Value-sensitive design under ground? Exploring the community-based monitoring of a geothermal project in the Netherlands

The transition towards a carbon-free energy system necessitates societal changes, next to technological and economic transformations. For geo-energy projects, these societal changes relate to difficulties in achieving local support for subsurface initiatives. Societal acceptance of geo-energy projects entails more than a one-way perspective in which project initiators and experts try to convince society. To increase societal acceptance, an approach that broadly includes public values is imperative to locally embed geo-energy technologies. Value sensitive design of geo-energy systems requires deliberative processes of actor involvement in defining public values. One of the methods, known for its deliberative quality, is community-based monitoring (CBM), often implemented to assess long-term impacts of new technologies on its (social) environment. Research on value-sensitive design of CBM is lacking. This paper explores opportunities for value-sensitive CBM for geo-energy projects by examining 1) how public values could become part of CBM, and 2) how value-sensitive design of CBM could contribute to the project development strategy. An in-depth case study of a geothermal energy project in the Netherlands was conducted. This project has been developed as ‘black box’, similarly as most geo-energy projects in the Netherlands, causing anxiety and suspicion at local communities and stakeholders that are neither directly involved, nor evidently benefit from it. A practical mitigation of both inadequacies is to include local communities, stakeholders and local government, in monitoring the project's impacts. The case study shows that CMB 1) might address the imbalance in the distributive justice by including costs and benefits for local actors, and 2) might mitigate lacking procedural justice by organizing the structured and structural participation of local actors in setting up the monitoring system and in collecting and interpretating data.

Collaborative monitoring broad arrays of values, as an integrated part of the project development strategy, can address the needs and expectations of local communities and stakeholders, creating better preconditions for their societal acceptance. An adjacent benefit might be that by informing local communities and stakeholders, local governments and legislators can be put at ease, preventing current negative sentiments around geo-energy projects with ‘contested’ technologies from occurring, that often lead to the termination of these projects without well-informed dialogue between actors involved.