Impacts, procedural processes, and local context: Rethinking the social acceptance of wind energy projects in the Netherlands

A lack of social acceptance obstructs the diffusion of wind energy and jeopardises the fight against global warming and climate change. Academic literature has identified the leading causes of social acceptance, but falls short in providing workable methodologies to consider this in the planning and decision-making process. This paper attends to this issue by providing a novel holistic conceptualisation of community acceptance as an interplay between project impacts, the procedural process, and local context. This conceptualisation can help project developers, decision-makers and researchers to better understand the different dimensions of acceptance and identify potential blind spots in their current methods and approaches. Based on this conceptualisation, we construct and apply a planning tool based on geographical information systems and multi-criteria decision analysis. Using this method on a national scale, we estimate wind energy potential in the Netherlands from a social acceptance point of view. We find that a third of the theoretically available land can be exploited, and that roughly 26.5GW worth of wind energy can be installed. The case demonstrates that the approach can effectively raise acceptance by reducing impacts, facilitating participation, and improving transparency in the siting process.