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Licensing processes for renewable electricity plants have been surprisingly little studied. Yet, how public and private stakeholders influence the process, formally and informally, is crucial to the outcome of the licensing decision. This article analyses how the organisation of the Norwegian windpower licensing process affects actor influence, and the consequences for licensing outcomes as…

The deployment of offshore wind and power transmission in the European North Sea is accelerating. Stakeholders advocate regional governance for the European grid expansion, which may evolve into a pan-European governance and is key to developing integrated, hybrid offshore projects. However, such projects are still scarce. We thus analyze the governance of the North Sea offshore grid expansion…

Wind farms are constructed in mountainous rural villages where indigenous elderly people believe in Korean traditional beliefs such as pungsu (fengshui or geomancy) thought and shamanism. Built upon mixed qualitative methods, this research examines the relationship between traditional beliefs and local opposition to wind farms. First, the interpretation of mountains and wind based on pungsu…

With increasing demand for renewable energy, research focusing on social acceptance of production facilities has firmly established itself over the past decades. While the influence of worldviews on individuals’ perceptions and behaviour has received widespread scholarly attention regarding a variety of related issues, social acceptance of renewable energy technologies (RET) has not been one…

To date, challenges to renewable energy transition have been discussed largely based on the cases and experiences from the Global North. In this paper, we aim at broadening our understanding of this specific socio-technical transition by incorporating the case of wind power development in China. Based on the analysis of policy and legal documents, we examine how institutions are organized and…

Social and political opposition to wind power in North America and Europe has complex origins, but recent analyses emphasize exclusionary planning processes and human attachment to cultural and physical landscapes. In the global South, knowledge is far less developed regarding reasons for opposition to wind power. Physical and economic marginalization of affected people, whose lands may be…

The primary social challenge of offshore wind power development may be local community members’ struggle to come to terms with the transformation of the ocean. In this study of local residents’ perceptions of the first wind power project off the North American coast, we consider whether factors such as aesthetics and place attachment, dependency and identity might serve as barriers or gateways…