ENE906 Socio-environmental and Legal Aspects

The overall focus of this module is to contribute to greater insight and reflexivity around opportunities and challenges linked to offshore wind development from a socio-technical perspective. Through the presentation of political and legal frameworks as well as central themes and selected social science methods and theories, the student will be able to investigate wider socio-technical implications of an offshore wind project. This will increase insight into the variety of social, economic, environmental controversies and contribute with, among other things, dialogue-based tools to solve them.

The offshore wind revolution from a sociotechnical perspective: This part focuses on the overall role and significance of offshore wind in Europe and Norway within the last decades. Focus is on the climate, energy, safety, and economic dimensions of the massive investment with a view to understanding the underlying international, national and regional rationales. In addition, the interaction between offshore wind, political agendas, and the overall concept of energy as socio-technical systems is highlighted. This implies presenting various basic theoretical approaches to the concepts of social acceptance and energy justice including challenging conceptual issues and listing principal stakeholder interests in a typical offshore wind project.

Host community concerns in offshore wind projects: This part focuses on host community attitudes to offshore wind projects. The lecture has two focal points. Partly, the focus is directed towards some of the key factors that have shown to influence community responses to offshore wind - such as landscape, environment, place attachment, trust, property values, health, economy and recognitional, distributional and procedural energy justice. Partly, the focus is on public participation, controversies, and the role of government policy in regulating and mediating the drivers of social acceptance in the planning process. Central steps in this planning process to obtain the planning permit for offshore wind farms that includes community concerns are described, including the role of environmental impact assessment (EIA).

Governance of offshore wind energy projects: This part focuses on how national, regional and municipal planning and governance actors handle the OW development. The perspective is twofold: on ‘hard spaces’ of government, legislative planning procedures; and on ‘soft spaces’ of community participation, multi-actor-network governance, and socio-environmental values. Existing regimes of governance will be identified, including national policies, formal government actors and legislative regulations which premise planning procedures and spaces of governance and public participation in OW planning, but also various perspectives on dilemmas, potentials and needs for new governance models. Additionally various perspectives on governance and not least public participation and how to facilitate a fair and inclusive participatory process is being discussed.

Pathways to co-existence of offshore wind and regional development: this part focuses on various perspectives on co-existence of offshore wind and regional development. Energy development has over time been the subject of various regional development models. This lecture unfolds such models with a historical look back to hydropower and oil development in Norway and forward to the development of the modern regional offshore wind power adventure. With reference to the previous lectures in sub-module 3.1, limitations and potentials of such models will be discussed. Furthermore, alternative perspectives and concrete experiences from other countries will be presented and discussed.

Groupwork presentations: This session is interactive in that participants will present their group work to each other in plenary and receive feed-back from lecturers and peer groups. Each group gives a 15 min. PowerPoint presentation which, together with the report on which it is based, is part of the final examination.