Understanding the Social Reception of Energy Infrastructure in the Developing World

本项目审查发展中国家对拟议能源项目的社会接受情况。促进获得负担得起的、可靠的现代能源——特别是在南亚和非洲的关键地区——是美国外交政策的一个重要优先事项。尽管未满足的需求规模巨大，但在许多社区，社会抗议和争论已成为项目实现的障碍。然而，人们对这种争论的起源和影响知之甚少。更好地了解引发抗议的因素将提高美国的经济竞争力，并为外交政策提供信息。由于美国的公共机构和私营公司通常为国外的能源企业提供资金和技术，这项研究通过有针对性的出版物和有相关政府、工业、金融和非政府利益相关者参加的公开会议进行传播。此外，这项研究有助于教育和研究基础设施。具体地说，它生成了对其他研究人员有用的公共数据集和相关方法的文档。它还培训代表性不足的本科生和研究生研究人员。该项目通过促进基础设施选址和社会抗议的比较政治来推进学术知识。它提供了三个主要的进步。首先，它开创了一种对抗议事件进行全球比较研究的方法，展示了如何利用传统和社交媒体记录来收集有关社会争议的可靠数据。其次，它将抗议活动的原始数据与世界各地拟议煤炭项目的现有数据结合起来，深入了解项目选址的政治在发达国家和发展中国家可能存在的差异。第三，它对抗议如何影响结果提供了多方面的处理，包括考虑抗议影响项目和社区层面结果的可能性。该项目采用多种方法收集和分析数据，包括统计方法、焦点小组讨论和定性案例研究。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project examines the social reception of proposed energy projects in developing countries. Promoting access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy -- especially in critical regions of South Asia and Africa -- is an important foreign policy priority of the United States. Despite the scale of unmet demand, social protest and contestation have become a barrier to project realization in many communities. Yet the origins and impact of such contention are poorly understood. Having a better understanding of the factors that drive protest will enhance American economic competitiveness and inform foreign policy. As American public institutions and private firms commonly provide funding and technology for energy ventures abroad, the research is disseminated through targeted publications and a public conference with relevant governmental, industry, financial, and non-governmental stakeholders. In addition, this study contributes to education and research infrastructure. Specifically, it generates public data sets and documentation of the associated methodology that will be useful to other researchers. It also trains underrepresented undergraduate and graduate researchers.This project advances scholarly knowledge by contributing to the comparative politics of infrastructure siting and social protest. It offers three main advances. First, it pioneers a method for the global comparative study of protest events, demonstrating how traditional and social media records can be leveraged to gather reliable data about social contestation. Second, it combines original data on protest with existing data on proposed coal projects all over the world, developing insight into how the politics of project siting may differ in the developed and developing world. Third, it offers a multi-faceted treatment of how protest affects outcomes, including consideration of the potential for protest to impact both project and community-level outcomes. The project employs a multi-method approach to data collection and analysis that includes statistical methods, focus group discussions, and qualitative case studies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.