Understanding Public Opposition to Wind Power as an Opportunity, Not an Obstacle
distributed). Additionally, community members could play an important role in assessing potential impacts of the development by contributing their own perspectives and local knowledge. If taken seriously, such local knowledge may prove very valuable in assessing potential impacts and finding solutions. Incorporating public knowledge might ensure that the project is environmentally, technically and socially acceptable.
Public involvement could also play a valuable role in designing community benefits packages. Here, local community members could play an important role in determining who the recipients of benefits should be, what form the benefits should take or how they should be administered. This is an area where the local community could lead the decision-making process, ensuring that the outcomes are appropriate and beneficial to the local community.
In order to engender a sense of fairness, prospective developers should aim to facilitate local community involvement as early as possible when designing and planning wind power projects. This would benefit not just the local community but also the developers and should be viewed
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as an essential component of planning and development. However, public trust will be earned only if participatory exercises are felt to be meaningful and to lead to visible outcomes or changes. In this respect, if earning trust is the goal, community members should have opportunities to influence key aspects of the project and, crucially, developers ought to be open to the possibility that public participation could indicate flaws in their approach or design. Ideally, they should be willing to abandon projects or aspects of projects if it is indicated that they are inappropriate.
Engagement with members of the public should begin from the understanding that opposition is not necessarily a result of ignorance and that it is not a deviant position. If the ‘problem’ of opposition is ever to be overcome, it must first be understood, and the reasons underlying it must be addressed rather than overlooked. n
Acknowledgement
The author is grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for funding this research (award number PTA-026–27–2236).
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