Increasing development like roads and houses will alter the future landscape of Vermont. Development provides important resources for people and society, but also results in consequences for wildlife and opportunities for recreation. Managing development requires information on the public's acceptability of development and how acceptability is shaped by information on various consequences. In this study, I examined three questions: 1) What is the public's acceptability of development? 2) Does wildlife information influence public acceptability of development and 3) Is the maximum amount of acceptable development influenced by views about wildlife, involvement in recreation, and demographic factors? I surveyed 9,000 households in Vermont by including a questionnaire which asked about development, wildlife, recreation, and demographics. I assessed acceptability of amount of development using social-norm curves and used parametric significance tests and mixed-effects models to examine the influence of wildlife, recreation, and demographic factors. The survey response rate was 44%. The maximum acceptable amount of development was slightly more than 32 households/km2, and not meaningfully influenced by the broader consequences of development on seven common wildlife species. The public demonstrated a strong preference for clustered development over sprawled development, which became unacceptable at 20 households per km2. Maximum acceptability of development was significantly influenced by views on some species, including bear, bobcat, and fisher, but not by others such as deer, fox, raccoon, and coyote. Similarly, those involved in common forms of outdoor recreation, including birding, ATVing, hunting, fishing and camping, were significantly less accepting of development relative to those not involved in these forms of recreation. Maximum amount of development was also affected by demographic factors, including town density, respondent age, home ownership and location of birth. The results provide a baseline measure of the public's acceptability of development, which can be used to guide decision-making about amount and pattern of development, wildlife management, and efforts to promote recreation in the state.

Public support for renewable energy projects is important in transitioning towards a more sustainable energy system. However, the literature investigating local energy acceptability has predominantly focused on understanding local opposition to single (wind) energy projects. As a result, it has relatively little to say about the construction of support for such projects, and about the relative acceptability of other local contributions to sustainability. Also, by focusing on oppositional responses to energy projects, the willingness and ability of local communities to contribute constructively to the design of locally-supported energy developments has also been overlooked by many previous studies. In response to these limitations, this research adopted a focus on early stage ‘upstream’ deliberation of multiple local energy alternatives, using the British island of Guernsey as a case study. Informed by social representations theory, three studies investigated how potential future offshore wind, tidal and wave energy projects were represented by Guernsey residents to threaten, enhance or fit place-related values and meanings associated with Guernsey and its coast and sea. Working collaboratively with the Guernsey government’s Renewable Energy Team, a mixed methods approach with a focus on participatory, visual methods was adopted, including auto-photography (Study 1), deliberative focus groups (Study 2) and a questionnaire survey (Study 3). The research found Guernsey and its coast and sea to be meaningful to local residents in many ways and at different scales, including as a unique island in need of more independence, with a coast that is valued for its quietness, wildlife, leisure opportunities, tides, natural beauty and as a space for exploration. Public understandings of tidal and wave energy as a local energy option were highly diverse, and subsequently some but not all local offshore renewable energy options were represented as ‘fitting’ these place-related meanings. In particular, the notion of Guernsey’s local distinctiveness was found to be important; tidal energy projects were represented as enhancing this distinctiveness, while offshore wind energy was instead portrayed as making Guernsey more like everywhere else. Overall, local energy acceptance at such an upstream stage was found to depend to a substantial extent on the technology chosen, the selected site for the project, and on how the project is interpreted relationally within a context of wider energy systems, policies and the perceived availability of (more appealing) local alternatives. This thesis suggests that adopting an upstream, visual, place-based approach could be one way to both achieve a better academic understanding of the acceptability of local energy projects, and to contribute to the development of more acceptable energy development practices in the future.

Cette thèse s'intéresse à la réconciliation entre le défi mondial du changement climatique et les solutions locales et sectorielles qu'il convient de bien articuler pour contribuer, efficacement, équitablement et de la manière la plus acceptable, à la réduction des émissions de CO2. Plus précisément, nous étudions les conditions pour une mise en place réussie de la politique climatique à l'échelle de la mobilité urbaine des personnes. / This PhD thesis deals with the reconciliation of the global challenge that is climate change and the local and sectoral solutions that need to be accurately designed to remedy to it the most efficiently, equitably and acceptably possible. More specifically, we investigate the conditions for a successful implementation of climate policy at the scale of the urban mobility of passengers.