Energy Justice from the Bottom Up: A Capability Approach to Community Acceptance of Wind Energy in Southern Mexico
type: CreativeWork
description: Adopting ambitious renewable energy targets has profound social, economic, and environmental implications, at local and global scales. Indeed, these targets have raised deep questions about social justice in capitalist societies attempting to pursue clean energy transitions. To understand how these transitions occur, we must understand dynamics of community acceptance that are linked to the politics of local approval of siting Renewable Energy Technologies (RETs). As a result, it is vital to identify links to justice as an important explanatory factor affecting community acceptance of RETs. Wind energy offers an emblematic case of these dynamics, highlighting the tensions between the technical and the social. At a technical level, the efficiency of wind energy technologies has rapidly improved, becoming a relatively cheap renewable resource central to many energy transition and climate change mitigation strategies. Nonetheless, despite widespread public support for wind energy, low success rates in planning applications are threatening the expansion of wind energy production. This is because wind farm developments often face strong social opposition. While this puzzle has been studied in high-income settings, there is little work that adequately explains the sources of this resistance in developing countries. This research thus explores the factors affecting whether and how communities accept wind energy developments in Southern Mexico. It does so by drawing together three lenses: the energy justice framework, the capability approach, and power analysis. These lenses help examine how shifting actions and power relations maintain or transform conflicts around RETs in developing contexts. This study looks at the case of wind energy siting in three Indigenous communities neighbouring wind installations in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca state, Mexico. The three localities offer a valuable comparison, as they have low, medium, and high levels of wind farm community a…
abstract: Adopting ambitious renewable energy targets has profound social, economic, and environmental implications, at local and global scales. Indeed, these targets have raised deep questions about social justice in capitalist societies attempting to pursue clean energy transitions. To understand how these transitions occur, we must understand dynamics of community acceptance that are linked to the politics of local approval of siting Renewable Energy Technologies (RETs). As a result, it is vital to identify links to justice as an important explanatory factor affecting community acceptance of RETs. Wind energy offers an emblematic case of these dynamics, highlighting the tensions between the technical and the social. At a technical level, the efficiency of wind energy technologies has rapidly improved, becoming a relatively cheap renewable resource central to many energy transition and climate change mitigation strategies. Nonetheless, despite widespread public support for wind energy, low success rates in planning applications are threatening the expansion of wind energy production. This is because wind farm developments often face strong social opposition. While this puzzle has been studied in high-income settings, there is little work that adequately explains the sources of this resistance in developing countries. This research thus explores the factors affecting whether and how communities accept wind energy developments in Southern Mexico. It does so by drawing together three lenses: the energy justice framework, the capability approach, and power analysis. These lenses help examine how shifting actions and power relations maintain or transform conflicts around RETs in developing contexts. This study looks at the case of wind energy siting in three Indigenous communities neighbouring wind installations in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca state, Mexico. The three localities offer a valuable comparison, as they have low, medium, and high levels of wind farm community a…
author: Velasco Herrejon, Paola
language: eng
keywords: Capability Approach, Wind Energy, Energy Justice, Power Analysis, Mexico, Indigenous Communities
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/93360ebd-9eab-45d1-b842-9b1a6649a38e/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2020-12-04
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:23Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.77124