Not in Anyone’s Backyard? Civil Society Attitudes towards Wind Power at the National and Local Levels in Portugal

Delicado, Ana; Junqueira, Luís; Fonseca, Susana; Trüninger, Mónica; Silva, Luís

doi:10.23987/sts.55324

Cited by 26 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Perhaps also for these reasons, the central government has offered generous support to the current rapidly growing industry of communityowned RES (ENVE, 2018). In Portugal, Spain and Italy, generous government subsidies and the limited (and at times non-existent) involvement of the local population in the planning processes for new WT plants have encouraged the presence of large electricity companies (Delicado et al, 2016;ANEV, 2018), meaning that control is concentrated within a few energy corporations (Delicado et al, 2014). This may well be why the spatial pattern of WT distribution is different in these countries compared to those of northern Europe: as we said above, the WT are mainly concentrated in a few specific areas, reducing their visual impact to small portions of territory and maximizing the use of wind where it is supposedly strongest.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The new “windscapes” in the time of energy transition: A comparison of ten European countries

Mauro

2019

Applied Geography

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The remarkable growth of wind energy in the last twenty years has been accompanied by a rapid spread of wind turbines (WTs) in many European countries, sometimes creating new landscapes that we are supposed to call "windscapes". This paper aims to map the EU regions characterized by a very high density of WTs in those ten EU countries, which for various reasons have become key players in the wind energy sector in Europe. We use the crowdsourced data from a participative mapping project, the OpenStreetMap (OSM), created in 2004 in order to build and share online a free editable map of the world. First, we automatically extract the geographical position of each WT, thus creating a GIS of WTs for each of the EU countries under examination. Having certified the reliability of OSM data, we have to estimate the concentration of WTs. For this reason, we assume that the search radius around each windmill corresponds to its visual impact threshold (roughly equal to 10 km). Applying the 'point density' function in a GIS environment, we create the map density of WTs in the study area. In order to have a clear visualization of the impact of the wind energy policies adopted by each EU member state, this map is then compared with the map of wind resources created in 1989. What emerges are two very different situations in the study area: while in the north, Germany and Denmark have seen a massive spread of WTs all over their countries, WTs in the south are mainly concentrated in only a few windy areas of Spain, Portugal and Italy. Moreover, almost 1,350 Km 2 of land distributed in four member states (Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom) can be said to be characterized by a very high density of WTs (over than 200 WTs in a circle area with a radius of 10 Km).

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The new “windscapes” in the time of energy transition: A comparison of ten European countries

Mauro

2019

Applied Geography

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“…Levels of civic participation are quite low, as the Portuguese tend to have limited trust in public officials (Carvalho et al 2014). Government initiatives engaging civil society have been scarce, with a preference for top-down approaches and centralized forms of decision-making, with no real fora for active participation or feedback from civil society representatives (Carvalho et al 2014;Delicado et al 2014;Jörgens 2020). Companies from the energy sector tend to organize themselves to lobby for greater investment in renewables, but the state is seen as unavailable to listen to other stakeholders (Delicado 2015a).…”

Section: Discourse On Energy Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite high levels of environmental concern, civic participation in environmental decision-making is still low in Portugal. A centralized administrative tradition undermines the chance of participation of civil society actors in decision-making (Carvalho et al 2014;Delicado et al 2014), the population lacks technical and environmental knowledge, and public officials do not disclose information transparently. RES development in Portugal remains a product of pre-determined political decisions taken from above (Delicado 2015b).…”

Section: Coordination Mechanisms and Multilevel Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Energy Governance in Portugal

Guerreiro

Jörgens

Alves

2022

Handbook of Energy Governance in Europe

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Portugal is in the middle of a major transformation of its energy supply, which has been shaped by internal resource constraints, growing environmental concerns, and the dynamics of European integration. Portugal's past choices -the investment in hydro power and the refusal of nuclear energy -and the lack of an endowment of resources have constrained the Portuguese energy policy. With the accession to the European Union in 1986, environmental concerns moved up the Portuguese policy agenda. The EU's push for a common electricity market influenced a set of policies oriented towards the liberalization of the energy market, which was centralized, monopolistic, and public-owned. The investment in renewable energy gained momentum in the 2000s, led by the Portuguese government and EDP, the (then) publicly-owned energy company, supported by a public discourse on climate change and energy policy imbued with economic rationality. The financial crisis that hit Portugal in 2010 led to a temporary stall in the promotion of the use of energy from renewable energy sources (RES), but new market-based support schemes, such as photovoltaic solar auctions, have fostered the recent new investment in renewables.

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“…Place attachment and concerns about landscape and fairness are among the many factors that are known to affect the interpretation of wind installation. Discussions and opposition have been afloat in many countries that have installed large-scale wind power (see Delicado et al 2014).…”

Section: Interpretative Flexibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Sociology of Interdisciplinarity

Silvast

Foulds

2021

Sociology of Interdisciplinarity

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In building upon the cases presented in Chaps. 10.1007/978-3-030-88455-0_2, 10.1007/978-3-030-88455-0_3, and 10.1007/978-3-030-88455-0_4, we develop a Sociology of Interdisciplinarity that draws our empirical insights together with resources from Science and Technology Studies (STS), in addition to Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Research Policy, Infrastructure Studies, Anthropology, and Philosophy of Science. The key novelty of this framework is using STS insights to unpick the dynamics and consequences of interdisciplinary science, which distinguishes us from decades of earlier interdisciplinarity studies and gaps in understanding. Moreover, we not only focus on individual scholars and their experiences but pay careful attention to the wider contexts of interdisciplinary research, such as the impacts of funding structures, different access to resources, and power relations. We are careful in our approach so that our units of analyses—which vary from research groups and projects to whole epistemic communities and research policies—are most appropriate for the problem definitions that we put forward. The framework rests on a set of six dimensions, which we discuss in relation to current debates in the literature and our empirical analyses.

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Not in Anyone’s Backyard? Civil Society Attitudes towards Wind Power at the National and Local Levels in Portugal

Cited by 26 publications

References 36 publications

The new “windscapes” in the time of energy transition: A comparison of ten European countries

The new “windscapes” in the time of energy transition: A comparison of ten European countries

Energy Governance in Portugal

A Sociology of Interdisciplinarity

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