Sign up to our General and Policy newsletters to keep up to date with all our latest developments.
Funded by
© IDRIC 2022 | Website: Tangent & Duncan Weddell & Co
Principal Investigator
University of Exeter
University of Exeter:
Dr Huei-Ling Lai
Despite the significance of sense of place for social acceptance of decarbonisation technologies, ways that sense of place are implicated in, and impacted by, UK industrial decarbonisation has been overlooked by research to date.
Why place matters in industrial decarbonisation: Net zero technological innovation is fundamentally social, spatial and political in character. Yet research indicates that cultural issues such as sense of place are often overlooked by stakeholders when managing transformative change, increasing the risk of potential antipathy or animosity by local communities directly impacted by the siting of novel infrastructures or technologies.
This project will ensure that such issues are made explicit in industrial decarbonisation, benefiting public,private and civil society stakeholders in three studied clusters (Scotland,South Wales, and North West).
This project will investigate how stakeholders such as local authorities and economic partnerships in six industrial clusters are creating a ‘net zero’ sense of place with a distinct local identity, fostering innovation, attracting inward investment and recruiting skilled workers.
Second, the project will reveal community lived experience and local knowledge, including place attachments and identities, in three cluster case studies (Grangemouth, Merseyside and South Wales, aiming to reach remaining clusters in a potential follow-up study). These tasks will be achieved using an innovative mixed-method approach.
Third, workshops will be held in each case study cluster to compare visions of place-based decarbonisation between stakeholder and community participants. Collectively, the research approach will produce an integrative framework guiding a socially acceptable, place-based process of decarbonisation and path to net zero emissions that will positively impact UK industrial clusters and offer guidance for decarbonisation elsewhere.
This project aims at producing journal publications and written reports on the theme of each phase.
Key quarterly reports include: