Research on the social acceptance of renewable energy technologies: Past, present and future

Abstract

in 2007 [1] formalized what is still nowadays generally called the field of research on the social acceptance of renewable energy innovation or renewable energy technologies (RET). Twelve years later, we can say that this paper and associated proposal has been a landmark for research on this area, not only because it helped formalize it as a standalone field of research (see also [2,3]), but because it simultaneously provided a systematization of past research -the need to overcome the NIMBY (Not in my backyard) explanation for local opposition -and an orientation for future of research on the social acceptance of RET -to further examine instead the relation between opposition to RET and several socio-political, market and community factors. As such, it provided a turning point in this area of research from -as I will refer to it in this paper -the first to the second wave of research on the social acceptance or RET, or, as based on the proposal of Labussière and Nadaï [4], from normative to criticism approaches. In order to better understand this change, it is relevant to briefly go back to the 1980s and to research, within the risk perception tradition [5; see also 6], on people's responses to hazardous facilities, including several related to energy, such as nuclear power plants.As pointed out by Freudenburg and Pastor [5], much research up until that point would explain public opposition to hazardous facilities and technologies as NIMBY, a syndrome or phenomenon that summarized the idea that people were only opposing those facilities due to them being built in their backyard and thus based only on selfishness (not considering the greater good), ignorance (not being able to understand the need for the construction of such facilities) and irrationality (reacting emotionally) (for more detailed reviews on the origins of NIMBY, see

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