Energy Justice and Social Acceptance of Renewable Energy Technologies: A Capabilities Approach

The adoption of ambitious renewable energy targets has had profound social, economic and environmental implications that operate at scales ranging from local to global and have raised questions about social justice in capitalist societies (Shearman and Smith 2007). Therefore, identifying key social justice issues affecting social acceptance of RETs has become hugely important in advancing the proliferation of clean energy. Accordingly, the “energy justice” conceptual framework has been developed to identify the ways in which benefits and ills related to energy issues are distributed, remediated and victims are recognised (e.g. Jenkins et al. 2016, McCauley et al. 2013, Sovacool 2013, Heffron and McCauley 2014, Sovacool and Dworkin 2014).
While acknowledging the usefulness of the energy justice framework, this paper aims to address three important gaps in the energy justice literature: (1) there is limited research on the links between social acceptance of RETs and energy justice; (2) even though the capability approach (CA) has been proposed to theoretically extend the concept of energy justice as a way to bridge ideal and abstract notions of justice (Schlosberg 2012) and to capture tensions between well-being and climate change mitigation (Wood and Roelich 2019), it has only been empirically applied within an energy justice framing linked to energy usage and energy poverty (Day et al., 2016; Walker and Day, 2012), and not applied to energy production; and (3) hardly any attempts have been made to look at social acceptance in the context of emerging economies and to engage in how indigenous communities interpret energy production related issues, and what kind of improvements and strategies they would propose and endorse.
To contribute to bridging these gaps, this paper aims to extend the energy justice framework with the CA (Sen 1985, 1992, 1999, 2009; Nussbaum, 2000, 2003, 2011) to understand factors affecting acceptance of energy technologies. The CA is a normative framework for the evaluation of people’s advantages (Comim, Fennell, and Annand 2019) that offers a context-sensitive analysis of justice issues (Schlosberg 2004; Walker 2009) by allowing individuals to define what justice ought to be. Thus, we argue that operationalising the CA may unveil what the three justice tenets mean to people on the ground, in the aim of building a bottom-up approach to energy justice.
To do so, the study identified capability related concerns of indigenous people living in three communities neighbouring wind installations located in Southern Mexico that have low, medium and high levels of social acceptance, thus providing a useful comparative stance. Data was drawn from 103 semi-structured interviews and a large-scale questionnaire-based survey (N = 380). Findings confirm the importance of looking at distributive/procedural/recognition justice and propose a characterisation of this concept for this research. At the same time, the CA resulted essential to bottom-up conceptions of energy justice that can lead to an improved awareness of justice implications related to acceptance of energy technologies. In the Mexican case these factors are related to inclusive community engagement that pays particular attention to valued ways of being and doing of the local population, such as equal access to employment, higher education and RETs related skills, diversified sources of income, and recognition the local indigenous everyday life and communal identity.
Paola Velasco-Herrejon
Paola Velasco Herrejon is a PhD Researcher at the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge. Her work focuses on social acceptance of renewable energy technologies. Her previous experience includes working at the Women’s National Institute in Mexico, the United Nations Development Programme, and as Corporate Social Responsibility coordinator of a mining and energy firm. She is currently Teaching Assistant of the paper Business, Government and Technology in Emerging Markets at the Cambridge Judge Business School. She also supervises undergraduate students at the Department of Sociology and Economics and is a tutor on sustainability and economics subjects in summer academic programs held at the University of Cambridge. Paola earned her MA in Gender and Development as a CONACYT scholar at the Institute of Development Studies based at the University of Sussex.
Thomas Bauwens
Dr. Thomas Bauwens is an economist specialized in sustainability and energy issues with a pronounced interest in multi-disciplinarity. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Utrecht University’s Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, conducting research on the roles of circular start-up hubs in the transition to a circular economy and on community energy. He holds a PhD in economics from HEC-Management School, University of Liège (Belgium) and completed a post-doctoral research stay at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. His work has been published in journals such as World Development, Ecological Economics, Energy Policy and Energy Research and Social Science.