Exploring the Local Sustainability of a Green Economy in Alpine Communities

Natalia Magnani

doi:10.1659/mrd-journal-d-11-00105.1

Abstract

Abstract This article aims to contribute to the analysis of the complex relationship between sustainable development and green economy in mountain areas by focusing on a conflict over the building of a centralized biogas plant to produce renewable energy from livestock manure in an Italian Alpine valley. The case study shows that the project for a large-sized biogas plant promoted by the local political institutions as environmental modernization of local agriculture, and supported by the most important professional organizations, became increasingly controversial at the local community level and was eventually abandoned. By drawing in particular on the literature concerning the social acceptance of renewable energies, the article highlights how this conflict raises issues of distributional justice and procedural justice with regard to the implementation of the green economy model, and it points out the need to embed green economy technologies in the local context and conditions. These concerns should be ...

Highlights

The present article aims to contribute to the analysis of the complex relationship between sustainable development and green economy in mountain areas by focusing on a case study of a conflict centered on the building of a large centralized biogas power plant to produce renewable energy from livestock manure in an Italian Alpine valley.The production of renewable energy is one of the key pillars of green economy as defined by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP 2011)
In the new global run for renewable energies, rural areas—and especially mountain areas—play a central role (Kitchen and Marsden 2009). The richness of their natural resources in the green economy model can afford them new developmental opportunities and help them counteract the process of marginalization and decline that they have undergone as a result of industrialization and the development of the service economy
According to Woods (2003), rural conflicts over renewable energies need to be analyzed as processes of confrontation between broad visions concerning nature and the rural, rather than as results of controversies between selfish locals attached to their ‘‘backyard’’ and developers, as argued by the ‘‘not in my backyard’’ (NIMBY) syndrome explanation (Van der Horst 2007)

Summary

Introduction

The present article aims to contribute to the analysis of the complex relationship between sustainable development and green economy in mountain areas by focusing on a case study of a conflict centered on the building of a large centralized biogas power plant to produce renewable energy from livestock manure in an Italian Alpine valley.The production of renewable energy is one of the key pillars of green economy as defined by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP 2011). The present article aims to contribute to the analysis of the complex relationship between sustainable development and green economy in mountain areas by focusing on a case study of a conflict centered on the building of a large centralized biogas power plant to produce renewable energy from livestock manure in an Italian Alpine valley. In the new global run for renewable energies, rural areas—and especially mountain areas—play a central role (Kitchen and Marsden 2009). As highlighted by Boehmer-Christiansen (2003), green technologies cannot be defended on grounds of equity. Rather, they rely on commercial expectations and promises of secondary benefits, which in many cases end up serving the interests of technical, commercial, and political elites

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