Jeju, an island in Korea, became a place to site wind turbines with an unusually high level of public acceptance. Based on interviews, media analyses, and policy research, we found that the collective memory of socio-economic deprivation enabled community engagement to matter to residents, the provincial government, and environmental activists. It was within socio-historically contextualized processes of articulating the vision of a "good" society that an actual form of community engagement, however inadequate it might appear to some, became relevant to stakeholders in a particular locality. We emphasize that community engagement in renewable energy governance does not have one but multiple and situated ways of mattering depending on local contexts.

Through a public engagement exercise held in 2017, 471 Korean citizens decided to resume construction of two nuclear reactors. This article examines the white paper, academic articles, and interview accounts to discuss how distinct groups in their contexts articulated “lay knowledge” as the basis of participatory science and technology governance enacted in Korea. Reflecting on both Brian Wynne’s emphasis on public meanings and the STS literatures’ attention to lay actors’ knowledge-ability, the article reveals the articulation of “lay knowledge” as a process of simultaneously empowering and disempowering the lay public.

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