About the Project

Aims and Approach

A digester.

The overarching conceptual aim of the project was to provide an integrated framework for understanding public engagement with diverse RET that encompasses technical and social science aspects; and to then use this framework to suggest how a constructive dialogue can be better facilitated between publics and other stakeholders about RET, in order to manage uncertainty in development and to inform the achievement of government targets.

Our approach in focusing on the public is one which considers the responses of individual people to renewable energy technologies, including cognitive, emotional and behavioural aspects, to be embedded within socio-cultural, political and economic processes; where diverse ‘publics’ engage with and respond to renewable energy developments in local contexts of place and history but shaped by broader structures of institutional behaviour, societal norms and media representations; and where perceptions are conceived to be complex, socially constructed phenomena, contingent upon local and national factors, open to social influence and dynamic across time.

Our work programme comprised five work packages:

literature review,
analysis of how publics are constructed by diverse stakeholders,
construction of a provisional framework,
validating the framework in a series of case studies, and finally
refining the framework.

These research questions and work programme have been designed to capture the interdisciplinarity of the problem addressed by the proposal through mechanisms for joint working across project partners and across work tasks. These operated in parallel to mechanisms such as a project advisory panel and practitioner workshops, to ensure that perspectives from non-academic stakeholders shape the research programme. The project resulted in a series of outputs targeted at academic and practitioner audiences, in particular the conceptual framework, which has been disseminated to key actors in industry, policy makers, advocacy groups and the public through a project website, practitioner participants, project partners and related networks.

If you are interested to find out more about the project, please contact Patrick Devine-Wright - p.g.devine-wright@exeter.ac.uk