In his latest book ‘Resolving Land and Energy Conflicts’Patrick Field (Director of the Consensus Building Institute in Boston/Cambridge) offers an impressive insight into the issues surrounding the impact of energy generation on the American landscape.

Conflicts are about health, environmental impacts, visual pollution, and the industrialization of the landscape. It doesn't matter if it's about oil and gas, or solar and wind. Using examples (like the new oil pipeline through Native American reservations in South Dakota), Field outlines how already complex situations have become even more complicated due to the climate debate. Besides the stakeholders, landowners, and local governments, climate activists, trade unions, and other stakeholders are now also coming forward to discuss the utility and necessity of an initiative.

Field, in his new book, indicates how complex route determination for infrastructure is, partly due to poorly aligned legislation, overlapping authority powers, and an unfair distribution of costs and benefits. Based on a number of case studies, he argues that projects in which cooperation between conflicting parties was sought yielded better results.

The seven lessons from his research are explained in detail. Such as the need to involve local communities early in the choice of route. Proposals benefit from this and become less controversial. He also advocates for regionalizing tasks that transcend the local scale. The impact of the initiative on the environment can then be better assessed, communities run less risk of being played off against each other, and the opportunities for trade-offs and increasing the pie grow. This does require local interest groups to unite at a higher level and also to agree among themselves in order to take a strong position against the initiator.

The challenges Field writes about are recognizable in Dutch discussions about the location of wind turbines, solar farms, and high-voltage power lines. With the energy transition still largely ahead, the Netherlands will also face complex siting discussions, in which LULU (Locally Unwanted Land Use) will hinder rapid decision-making about locations or routes for energy generation and transmission, at least on land.

‘Resolving Land and Energy Conflicts’ also offers Dutch environmental managers, initiators, and investors a source of inspiration for methods to bring their complex task to a successful conclusion. A successful energy transition requires early dialogue with stakeholders in the immediate vicinity, serious discussion about the costs and benefits of an initiative, and an accessible monitoring process to ensure that promises are kept.

Co-founder, Trainer

Hans van Zijst