Acceptance, acceptability and environmental justice: the role of community benefits in wind energy development

Abstract

Conflict around wind farm development has stimulated interest in ‘community benefits’ – the provision of financial or material benefits by the developers to the area affected by these facilities. By and large, both policy makers and researchers have couched the rationale for community benefits in instrumental terms, i.e. that an increased flow of community benefits will improve the social acceptability of these facilities and thereby expedite planning consent. This paper questions this conventional rationale. Proponents of this rationale neglect the institutionally structured terrain of the planning process; the provision of community benefits can shift in significance depending on whether or not the ‘affected community’ has any significant influence over wind farm projects. Similarly, our discourse analysis conducted in Wales shows that community benefits are seen predominantly as compensation for impacts, without any clear implication that they should change social attitudes. Our conclusion is that the dominant, instrumental rationale for community benefits obscures other, equally important justifications: the role of community benefits in promoting environmental justice; and how flows of community benefits might better serve the long-term sustainability of wind farm development areas.

Keywords:

• renewable energy
• community
• compensation
• justice
• planning

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference in Manchester University, on 28 August 2009, in the session ‘Public and stakeholder engagement in transforming energy systems’. The authors are grateful to the session organisers, Paul Upham, Patrick Devine-Wright and Rob Flynn, for the opportunity to present their work and to the audience for their comments. We also express our thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions; all remaining errors and omissions are, of course, our own.

Notes

1. Our research relies on developers’ statements of what they have provided or offered, in public or semi-public documents and we recognise, with Rowley et al. (2007) that obligations offered may not actually be delivered and monitoring is generally weak. However, we never learned of any wind farm developer not providing what they offered.

2. This guidance does not carry the same weight as development planning policy, but it can be taken into account in determining planning applications.

3. At NPower Renewables wind farm at Fynnon Oer, in the Afan Forest, south Wales.

4. Interestingly, a similar pattern has unfolded at English national level, where proposals for making community benefits “more routine and systematic” (BERR 2008, para 3.4.4) were replaced, in the final Renewable Energy Strategy, by a reliance on encouragement and advice (HM Government 2009, para 6.6).