Contested environmental policy infrastructure: Socio-political acceptance of renewable energy, water and waste facilities

The construction of new infrastructure is hotly contested. This paper presents a comparative study of three environmental policy domains in the Netherlands that all deal with legitimising building and locating infrastructure facilities.

The author notes that such infrastructure is usually declared essential to environmental policy and claims to serve sustainability goals. It is considered to serve (proclaimed) public interests, while the adverse impact or risk (mainly concerning environmental values) is concentrated at a smaller scale, for example in local communities.

The institutional capacity for learning in infrastructure decision-making processes in the following three domains is compared:

• the implementation of wind power as a renewable energy innovation
• the policy on space-water adaptation, with its claim to implement a new style of management replacing the current practice of focusing on control and ‘hard’ infrastructure
• waste policy with a focus on sound waste management and disposal, claiming a preference for waste minimisation
  

All three cases, it is noted, show a large variety of social acceptance issues. In dealing with environmental conflict, the author asserts that the environmental capacity of the Netherlands appears to be low and, therefore, a need to enhance collaborative planning is suggested.