Abstract
This chapter looks back at our own research practice about the social acceptance of renewable energy technologies (RET) and reflects on the articulation between our practice and the way in which we conceptualize social acceptance. We do so based on our own work about French onshore wind power development over the past fifteen years. We examine the factors that influenced the course of our research work, we retrospectively distinguish between three ways in which we have addressed acceptance issues, and discuss this evolution in relation with the academic field of social acceptance of RET. This allows us to reflect on the dynamics of this academic field and to conclude that a different relation and engagement of social science researchers with the fieldwork is called for.
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Notes
- 1.
The notion of “interference” brings the emphasis on emerging relational realms induced by energy transition processes. We distinguish between four notions: “interaction” and “interference”, “relationship” and “interrelationship”. To put it shortly, the notion of interaction pertains to analytical strands—such as system analysis—which presuppose the existence of distinct entities and analyse the set of relations between these given entities. Different from this, the notion of interference points out situations in which the parts do not necessarily precede their being part of a common reality. In such situations, the relations are constitutive of the parts, which ontologies then depend on the set of relations at work. Importantly, the becoming of interferences is highly uncertain, as they can evolve towards reciprocal modes of relationships acknowledging the consequences of the process for all the parties—which we term “interrelationship”—or towards ill-related and sometimes conflictual reality.
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Nadaï, A., Labussière, O. (2021). Social Acceptance: Beyond Criticism and Critical, a Call for Experimental Ontology. In: Batel, S., Rudolph, D. (eds) A critical approach to the social acceptance of renewable energy infrastructures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73699-6_8
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