Despite growing interest in issues of place attachment and land use changes, scholars of renewable energy have tended to overlook the ways that people–place relations affect local acceptance/opposition of renewable energy projects. We address this gap drawing on the concept of customer experience to capture the meaning of place attachment in a specific context of climate change adaptation (e.g., proposals to site large-scale low-carbon energy technologies such as wind farms) and deepening understanding of the role of place attachment in shaping community responses to the local siting of renewable energy technologies. This research adopts a phenomenological approach that focuses on the narrators’ impressions of their experience with the local place where they live (a village in Northeast Tunisia) as well as the meanings they attribute to the project. Results show that according to the evaluation of change, whether the renewable energy project enhances or disrupts the different aspects of place experience, residents will exhibit respectively either positive or negative emotions and attitudes and will take action accordingly either by supporting or protesting the project.

PurposeThe research aims to addresses the limitations of previous literature regarding choosing the appropriate conceptualization of trust (i.e. interpersonal trust or system trust) and the role of design aesthetics in generating system trust and intention to adopt mobile banking.Design/methodology/approachThe research conducts two studies. Study 1 determines the degree of humanness in a mobile banking application. Study 2 tests the research model. A total of 261 respondents participate in Study 1 and 491 in Study 2. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) (study 1) and SmartPLS (PLS software) (study 2) are used to test the hypotheses.FindingsStudy 1 establishes that the mobile banking application is perceived to have low humanness. Thus, it is expected that system trust is more appropriate to use than interpersonal trust. Study 2 demonstrates that (i) system trust is more useful than interpersonal trust in the mobile banking context and (ii) design aesthetics positively influences consumer system trust and intention to adopt.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, the current research is the first to distinguish empirically between system trust and interpersonal trust and identify the best choice of mobile banking trust type. Specifically, the study determined the choice of system trust for mobile banking through a priori humanness measures and validated this choice by measuring both system trust and interpersonal trust, which has not been done before. In addition, retail banking should consider the influence of design aesthetics on consumer trust and incorporate elements that enhance consumers' opinions about the mobile banking application's functionality, reliability and helpfulness.