community. Perspective 2 sees CE as an inherent part of project management, using it to remain in control of the process. Perspective 3 is all about project development, with CE as something that must be done as part of compliance with laws and regulations.

We show that CEPs have heterogeneous perspectives on community engagement. We discuss differences between these perspectives: 1) mode of engagement; 2) the position of the CEP between their organization and the community; 3) how conflict is viewed and dealt with; 4) the extent to which CEPs see themselves as responsible for the representation of communities; and 5) interaction with internal stakeholders. We end by discussing the implications of this study for project developers and the governance of energy infrastructures. ... Read more

The Transition Network is a global grassroots network that supports community-led resilience in the face of global change. This paper reports on an ethnographic study of one of its longest-running projects, Transition Town Lewes (TTL) in the United Kingdom. The aim of the study is to analyse TTL as a community. More specifically, we ask two questions: (1) what type of community is TTL? and (2) what are the challenges TTL faces as a community? With this, we contribute to the existing literature on local sustainability initiatives and in particular on Transition initiatives, by providing an in-depth understanding of the challenges and social dynamics at play in a day-to-day setting. We conducted three months of intensive ethnographic fieldwork using participant observation, interviews, and a focus group. Our analysis shows that TTL is a community that, on the one hand, is motivated by explicit intentions and goals, but that, on the other hand, leaves openness and flexibility regarding the level and specifics of participants’ engagement. We introduce the novel concept of ‘light intentional community’ to describe this type of community. We first investigate intentionality in TTL, finding that differences exist between individual participant motivations and stated TTL objectives. We go on to describe the ‘light’ aspect of TTL—the differences in levels of engagement between community participants. Our analysis shows that TTL and its participants face two main challenges. First, TTL participants experience ‘multi-dimensional liminality’: they operate in a liminal space between mainstream society and TTL practices, and additionally experience a continuous sense of transitioning toward a moving goal. Second, TTL as a community faces internal and external frictions. These challenges are interrelated and stem from the structure and dynamics of TTL as a light intentional community. We conclude by reflecting on our analysis of the nature and challenges of ‘light intentional communities’, identifying what opportunities this concept brings for overcoming the challenges of grassroots globalization initiatives amidst mainstream society. ... Read more

Societal controversies on the implementation of new energy technologies relate to public values that are affected by these new technologies. The process of specifying and articulating these values and assessing technologies based on those values follows both a formal and an informal trajectory. This chapter studies the interplay between such formal and informal assessment in the case of two plans for the implementation of energy technologies in the Netherlands, the project to develop carbon capture and storage in the municipality of Barendrecht and the project to have explorative drilling for shale gas in the municipality of Boxtel. What these studies reveal is that values that are specified by actors emerge from different discourses. These discourses do not emerge independently, but develop in mutual interaction, at times contributing to a progressive entrenchment of positions. To avoid such a situation, the symmetry between different claims for the public interest needs to be attended by policy makers. ... Read more

While societal controversy is often seen as a barrier for technological development, we take the position that controversies can be useful for guiding and steering these developments. Controversies articulate the conflicting values at stake and reveal unanticipated societal and ethical risks. A common reaction to public controversies is to counter public responses to technology with facts and experts' conclusions. Formal assessment methods such as Environmental Impact Assessment, (social) Cost Benefit Analysis and Risk Assessment are often used as an expert-based approach to inform decisionmaking on large energy projects. These methods are, however, predominantly (and sometimes solely) warranting one single value, being sustainability, utility or safety. Due to their inability to address the wide and variable range of values, formal assessment methods often become debated, for instance because their scope and process is not considered appropriate for the project at hand. As such they can be seen as imperfect (and sometimes even counterproductive) in supporting socially responsible public-private decision-making for energy projects. We argue that project developers and policy makers need to enrich the assessment of energy projects by acknowledging the broad range of values that emerge from such controversies. ... Read more