Time, history and meaning-making in research on people's relations with renewable energy technologies (RETs) – A conceptual proposal

Abstract

The research field of the social acceptance of renewable energy technologies (RETs) has shown that people as central actors in current low-carbon energy transitions relate to RET projects and associated processes and infrastructures in diverse ways. These relations depend on the local context and history in which RET projects are deployed. Despite being an everyday reality for all actors involved, the experience of time has not been of central concern for this research field. References to temporality in social acceptance work are both omni-present and frequently vague, used as a mere backdrop to the main story; most research has examined local residents' responses at a specific moment in a project's life cycle; some consider RET projects as independent from histories of infrastructure and place and people's relations with RETs as void of past experience. This paper advocates for a deeper engagement with time in the field. Based on a milestone literature review highlighting how time and history have been tackled in analyzing local residents' relations with RET projects in specific case contexts so far, we propose differentiating physical from historical time dynamics and by developing this distinction we offer a first conceptual framework for considering time in people's relations with RET projects. Through this, our proposal contributes to recent critical work in social acceptance research of RETs and provides analytical tools for researchers who intend to approach the temporal embeddedness of people's relations to RET projects.