A critical approach to the social acceptance of renewable energy infrastructures

Renewable energy is too often pursued in a technocratic fashion, where community engagements with energy are depoliticized as consumer choices or hyper-local problems. This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary book offers an important antidote, showing how a critical approach to energy can transform how we understand the social acceptance of renewables. In these chapters, readers will find many ways to think differently about energy, while also discovering why that matters in the struggle for more just energy systems.
- Cara New Daggett, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Virginia Tech, USA

This book provides a critical approach to research on the social acceptance of renewable energy infrastructures and on energy transitions in general by questioning prevalent principles and proposing specific research pathways and lines of inquiry that look beyond depoliticised, business-as-usual discourses and research agendas on green growth and sustainability. It brings together authors from different socio-geographical and disciplinary backgrounds within the social sciences to reflect upon, discuss and advance what we propose to be five cornerstones of a critical approach: overcoming individualism and socio-cognitivism; repoliticisations – recognising and articulating power relations; for interdisciplinarity; interventions – praxis and political engagement with research; and overcoming localism and spatial determinism: As such, this book offers academics, students and practitioners alike a comprehensive perspective of what it means to be critical when inquiring into the social acceptance of renewable energy and associated infrastructures.

Susana Batel is an environmental psychologist at the University Institute of Lisbon interested in people’s engagement with energy transitions and associated social justice issues. She has published in journals like the Journal of Environmental Psychology, Energy Policy and Energy Research & Social Science, and is co-editor of Papers on Social Representations.

David Rudolph is a human geographer at the Technical University of Denmark with an interest in just, inclusive and equitable low-carbon energy transitions. He has published in journals such as Antipode, Environment and Planning C and Energy Research & Social Science.