Community-developer collaboration and voluntary community benefits in Scotland: Are community benefits a gift or compensation?

Abstract

Community benefits are a key strategy for promoting social acceptance of renewable energy and ensuring distributive fairness of the energy transition. However, they can sometimes damage rather than strengthen the relationship between communities and developers. This paper examines stakeholder submissions to The Scottish Government's Good Practice Principles on Community Benefits from Onshore Renewable Energy Developments (2019) consultation. Communities perceive community benefits as compensation and express concerns about their voluntary nature, while developers see them as benevolent gifts, worrying about their impact on project viability. As the guidelines are voluntary, community benefit arrangements rely on collaboration between developers and communities, but power imbalance and a lack of shared understanding can impede this collaboration. Inspired by governmentality literature, this study analyses stakeholder discourses to understand how issues are framed, solutions proposed, and rationalities guiding these discussions. Qualitative system dynamics modelling is used to provide a comprehensive view of challenges in the design of community benefit arrangements in Scotland, highlighting risks to the developer-community relationship and trust in the energy transition. The analysis suggests that making community benefit arrangements mandatory or rethinking them is essential to preserve this relationship and trust.