D6.2.2: Community compensation and engagement: report on best practices and closing of knowledge gaps (ALIGN-CCUS)

(1)

ACT ALIGN CCUS Project No 271501

This project has received funding from RVO (NL), FZJ/PtJ (DE), Gassnova (NO), UEFISCDI (RO), BEIS (UK) and is co-funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme

ACT, Grant Agreement No 691712

Accelerating Low carboN Industrial Growth through CCUS

Deliverable Nr.D6.2.2: Community compensation and engagement: Report on best practices and closing of knowledge gaps

Dissemination level Public

Written By Dr. Emma ter Mors (Leiden University), Ruben Peuchen, MSc (TNO), Dr. Christine

Boomsma (Leiden University), dr. Corin Jack (University of Edinburgh), Prof. Diana-Maria Cismaru (National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest), dr. Corina Buzoianu (National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest), dr. Kevin Broecks (TNO), dr. Simon Shackley (University of Edinburgh)

Checked by WP6 Leader Dr. Emma ter Mors (Leiden University) Approved by the coordinator Ing. Peter van Os (TNO)

(2)

Document No. Issue date Dissemination Level Page

ALIGN-CCUS D6.2.2 Report on best practices and closing of knowledge gaps

30 November 2020 Public

2/195

Copying of (parts) of this document is forbidden without prior permission. 2

Acknowledgement

Since work for the ALIGN-CCUS project started in 2017, the Task 6.2 research team has gained tremendously from the support and expertise of many individuals which elevated the quality of this work and without whom this work would not have reached its full potential. Here we would like to thank those people.

First, we wish to thank the interviewees and workshop participants who gave their valuable time and input. Their knowledge and expertise helped us tremendously to obtain answers to our research questions, and to share and validate our research findings. We also wish to thank and acknowledge Leiden University Master thesis students Maud van den Eijnde, MSc, Mark Mulder MSc, and Jelmar Bijstra, MSc, (i.e. team ‘MMJ’) for their contributions to the design and data collection of Experimental survey 2, and thank the Municipality of Leiden for making its city hall available for data collection for this study. For the conducting of the UK interviews we would also wish to thank YoungHwa Cha (University of Edinburgh) for her valued assistance with this task. Finally, we wish to thank the wider members of the ALIGN-CCUS Work Package 6 team, including Renate Meier, MSc (Leiden University) and dr. Arianne van de Wal (Leiden University) for their constructive feedback when reviewing early drafts of the report, and for their help setting-up the research and writing the report. Furthermore, we are grateful to any other persons who have not already been named that provided information, help, or feedback throughout the duration of this work.

Information requests

The full version of the D6.2.2 report will be made publicly available on the ALIGN-CCUS website once the linked scientific journal articles have been published. Until then, the full version of the D6.2.2 report is available upon request.

(3)

3/195

Executive summary

In this report, we focus on a lack of public support as a potential barrier for industrial Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) implementation in (specific) European countries. We consider community engagement and community compensation as important instruments to build trust relationships and foster public support. The main aim of the present research conducted as part of ALIGN-CCUS Task 6.2 was to identify best practices and to identify and close knowledge gaps when it comes to community engagement and community compensation in the context of CCS implementation.

Public engagement includes measures ranging from providing information, education, consultation to deliberation. Public engagement plays a key role in building trust and fairness perceptions. Thus, public engagement processes should be facilitated in such a way that local communities feel that their interests are heard as well as acted upon. That is, trust, and ultimately public acceptance, are built on meaningful two-way dialogue between communities and project developers/authorities (Boomsma et al., 2020).

In this report we focus on community engagement in general, but also on one approach in particular: offering community compensation, also referred to as community benefits or host fees. Community compensation can be used to engage with local communities and obtain a fair distribution of costs and benefits. Community compensation can be defined as “a form of equity adjustment aimed at correcting imbalances between regional benefits and local burdens associated with the siting of new or expanded facilities” (Ter Mors et al., 2012, p. 130). As explained by Boomsma et al. (2020), the distribution of impacts from many low-carbon developments, including CCS, is not equal across society. Projects may instigate trust and lead to less public resistance if there is a balance between perceived local benefits and negative impacts. Offering community compensation may be one way to achieve this balance.

Insight in how to successfully use community engagement and community compensation schemes is crucial for CCS implementation. Research on community engagement and community compensation is an emerging field though. Little research so far had examined the effectiveness of community compensation in a CCS context, and

most of the limited research available took place in the Netherlands. While social science research in the context

of CCS has provided important initial insights into some relevant factors in community compensation, important questions have remained unanswered, including the generalizability of research findings across countries. ALIGN-CCUS Task 6.2 aims to identify and understand success factors and pitfalls in community engagement and

community compensation for CCS projects and to identify and close relevant knowledge gaps. That is, the research

described in the present report was designed to capture experiences on community engagement and community compensation connected to project development in European countries, permitting systematic analysis of what strategies work best in which context. More specifically, the current report concerns ALIGN-CCUS sub-tasks 6.2.2 (semi-structured interviews) and 6.2.3 (quantitative studies) and follows up from sub-task 6.2.1 (literature and policy review, see Boomsma et al., 2019, 2020). In the research reported in the present D6.2.2 report, we used a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative research methods (30 interviews with community engagement managers in three European countries, a workshop held in the Netherlands) with quantitative research methods (two experimental survey studies, with respondents from three European countries), focusing both on stakeholder experiences and preferences, and on preferences and responses of citizens in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom (UK) and Romania.

Overall, the report provides a set of lessons and knowledge gaps for community engagement and compensation in the context of CCS. These findings can provide a useful tool for researchers in this field looking to close knowledge gaps as well as stakeholders (e.g., project developers; authorities; community engagement managers) wanting to understand how to effectively make use of community engagement and community compensation in the CCS context.

(4)

4/195

The report shows that environmental engagement managers have valuable expertise and experience when it comes to the implementation of local projects. Related, the report also shows that useful lessons can be learned from other low carbon technologies (e.g., renewables, nuclear energy), subsurface activities (e.g., gas extraction) and infrastructure projects that impact local publics (e.g., road construction) when designing engagement and compensation strategies, that can be applied to ensure community engagement and compensation is practiced more effectively to engage with local publics in the context of CCS. The report further suggests that community engagement and compensation preferences, views and practices as expressed by community engagement managers interviewed in the Netherlands, the UK and Romania overlap to an important extent, but also that each project is unique, and that country-specific and local contexts need to be considered.

The report further shows that community compensation preferences between community engagement managers and citizens in the three countries examined overlap to an important extent, indicating that community engagement managers might be quite accurate in estimating how citizens would evaluate community compensation measures. Further, the report shows substantial overlap in relative preferences for community compensation measures among citizens in the Netherlands, the UK, and Romania, but also relevant differences between countries when it comes to CCS acceptability and the evaluation of compensation measures.