Contemporary energy and climate change policy focuses on getting society to accept the widespread infrastructural changes deemed necessary for realising net zero. This emphasises approaches such as information provision, financial incentives, compensation and instrumental public engagement to secure public acceptance of predefined transition pathways.
Yet in light of a renewed policymaker commitment to getting publics to rapidly accept net zero infrastructures, there are critical calls to ensure the transition is also socially just. These calls emphasise how narrow public acceptance and societal acceptability perspectives are increasingly problematic as they typically overlook public values and concerns and can lead to implementation delays and unsustainable transitions in the longer term, thus highlighting the need for societal responsiveness.
This policy briefing synthesises insights from a collaborative UKERC project that systematically reviewed and analysed social science literature and UK policy discourse to explore such alternative perspectives and approaches.
A novel framework is introduced, setting out four distinct perspectives on the relations between publics and infrastructural change. These perspectives are corroborated with evidence from the exemplifying case study areas of wind energy, greenhouse gas removal technologies, and smart home technologies .
The review suggests that alongside dominant public acceptance and societal acceptability perspectives, emerging social science understandings challenge the bulk of contemporary policy for net zero by emphasising the need for societal responsiveness, both in specific contexts and more systemically.
These alternative perspectives challenge the misrepresentation of public views and actions in acceptance-based approaches and suggest that successful net zero transitions depend on moving beyond acceptance to be more, not less, responsive to society.
These emerging social science perspectives also emphasise the need for a more systemic approach to societal responsiveness that will help ensure the net zero transition is both efficiently delivered and socially just. This requires new research and policy developments, including: (i) understanding public responses as being place-based, contextual and interrelated across systems; (ii) taking a systemic approach to public engagement with net zero infrastructures; and (iii) cultivating new forms of societal responsiveness across systems.
Novel institutional architectures, new modes of responsive governance, and taking practical steps to become more responsive to public concerns, values and actions across whole systems are needed to achieve societal responsiveness of net zero infrastructures.
While such people-centred approaches can be challenging and time-consuming, they provide a much better alternative to acceptance-based approaches. Only when policymakers become fully aware of the multiplicity and diversity of public actions and views can they effectively respond to the social challenges of net zero.