Abstract
Social science has an important role in aviation biofuels research, yet social science methods and approaches tend to be underdeveloped and under-utilized in the broader aviation biofuels literature and biofuels overall. Over the last 5 years, social science approaches in aviation biofuels research, particularly site-selection, have made several advances. Where early site-selection models either entirely excluded social science concepts or included only a few measurements using poor proxies, current models more accurately, and more comprehensively capture key social science concepts to better examine and predict project implementation success and long-term sustainability. Despite several studies published within the last 20 years noting the need for more empirical studies of social sustainability and improvement in incorporation of social criteria, progress has remained rather stagnant in several areas. To help move the field forward, we conduct a review of the current state of social science research in aviation biofuels with a focus on sustainability, site-selection, and public acceptance research, identifying key approaches, important developments, and research gaps and weaknesses of current approaches. While several review studies already exist, they tend to focus on a single area of biofuels such as public acceptance. By broadening our review to several areas, we are able to identify several common limitations across these areas that contribute to the continued underutilization of social science approaches in aviation biofuels. This includes the preference for practical and reliable indicators for social criteria that prioritize quantitative methods over other approaches. Based on these limitations, we make several recommendations to improve social science research in aviation biofuels, including ensuring that social scientists are key members of the research team, the adoption of a mixed-methods research designs that combines quantitative and qualitative approaches that better measure some criteria and local-level impacts, and adequate resources for social science research throughout biofuel development projects as these methods are often more time-consuming and costly to implement. We argue that implementing these recommendations in future aviation biofuel development projects will improve social science approaches utilized in aviation biofuels research and address a long-acknowledged gap in the field.
Highlights
The social sciences have much to contribute to aviation biofuels development, the broader literature and research in sustainability, and expertise in the effective and appropriate use of social science research and methodology, such as survey design, implementation, and analysis
This review focuses on social science applications in aviation biofuels research with specific attention to empirical studies that utilize social science methods and techniques, either wholly or in part
We identified three key areas in aviation biofuels research that constitute much of the social science empirical research currently being used in the field, sustainability, site-selection with a specific attention to combined frameworks and modeling, and public acceptance
Summary
The social sciences have much to contribute to aviation biofuels development, the broader literature and research in sustainability, and expertise in the effective and appropriate use of social science research and methodology, such as survey design, implementation, and analysis. Social science aspects, when employed, can play an important role in helping assess potential for acceptance of biofuel-related projects (Marciano et al, 2014; Ahmad and Xu, 2019; Segreto et al, 2020), provide the opportunity to more fully assess community capacity to sustain biofuel facilities (See Martinkus et al, 2017; Rijkhoff et al, 2017; Martinkus et al, 2019; Mueller et al, 2020; Rijkhoff et al, 2021), and more fully understand the sustainability of biofuel supply chains (See Wang et al, 2017; Pashaei Kamali et al, 2018; Wang et al, 2019) Despite these advancements, there are several limitations to the application of social science research and methodologies in biofuels development. Social science has made important contributions in the field of biofuel development, but this work has much less prominence, less resources are committed to social aspects of biofuel development and sustainability, and the consequence is that the understanding of social costs and benefits of biofuel development are lacking, especially at the local level
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