How to Assess What Society Wants? The Need for a Renewed Social Conflict Research Agenda

It is hard to know what society wants when it comes to the development and implementation of Renewable Energy Technology (RET), as society articulates its assessment in many different ways. This chapter presents social conflict on RET as one of these forms of societal assessment. After we conceptualise the notion of societal assessment as a rhizomatic phenomenon, we identify and discuss three false assumptions about social conflict in social acceptance literature. We argue that social acceptance research should look more into (1) social conflict as a multi-actor process, (2) as a process of participation, (3) as a process in which multiple conflicts interact. We finish the chapter with a discussion on the implications for research on social acceptance.