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Keep it Local and Fish-Friendly: Social acceptance of hydropower projects in Switzerland
Journal
Renewable & sustainable energy reviews
ISSN
1364-0321
ISSN-Digital
1879-0690
Type
journal article
Date Issued
2017-02
Author(s)
Abstract
Hydropower is the largest source of renewable electricity in the world, but despite being a mature and clean energy technology it has also been the subject of ecological and social conflict. Literature suggests that the social acceptance of renewable energy can be increased by respecting procedural justice (fair, participatory planning processes) and distributional justice (fairly allocating costs and benefits). However, empirical evidence about how justice considerations are related to the expansion of hydropower is scarce, pre-existing studies being mostly qualitative in nature. We contribute to filling the gap in the current literature by describing in this paper how choice experiments with 1004 Swiss residents were undertaken to explore the influence of procedural and distributional justice on acceptance, relative to other attributes of hydropower projects. We find that while considerations about justice do play a role in decisions to accept, respondents in Switzerland care most about ecological impacts, and secondly about local ownership.
Project(s)
Language
English
Keywords
social acceptance
environmental justice
discrete choice experiment
choice-based conjoint analysis
hierarchical Bayes estimation
hydropower
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
Yes
Publisher
Pergamon
Publisher place
Oxford
Volume
68
Number
Part 1
Start page
763
End page
773
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
243804