Dr. Matthias Buchecker

Participation and public involvement often occur late in energy planning or only in the approval phase, limiting substantial discussions or exchange of perspectives. As a result, current participatory planning emphasizes acceptance rather than efforts to seek shared solutions for energy transition, which leads to considerable resistance to local energy transition projects. To identify shared solutions in local energy transition, understanding residents' perspectives on regional energy transition and how they relate to residents' perspectives on regional spatial developments is crucial. Therefore, this research explores residents' perspectives on regional energy transition and regional future developments to set the basis for finding shared solutions, thereby advancing energy transition in spatial and energy planning.
A standardized questionnaire (N = 907) containing a public participation geographic information system (PPGIS) was used to investigate and gain insights into residents' perspectives on energy transition and their preferred future regional developments in the Swiss region of Knonauer Amt. The results highlight three main findings: (i) skepticism toward energy transition often comes from a perceived lack of benefits rather than from concerns about impacts on the landscape; (ii) perspectives on energy transition and on regional development are closely linked, meaning that they should be discussed together in regional strategic planning; and (iii) incorporating residents’ perspectives early in future-oriented energy planning offers strong potential for developing shared solutions. These findings contribute to the identification of pathways for developing shared solutions in energy transition planning.

Les effets des changements climatiques en Suisse s'intensifient, comme en témoignent de manière indiscutable les récentes vagues de chaleur et les crues dévastatrices. Cette aggravation annoncée présente des défis majeurs pour les communes et les régions. La nouvelle plateforme «Adaptation aux Changements Climatiques Intégrée (ACCI)» les aide à mettre en oeuvre, grâce à une démarche participative, des mesures efficaces, fondées sur des données scientifiques solides, et soutenues par toutes les parties prenantes.
 

Die Auswirkungen des Klimawandels in der Schweiz verstärken sich, wie die jüngsten Hitzewellen und verheerenden Hochwasser deutlich zeigen. Angesichts der erwarteten Verschärfung des Problems stehen Gemeinden und Regionen vor grossen Herausforderungen. Die neue Plattform «Integrierte Klimaanpassung» (IKA) unterstützt sie dabei, durch partizipative Prozesse wissenschaftsbasierte und wirksame Massnahmen zur Klimaanpassung umzusetzen, die von allen Beteiligten getragen werden.

Mehrjährige Forschungsarbeiten der WSL zu erneuerbaren Energien können Antworten liefern auf Fragen wie die folgenden: Wovon hängt die Akzeptanz von Anlagen für die Erzeugung erneuerbarer Energie ab und wie lässt sich die Akzeptanz steigern? Was vereinfacht die Planung solcher Anlagen und wie fördert der Einbezug der Bevölkerung ihren Ausbau? Was können Gemeinden tun? Welche Rahmenbedingungen auf nationaler und kantonaler Ebene sind förderlich? Insbesondere angesprochen von diesen Ergebnissen sind Energie- und Planungsbeauftragte von Gemeinden, Regionalverbänden, Kantonen und Bund, Energieund Umweltverbände, Ingenieur- und Planungsbüros sowie die interessierte Öffentlichkeit.

Les travaux de recherche que mène le WSL sur plusieurs années peuvent fournir des réponses à diverses questions, par exemple: de quoi dépend l'acceptation des installations d'énergie renouvelable et comment peutelle être améliorée? Quels sont les facteurs qui simplifient la planification de telles installations et comment la participation de la population favorise-t-elle leur déploiement? Que peuvent faire les communes? Quelles sont les conditions-cadres favorables aux niveaux national et cantonal? Ces résultats s'adressent en particulier aux responsables de l'énergie et de la planification dans les communes, aux associations régionales, aux cantons et à la Confédération, aux associations dans les domaines de l'énergie et de l’environnement, aux bureaux d'études ainsi qu’au public intéressé.
 

Uncertainty and change are increasingly commonplace as communities respond to impacts of social-ecological change including climate change, and dangerous levels of pollution. Given the extent of these crises, new approaches are needed to support responses. Here we identify challenges and discuss insights that the nexus of Senses of place (SoP) and mobilities research offers in navigating such uncertainty. We conducted a two-round Delphi, followed by a workshop, and collaborative writing process with a global network of researchers with expertise in either or both SoP and mobilities research. Participants identified five challenges at the place-mobility nexus that emerge when a social-ecological system is disrupted. We use the 2022 Odra River fish die-off to exemplify the identified challenges: 1) accounting for power dynamics, inequalities and motility; 2) doing justice to more-than human actors; 3) integrating multiple and sometimes nested spatial scales; 4) considering temporalities of place and mobilities, and 5) embracing multisensoriality. To address these challenges, we recommend drawing on diverse methods and knowledge co-creation processes that combine more-than-human perspectives, multisensoriality, and engage in the dynamic relations between places to understand people-place disruptions in the face of socio-spatial precarity. Addressing such knowledge gaps requires stronger collaboration of mobilities and place researchers.

Although community project planning is widely understood as crucial to equitable wind energy infrastructure planning, involved members of the public nevertheless perceive such participatory interventions as merely pseudo-participatory. Drawing on agonistic planning literature, we argue that this disposition towards tokenism can only be tackled with a (re)politization of community project planning practices. This includes an explicit (re)integration and cultivation of dissent and the potential overthrow of traditionally consensus-oriented formats that follow the deliberative paradigm. For radically political community energy project planning, however, public discourses must be fluid and participants must be open towards dissent, which largely contradicts the typical postures of a deliberative citizen who is supposed to argue in a rational and objective way, using the best arguments to convince others. To examine the feasibility of agonistic approaches for community wind energy planning, we conducted a quantitative discourse analysis on the data set of a large regional survey of an on-going wind energy planning project in Switzerland. We focused on estimating the degree of hegemony of public wind energy discourses and the willingness of residents to engage in participatory settings that can facilitate radically political community project planning (e.g., substantive participation settings). Our results show that for planning individual wind energy projects, the potential for agonistic planning approaches is low, not only because the discourses are already too hegemonic, but also because there is no real willingness to engage in radically political community wind energy project planning. In the context of early, comprehensive, and integrated community planning, however, agonistic approaches could provide the ground for open and innovative participatory planning of renewable energies.

The 'Aarhus Convention'–regulating access to environmental information, public participation and justice in environmental decision−making–is a key international agreement with a long history and a considerable number of signatory countries. While implementation has been studied nationally, there is little comparative research at the transnational level. Based on ten criteria, we analysed national implementation reports of the 2014, 2017 and 2021 reporting cycles in terms of how 33 countries in Europe have implemented the access to information and public participation pillars, and identified obstacles they encountered. We also studied similarities and differences supra-nationally. Overall, countries are quite successfully fulfilling the obligations of the two pillars. Most obstacles reported concern four criteria: access to information, information provision, interaction, and trust. Implementation practices have changed little from 2014 to 2021. However, East- and South-European countries report more, and more persistent or repetitive obstacles, compared to Northern and Western European countries. The national democratic context seems to affect the quality of implementation. The Convention’s compliance bodies and national agencies responsible for coordinating the implementation are encouraged to interact more closely, to account for the differences and leverage implementation.

The analysis of risk awareness should be the initial stage in integrated natural hazard risk management to promote appropriate and effective measures for mitigating risks and strengthening social resilience inside the multi-risk framework. Nevertheless, earlier studies focused on cross-sectional data and overlooked the changes in risk awareness levels and associated independent variables with time. This study analyzes for the first time a balanced nationwide panel dataset of 1612 respondent-year observations from Switzerland (period 2015–2021, including the epidemic of COVID-19) to examine and compare the effects of potential independent variables on the four dimensions of natural hazard risk awareness (NHRA), ranging from the broadest dimension of Relevance to higher dimensions of Perceived Probability of an event, Perceived Threat to life and valuables, and Perceived Situational Threat. The analysis in this study incorporates multiple methods of Random-Effect Model (RE), Generalized Linear Model (GLM), and mediation analysis. Results show that NHRA increased in Switzerland to different extents (up to 23.24%) depending on the dimension. Event memory, perceived information impact and reported individual informed level appeared to be the most consistent independent variables positively influencing panel NHRA. Among these, perceived information impact as an important indicator of risk communication, was also found to serve as a mediator from risk preparedness to risk awareness. By encouraging residents to engage in “Begin Doing Before Thinking” (BDBT) programs to leverage subliminal effects and self-reflection, this study proposes that behavior-cognition feedback loops may facilitate a virtuous cycle. Our promising observations provide recommendations for an effective awareness-rising strategy design and suggest extensive insights from potential short-interval panel analysis in the future.

Erholungssuchende sind eine wesentliche Nutzergruppe von Flussräumen, welche jedoch in der Regel nicht direkt in die Planung von Flussrevitalisierungen einbezogen werden. Dies ist für die Umsetzung der Ziele von Flussrevitalisierungen insbesondere deshalb ungünstig, da Erholungssuchende anders als die meisten Interessengruppenvertreter ökologische Aufwertungen unterstützen und bei ihren Anliegen für die Verbesserung der Erholungsinfrastruktur bereit sind, die Anliegen des Naturschutzes zu respektieren. Aus neueren Befragungen geht hervor, dass Erholungssuchende interessiert sind, sich an Planungsprozessen von Flussprojekten zu beteiligen. Pilotprojekte zeigen, dass der Einbezug von Erholungssuchenden in Form von Workshops konstruktive Vorschläge für Anpassungen an der Erholungsinfrastruktur hervorbringt und dazu führt, dass diese ihr Verständnis für die Biodiversität an Fliessgewässern erweitern. Um Lösungen zu finden, welche von allen relevanten Nutzergruppen von Flussräumen einschliesslich der Erholungssuchenden mitgetragen werden, wäre es besonders vielversprechend, diese in die strategische Planung der Gewässerentwicklung auf regionaler Ebene einzubeziehen.

La revitalisation des cours d’eau du point de vue des personnes en quête de détente
Les personnes en quête de détente constituent un groupe d’utilisateurs important des espaces fluviaux, mais elles ne sont généralement pas directement impliquées dans la planification des revitalisations de cours d’eau. Cette situation est particulièrement défavorable à la mise en oeuvre des objectifs des revitalisations de cours d’eau, car contrairement à la plupart des représentants des groupes d’intérêts, les personnes en quête de détente soutiennent les revalorisations écologiques et sont prêtes à respecter les exigences de la protection de la nature lorsqu’elles demandent l’amélioration des infrastructures de loisirs. Des enquêtes récentes montrent que les personnes en quête de détente sont intéressées à participer aux processus de planification de projets fluviaux. Des projets pilotes démontrent que l’implication des personnes en quête de détente sous forme d’ateliers génère des propositions constructives d’adaptation des infrastructures de loisirs et permet d’élargir leur compréhension de la biodiversité des cours d’eau. Afin de trouver des solutions qui soient soutenues par tous les groupes d’utilisateurs importants des espaces fluviaux, y compris les personnes en quête de détente, il serait particulièrement bénéfique de les intégrer dans la planification stratégique du développement des cours d’eau au niveau régional.

 

Context: The implementation of landscape-management decisions is often blocked because actors disagree in their perception of the problem at hand. These conflicts can be explained with the concept of problem framing, which argues that actors’ problem perspectives are shaped by their interests. Recent literature suggests that social learning through deliberative processes among actors enables shared solutions to complex landscape-management conflicts.
Methods: To examine these assumptions, a participatory process on integrated water-resource-management in a Swiss Alpine region was systematically evaluated using a quasi-experimental intervention-research design. The involved actors’ problem perspectives were elicited before and after the participatory processes using qualitative interviews and standardized questionnaires. Furthermore, a standardized survey was sent to a sample of regional residents (N = 2000) after the participatory process to measure the diffusion of actors’ social learning to the wider public.
Results: The data analysis provided systematic evidence that a convergence of involved actors’ problem perspectives, which were found to differ considerably before the intervention, had taken place during the participatory process. Furthermore, it determined diffusion effects of actors’ social learning to the wider public in terms of its attitude towards participatory regional planning.
Conclusions: The findings confirm the expected mechanism of social learning through deliberative processes and demonstrate it as a promising approach to implementing landscape-management decisions successfully. The catalyzing role of shared interests among actors suggests that landscape-management decisions should be implemented by participatory integrated planning on the regional level, which would require a new, strategic role of regional institutions.

1. Previous experiences play a multifaceted role in shaping current perspectives in integrated natural resource management. We used qualitative interviews and a quantitative survey to study the similarities and differences in terms of the links between the diverse actors' previous experiences and their current perspectives on the various issues to be resolved in a real-world integrated watershed management project.
2. We found that the quantity and quality of experiences in past projects including water management, participation and politics are dissimilarly linked to the information, mental models and beliefs of perspectives regarding present issues. More experienced actors generally have broader perspectives than less experienced actors. Less experienced actors are particularly curious about approaches to water management. Actors with more experience in water management are more focused on ecological issues due to positive experience.
3. Actors with more experience in participation are more sceptical about constructive solutions due to negative experience. Actors with more experience in politics emphasise the importance of agriculture and learning processes due to positive or negative experience. Actors with more negative experience in water management, participation and politics can nevertheless be motivated for participatory processes and integrated natural resource management.
4. We conclude that previous experiences are critical factors that should be considered when designing participatory processes in integrated natural resource management. It could be valuable to include mixed compositions of actors with different types of previous experiences and different aspects of current perspectives to benefit from their complementary strengths. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Participatory mapping for landscape planning is gaining in popularity. With a participatory geographic information system, the local spatial knowledge of the affected public can be collected and included in planning decisions. For its proponents, participatory mapping is deemed useful not only for rendering planning more inclusive but also for facilitating consensus in planning. Here, we present a case study of wind energy planning in a region in Switzerland in which we applied a participatory mapping approach that resulted in providing spatial data not for consensus-making but for creating counter-maps. Using a critical cartography approach, we identified from our sample data the distinct wind energy discourses of supporters, opponents, and people who were indifferent; these revealed three different representations of the same place, which leaves little room for reaching a consensus. Drawing on the agonistic planning theory of radical democracy, however, we could demonstrate why this outcome is not necessarily problematic but rather bears potential for more democracy and pluralism in controversial landscape planning. This case study builds the foundation for discussions about how to implement energy transition in the face of the climate crisis and touches on other cutting-edge issues, including the handling of dissensus, conflict, and polarization in planning.

Obwohl die Mehrheit der Schweizer Bevölkerung die Energiewende grundsätzlich befürwortet, gestaltet sich die konkrete Umsetzung herausfordernd. Besonders bei der Windenergie sind ausgeprägte Zielkonflikte erkennbar. Entsprechend sind geplante Windenergieprojekte häufig von Einsprachen betroffen oder werden zu einem späten Zeitpunkt im Planungsverfahren von der Bevölkerung bei einer Abstimmung abgelehnt. Ein häufig genanntes Argument gegen lokale Windenergieanlagen ist die Veränderung der Landschaft oder eine Verletzung der Bedeutung eines Ortes. Da Landschaften und Orte jedoch nicht einfach Gegenstände darstellen, sondern gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse repräsentieren, ist es wichtig, die Gründe für die Reaktionen vertiefter und in ihrem Gesamtkontext zu betrachten. Dabei gilt es auch die Ansprüche der Bevölkerung hinsichtlich prozeduraler Aspekte zu berücksichtigen, um Lösungen für die Umsetzung der Energiewende auf lokaler Ebene zu finden, für die auch die Realisierung von Windenergieprojekten notwendig ist. [...]

Although the majority of the Swiss population generally supports the energy transition, its local implementation has proven to be challenging. Especially regarding the planning process of wind power, conflicting interests regularly manifest themselves in legal objections or the project is rejected in a referendum at a later stage. A frequently cited argument against wind energy infrastructure is its impact on the landscape or the meaning of a place. Landscapes or places cannot be reduced to mere collection of objects but have to be conceived as representations of societal relationships. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the reasons for these reactions more fundamentally and in consideration of their specific context. In doing so, residents’ expectations in terms of procedural aspects have to be considered, in order to identify solutions for implementing an energy transition at the local level. [...]

Die Mehrheit der Schweizer Bevölkerung steht hinter der Energiewende. Geht es jedoch um die lokale Realisierung von erneuerbaren Energieprojekten, fehlt es oftmals an sozialer Akzeptanz. Studien haben gezeigt, dass dieser Widerstand seinen Ursprung vor allem darin hat, dass der Miteinbezug der Bevölkerung zu spät stattfindet und sich partizipative Verfahren in der Regel auf eine reine Akzeptanzbildung beschränken. Als möglicher Lösungsweg verfolgt der integrierte Planungsansatz deshalb die Idee, die Energiewende auf regionaler Ebene und als Teil der regionalen Entwicklung, öffentlich zu thematisieren.
Um die Machbarkeit des integrierten Ansatzes vor diesem Hintergrund zu prüfen, wurde in dieser Studie das Potenzial der «Energieregion» als Instrument für eine integrierte regionale Entwicklungsplanung untersucht. In der «Energieregion Kno nauer Amt» wurden dazu Interviews mit regionalen Stakeholdern geführt. Dabei zeigte sich, dass insbesondere die gemischte Zusammensetzung aus öffentlichen wie auch privaten Akteuren als Stärke gegenüber anderen regionalen Planungsgefässen gesehen wird. Ausserdem wünschen sich die meisten Stakeholder, dass die Energiewende zusammen mit weiteren Themen der Regionalentwicklung im Rahmen eines breitangelegten partizipativen Verfahrens verstärkt diskutiert wird.

A profound understanding of actors’ perspectives on issues to be resolved is essential for researchers and practitioners in integrated natural resource management. Existing mental model approaches to systematically elicit such perspectives have been based on qualitative interviews, which implies small sample sizes or time-consuming analyses. Few studies have investigated complex projects of practical relevance. We studied the actors’ perspectives before the participatory process in a real-world integrated watershed management project through qualitative interviews and a quantitative survey based on a theoretical framework inspired by mental model approaches. We identified clear accordance and discordance among the perspectives regarding meanings of the water bodies, objectives for their management, and related beliefs. The mixed methods mental model approach proved to be a promising practical tool for the effective and efficient elicitation of actors’ perspectives in decision making.