Energy Research & Social Science最新文献

This article critiques the prevailing future-oriented collective visions often used in energy research, emphasizing the need for ethnographic examination of individual interpretations and responses to energy transitions. It explores how individuals coexist with evolving energy landscapes, particularly in rural areas. Despite recommendations for qualitative research on energy aesthetics, there is a gap in understanding of the experiential, visual elements of energy transitions. Studies predominantly prioritize quantifiable preferences over subjective experiences. Drawing a distinction between aesthetics and visuality, it delves into the subjective experience of visual interactions with energy infrastructure. Grounded in empirical data gathered over a year in the Orkney Islands, it utilizes participatory photography and photo-elicitation to capture local perspectives. This offers an alternative approach to researching energy transitions in rural landscapes. The findings emphasise the complexities of living with localised energy development at an individual level, highlighting dilemmas, challenges, and opportunities. Integrating individual visual perspectives into future planning remains a challenge, yet individuals often develop unique strategies to coexist with energy infrastructure in rapidly changing landscapes. Engaging with local stakeholders through (visual) ethnographic research can reveal diverse perspectives, contributing to the understanding of the impact of energy transitions in rural communities such as the Orkney Islands.

Value similarity – the extent to which people think institutions managing risks hold different or similar values to themselves, affects trust in those institutions and as such, plays a critical role in the public acceptability of energy projects and policies. Yet, we do not know what constitutes value similarity. How do people judge the level of similarity between their own values and the values of an institution? What role do different values play in theses judgments? And to what extent can these perceived similarities actually increase trust in institutions? To explore this, we decomposed the construct of value similarity into one's personal values and the perceived values of an institution, and explored if their congruence led to higher ratings of perceived value similarity and trust in institutions. We studied these relationships for three institutions playing important roles in the energy sector in the Netherlands, in current and future energy systems. Overall, response surface analyses (RSA) showed that people see their own values and the values of an institution as more similar and trust the institution more when they both endorse biospheric values more strongly. Further, perceived value similarity and trust in institutions are higher when people perceive institutions to have stronger biospheric values than themselves and when they expect institutions to be less egoistic than themselves. We discuss these findings reflecting on what they suggest regarding the role of shared values in increasing trust in relevant institutions and acceptability of energy risks.

The tenet-based approach to energy justice has seen substantial uptake over the past decade. Despite referring to philosophical terminology, energy justice scholars rarely engage rigorously with philosophical methods or ongoing debates. We argue this absence is challenging for two implicit goals that often arise in applications of the approach: to describe and capture ethical-issues surrounding energy systems and to normatively evaluate choices, actions, and events surrounding these issues in reference to justice. In this paper, we discuss these descriptive and normative challenges within the energy justice scholarship. We outline a series of measures, methodologies, and debates in philosophy that can aid in meeting these challenges. We argue that the energy justice scholarship can be strengthened by 1) explicitly justifying normative assumptions; 2) acknowledging the breadth and interpretability of tenets by distinguishing concepts and conceptions of justice; and 3) including insights from ongoing debates in moral and political philosophy, which offer conceptual tools and theories to better capture ethical energy related issues. Combined, these suggestions form a research agenda to help energy justice scholarship better articulate, rationalise, and meet its goals.

Households can make fundamental contributions to reaching carbon reduction targets by means of high-impact energy-relevant investments. Using a stage model of decision-making, we analyzed which external factors, i.e., strong and disruptive events, make households consider such investments and may push their decision process forward. Three investment types were investigated: renewable heating systems, energy-efficient insulation measures and electric vehicle (EV) purchases. N = 812 German homeowners, living in existing single- or two-family houses, were questioned. As expected, a great majority of the participants could be allocated to the early stages of decision-making, i.e., they either do not consider an investment at all or they are still unsure whether to do so. Thus, we focused on these early stages in the following part of our analysis, employing several ordinal logit regression (OLR) analyses. The analyses revealed that the investments in renewable heating systems and energy-efficient insulation measures are related to economic, ecological, and social events. The importance of specific events for the decision-making process differed, though, depending on the type of investment and the point of decision-making investigated. The propensity to invest in an EV was influenced mainly by the necessity to buy a new car, while ecological and economical events played a relevant role, too. The findings provide insights for the design of intervention strategies that empower households to make energy-relevant investments, thereby not only considering the type of investment, but also the stage of decision-making households are in.

This paper explores the role of “bridge activists” in the Mountain Valley Pipeline resistance movement who acted to build mutual respect, solidarity and collective identity in a movement characterized by diverse tactics. Bridge activists operate in both moderate and radical flanks of a movement, bridging disparate movement factions. We argue these bridge activists enabled the development of an “ecosystem of tactics” within the movement. Contrary to a “diversity of tactics” approach, an ecosystem of tactics approach is grounded in mutual respect and the solidarity of a common goal (in this case, stopping the Mountain Valley Pipeline). Our findings suggest intentional bridge activism may empower current and future movements through encouraging participation, mediating conflict, developing collective identity and generating solidarity.

Stakeholder consultations organized by government agencies are the most ubiquitous form of public engagement in renewable energy transition in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. Despite the growing frequency and scope of these consultations, energy social sciences research shows that they are usually not effective at responding adequately to social and environmental concerns. This article presents research findings on how Maine's red-green coalition made of diverse social constituencies – labor unions, environmental groups, and climate advocates – presented a more democratic alternative. By utilizing the method of exploratory process tracing, we show how the coalition intervened to shape policymaking on offshore wind development. Our research shows that this success is due to the Maine coalition's ability to draw on cross-scale political resources, undertake multi-pronged campaigns to challenge the beneficiaries of the status quo, and to develop negotiated policy solutions acceptable to key constituencies. This research contributes new policy and scholarly insights about the conditions under which the efforts to promote a just and sustainable energy transition advance the goals of energy democracy.

Community engagement is a key pathway for incorporating social considerations into the development of utility-scale renewable energy facilities. Prior literature recommends meaningful, early community engagement to both improve siting outcomes and empower the public to participate in decision-making, but there is no recent nor comprehensive understanding of industry experiences with engagement. This study provides a critical contribution by revealing the practices and perspectives of project developers. We draw upon a survey of 123 professionals employed at 62 unique companies across the United States. We demonstrate that developers are highly concerned about the impact of community opposition on project deployment, and that they already use a variety of engagement strategies and adjust project designs in response to community feedback. However, the public is generally not made aware of project proposals until after land for the project is secured, and industry expenditures on engagement activities pale in comparison to other project development costs. We draw upon Arnstein's ladder of citizen participation to operationalize the engagement preferences of developers, and find that the majority of developers prefer that members of the public provide input but not recommend or make decisions. We characterize this preference as ‘halfway up the ladder’, compared to the idealized vision of full citizen empowerment envisioned in narratives of just transition. These findings contribute to discussion of the role and potential for community engagement to attend to justice in the energy transition.

Transitioning to a low carbon global economy will inevitably create winners and losers. Such rapid and far-reaching changes in the adoption of low-carbon technologies, lifestyle changes and labour relations require meaningful public engagement for policy to be both effective and equitable. But despite a large body of work on just transitions, there has been less attention paid to questions of citizen engagement in just transitions. In particular, the process of how and by whom social needs, priorities and demands are articulated and acted upon. While some research has mapped public participation on climate change, and there is a larger body of work on questions of social acceptance, there is a gap in our understanding of how citizen engagement with just transitions can be deepened and enhanced by drawing on experiences to date from other related and parallel processes. On one level, this neglect is unsurprising given the limited nature of processes explicitly designed to promote just transitions, such as the Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JET-Ps) or experiences of national level dialogues and commissions, despite recent interest in the related use of climate assemblies to enable citizen engagement. But, we argue, there are significant lessons to be drawn for citizen engagement with just transitions from a long and rich experience of previous attempts to amplify voices, create spaces for citizen engagement, and build alliances to address justice issues across a range of struggles over resource pathways.

The German energy system transformation, known as Energiewende, has gained significant political attention in the national discourse over the past decade. However, the implementation of the Energiewende has raised concerns about the justice of the transformation process among broader parts of society. This research article examines energy justice perceptions among uninvolved citizens in three rural areas (Ahrweiler, Ferdinandshof, Spremberg) experiencing conflicts over energy infrastructure projects. The residents' perceptions and experiences of energy justice are analyzed along the tenets of distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice, utilizing interviews and focus group material conducted between December 2020 and May 2022 in a secondary analysis approach. The paper describes justice perceptions among the uninvolved citizens in their daily communication, thereby identifying potential political mobilization and conflict issues. The study uncovers heterogeneous and sometimes conflicting perceptions of justice, influenced by local context and historical experiences. Key issues include distributional concerns over financial resource allocation and procedural justice debates regarding the degree and nature of citizen participation.

How do international development organisations develop institutional capacity in conflict zones? Here we take a descriptive, topological perspective on the question, using the case of Afghanistan. For twenty years prior to the capture of Afghanistan by the Taliban in August 2021 the international community directed substantial resources to Afghanistan, seeking to build a democratic state. Here we examine selected, energy-related aspects of those institution-building processes, taking the country as a case study of institutional development for energy and other transitions that is explicitly driven by particular values. We use the transition topology approach to map energy-related institutional development over two decades. We find that this institutional development can be categorized in terms of three main themes: development of a regulatory framework for the energy sector; privatisation of energy systems; and women's empowerment in terms of knowledge, skills and engagement in energy sector provisioning. The case contributes to an understanding of the types of institutional changes that transnational actors seek to induce, how they do this, and what types of outcomes can be achieved.