How stakeholders legitimate ‘acceptable’ national energy transitions through spatial imaginaries and imagined publics: A Swedish case study
Low carbon energy transitions reconfigure geographies of energy generation, distribution, and consumption, and are often subject to contestation. Social acceptance research has neglected relations between socio-political and market acceptance, and the role of socio-spatial beliefs in legitimating technology deployment. This research addressed these gaps in two ways. First, we devised a novel methodology integrating participatory GIS in semi-structured interviews with government, energy industry and non-governmental stakeholders. Second, we investigated how socio-spatial resources - spatial imaginaries and imagined publics - are drawn upon by stakeholders to legitimate ‘acceptable’ current and future pathways of low carbon energy technology deployment, using Sweden as a case study.