The Scottish government’s aim of deriving 100 per cent of the nation’s electricity from renewable sources is dependent on the utilisation of wind energy. Social barriers, however, have continued to threaten these targets. Community benefit funds have often been paraded as the most common way of improving public attitudes towards wind farms in the United Kingdom, although little empirical evidence exists to support this notion. Using the proposed Ourack wind farm, approximately three and a half miles north of Grantown-on-Spey in the Scottish Highlands, this case study, consisting of a sequential explanatory research design comprised of an initial close-ended survey followed by in-depth semi-structured interviews, sought to explore the community’s perceptions of community benefits, identify the type of fund that the community wanted, and investigate the role of such benefit provisions in altering perceptions of wind farms. The key findings indicated that the majority of participants were in favour of benefits being provided, they preferred funding to be directed towards community organisations, and approximately one third of research participants (31.6 per cent) perceived the proposed wind farm in a more positive light after considering the possible benefits the region would accrue. Furthermore, the research indicated the need for community benefits to become a standardised part of the planning process, thus reducing the likelihood of financial benefits being perceived as bribes, and allowing developers to provide greater information about any proposed benefits scheme prior to applying for planning permission. There are implications of this study for academics researching the role of community benefits in wind farm planning, and policymakers and developers for understanding the wants and needs of community members.

This dissertation explores the potential for community benefits agreements (CBAs) to serve as instruments towards a more democratic approach to situating urban redevelopment projects into residential neighborhoods. To aid my analysis, I utilize the lens of democratic political theory to describe their most intractable shortcomings as well as prescribe reforms that can better enable them to bridge the oftentimes conflicting ends of economic growth and social justice. Moreover, I consider the conditions that are most favorable for residents to maximize their bargaining power against developers and the conditions where developers are least likely to negotiate with the locals. Drawing from a range of sources including interviews, audio recordings, documents, and investigative reporting, I illustrate their common failings by using three case studies of CBAs from major American cities. I find that the most recurring problem facing CBAs is their susceptibility to co- option by powerful political and economic elites who manage to subvert them into devices for private gain. Up to this point, municipalities have been largely reluctant to regulate them, and this lack of regulation has led to agreements being shaped more by informal networks of powerful interests rather than the wants and needs of everyday residents. This informality leading up to an agreement is a major contributing factor to their failings. Thus, in the absence of a structure that actively promotes inclusive and transparent procedures leading up to the forging of an agreement, residents lack the power to meaningfully influence its terms and conditions. This observation leads critics to contend that their vulnerability to elite influence should force us to rethink, and ultimately abandon CBAs as reliable instruments for popular control over the built environment. However, I argue that this conclusion is misguided; given their proliferation across American cities and increasing salience in land-use debates, a more effective alternative is to find institutional designs that curb the excesses of such projects while also making them more responsive to local concerns. If policy makers, activists, and residents are going to continue to look to CBAs to extract concessionary gains from developers, then it is crucial to devise safeguards that effectively minimize opportunities for abuse while also enhancing residential voice in shaping the resulting agreement. / Political Science

The developed world relies on an enormous supply of electricity and heat energy to power countless daily activities, predominantly using non-renewable fossil fuels. Although this energy assists people in meeting their basic human needs, the way in which it is produced is at odds with the ability of people to continue to meet their needs in the future. The current trend towards renewable energy generation in the developed world that involves community members is a positive step away from current unsustainable energy practices. A Strategic Sustainable Development (SSD) approach helps to guide planning and decision making by using a vision of a sustainable energy future to assist in undertaking strategic actions. To offer practical support to communities wanting to work towards sustainable energy generation, this research combines the experience of communities undertaking Community Renewable Energy projects with an SSD approach, producing a Sustainable Community Renewable Energy Tool.

Progress Village, a historically Black neighborhood outside of Tampa, FL, encountered structural violence that included construction of an adjacent phosphogypsum stack. Why the neighborhood signed a legal agreement with the stack’s operating industry and the impacts of this decision provides a lesson in critical environmental justice. Theories of urban political ecology frame exploration of resident priorities, relationships with industry, risk perceptions, and health concerns. Utilizing activist anthropology, this thesis aims to be mutually beneficial to scholarly and neighborhood development. Ultimately, this research demonstrates how southern gradualism, racism, and a trend towards isolationism created today’s striving, yet marginalized and divided community. This thesis encourages scholarship on everyday resident-industry interactions and provides insights to strengthen future Community Benefits Agreements, while questioning if such agreements serve environmental justice.

La présence ou l'installation d'équipements générateurs d'impacts négatifs, comme les aéroports, les centrales électriques, etc. suscitent sur les territoires riverains et au- delà de nombreuses contestations. Divers modes de résolution ont pu voir le jour recourant généralement à de nouvelles formes de concertation, sans toutefois que cette entreprise débouche sur une distribution spatiale plus « juste » des aménités et désaménités environnementales. Au travers des compensations territoriales (discrimination positive à l'embauche des riverains, offre de formations en leur faveur pour les emplois développés par l'infrastructure, aménagement d'espaces verts…) se dissimule l'ambition non seulement de lutter contre les nuisances mais aussi de redistribuer les externalités positives dans le but d'une meilleure équité. Mesures apportées principalement à la collectivité, elles sont en général le résultat de négociations entre différents acteurs : représentants des collectivités locales, exploitants/aménageurs, société civile – associations, syndicats souvent regroupés en coalition. Les compromis compensatoires tentent de concilier des domaines aux légitimités et aux fonctionnements apparemment antagoniques (justice sociale, équité spatiale et efficacité environnementale). Il s'agit cependant de se demander, au travers d'une mise en parallèle de cas d'étude aux Etats-Unis, en Allemagne au Canada et d'une approche synthétique sur la France, si ces outils d'action publique/privée participent réellement à la résorption des injustices environnementales et spatiales dans la mesure où l'utilisation de la compensation socio-environnementale n'est pas sans soulever des questions d'éthique / The siting or the presence of a polluting facility like airports or power plants arouses protests at local and even at regional/national levels. To tackle these environmental conflicts, different solutions have been used and consultation has become an essential procedural component of the siting process. But these initiatives haven't allowed a better spatial distribution of environmental impacts and benefits. “Local community benefits” (affirmative action to promote the hiring of new employees towards residents, financing of community centers…) aim not only at reducing environmental pollutions, but also at improving the allocation of facility benefits to improve spatial and social equity. These collective-based measures result frequently from negotiation with the involved stakeholders: representatives of local governments, of developers, and of the inhabitants – associations, unions, which often strive to create a coalition so as to be more powerful. Compensatory agreements could be therefore a possible way of connecting different dimensions of sustainable development (social justice, spatial equity and environmental efficiency), even if they have apparently antagonistic legitimacy and differently work. In studying different field cases (in the United States, Canada, Germany and a global approach in France) we wonder if this private/public tool can help reducing environmental and spatial injustices, although compensatory measures raise up some ethical questions

Magister Artium - MA / Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest from governments and development organisations in adopting the Public Private Partnership (PPP) approach when developing and operating ecotourism projects. A PPP is a contract between a public sector institution and a private party, in which the private party assumes substantial financial, technical and operational risk in the design, financing, building and operation of a project (South African National Treasury 2004). Countries such as India, China and Kenya have developed numerous projects through PPPs. Protected Areas have followed suit in adopting the PPP approach, to be able to focus on their core business, namely conservation. To date, relevant research on PPP ecotourism projects, specifically pro-poor tourism approach is fragmented, limited in scope, and lacks examples that can assist practitioners in embedding pro-poor tourism principles in the PPP methodology. Academically, studies are largely evaluations that compare progress against projects’ defined objectives or broad based sustainable tourism goals. However, this study is an assessment of a tourism development from a pro-poor tourism perspective. Thus, this study interrogated the extent to which ecotourism PPP at De Hoop is pro-poor. Furthermore, the study sought to establish if rural local communities living in and near De Hoop PPP benefit and how their benefits can be enhanced. Pro-poor tourism indicators are used in this study as a theoretical base to evaluate De Hoop PPP.