Practices and rationales of community engagement with wind farms: awareness raising, consultation, empowerment

In light of the growing emphasis on community engagement in the literature on renewable energy planning, and given the acknowledgement of the complexity of community engagement as a concept, we conducted an empirical review of practice relating to community engagement with onshore wind farms in the UK, exploring what is actually happening in terms of community engagement relating to onshore wind farms, and examining the rationales underpinning approaches to community engagement. We found that a wide range of engagement methods are being used in relation to onshore wind farms across the UK, but that these are predominantly focused at consultation and awareness raising. Developers typically retain considerable - or total - control within such engagement processes. However, the case studies presented in this paper also evidence some innovation in engagement methods. Through this research we develop and test a non-hierarchical classification of community engagement approaches: awareness raising; consultation and empowerment. This provides a useful tool for reflecting on practices and rationales of community engagement. By considering the three approaches non-hierarchically, this model allows for an examination of how such rationales are acted on in practice.

鉴于可再生能源规划文献中日益强调社区参与，并且考虑到社区参与作为一个概念的复杂性已得到认可，我们对英国陆上风电场的社区参与实践进行了实证综述，探究陆上风电场社区参与方面实际发生的情况，并考察支撑社区参与方法的基本原理。我们发现，英国各地的陆上风电场使用了各种各样的参与方法，但这些方法主要集中在咨询和提高认识上。开发商通常在这类参与过程中保留相当大的——或完全的——控制权。然而，本文所呈现的案例研究也证明了参与方法上的一些创新。通过这项研究，我们开发并测试了一种社区参与方法的非等级分类：提高认识、咨询和赋权。这为反思社区参与的实践和原理提供了一个有用的工具。通过非等级地考虑这三种方法，该模型能够考察这些原理在实践中是如何起作用的。