Place, community ownership and the role of leaseholders within the social dynamics of wind energy projects in two Ontario communities
Abstract
To understand better why wind turbines continue to be polarizing at the local level, experiences of residents in two rural communities in Ontario, Canada were gathered through 31 in-depth semi-structured interviews and analysed with the help of NVivo. The qualitative, inductive study, utilizing a modified grounded theory approach, captured views on community ownership at the community level. Both cases were initiated to be community-owned, allowing for an exploration of why attempts at community ownership failed to materialize at both sites. Close examination of the places – landscapes and people – that constituted community, expanded understandings of how place identities, place attachments and social dynamics intersected and how these intersections impacted feelings on wind energy developments and community ownership. Furthermore, the inductive analysis, which included the leaseholders’ own perceptions of their behaviours and motivations, revealed the pivotal social dynamics of leaseholders of wind turbines. Leaseholders were often at the forefront of community-level discussions since they were envied by other local stakeholders for their higher-level procedural and distributive involvement in the wind energy projects, a dynamic which was sometimes injurious to relationships. Although discussions called for wider, more equitable distribution of benefits, local residents’ pluralities in needs, capacities, and desires for futures leaves doubts about whether community ownership can indeed be an empowering and unifying force at the local level. At the core of the thesis document are two manuscripts that provide a comprehensive discussion of findings from this study.