Where do you draw the line? Legitimacy and fairness in constructing community benefit fund boundaries for energy infrastructure projects

Energy Research & Social Science 54 (2019) 166–175

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Where do you draw the line? Legitimacy and fairness in constructing community benefit fund boundaries for energy infrastructure projects

T

Patrick Devine-Wright , Fionnguala Sherry-Brennan ⁎

Geography, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon, EX4 4RJ, UK

ARTICLE INFO

ABSTRACT

Keywords: Social acceptance Community benefit funds Boundaries Fairness Legitimacy

The low carbon transition is fraught with challenges for policy makers, not least the social acceptance of large-scale infrastructure. In response to community objections, the distribution of benefit funds has become increasingly prevalent as a means to bolster acceptance. However, little research has investigated the spatiality of benefit provision where boundaries are drawn that define the ‘locality’ of a project and who is eligible to benefit. Using a high voltage power line in Ireland as a case study, this paper investigates how the boundaries of the community fund were identified, contested, negotiated and implemented. It draws on a qualitative dataset comprising secondary materials, observation and in-depth interviews with the stakeholders administering the fund and both successful and unsuccessful community applicants. Stakeholders justified boundary setting as essential for efficient and equitable fund distribution, founded upon discourses of impact and proximity. Those administering the fund mixed objectivity and subjectivity, departing from a logical, formulaic approach to identify the locality of the project before revising it in response to ‘reasonable’ local knowledge and interests. The outcome was a boundary that was widely acknowledged to be imperfect, yet legitimate and fair. Community groups recognised the fund both as an instrumental tool to secure their acceptance and as a means to mitigate impact and share benefit, provided it served their interests. Application of the boundary in fund decision-making revealed inherent difficulties in putting abstract definitions of ‘locality’ into practice as well as tensions between values of meritocracy and distributional equity. We discuss the applicability of the findings to non-linear energy projects (e.g. wind farms) and propose recommendations to optimise legitimacy and fairness in drawing boundaries for community benefit provision.

1. Introduction Low carbon energy transitions are fraught with challenges for policy makers, not least the social acceptance of large-scale renewable energy projects such as wind farms and associated infrastructure such as high voltage power lines. Renewable energy projects at this scale can have significant impacts on landscapes and local communities, including the potential to negatively impact health and wellbeing, property values, ecological habitats and the visual character of landscapes (van der Horst, 2007; [1–3]). In addition, community objections have arisen from perceptions of injustice related to decision-making procedures and the distribution of impacts [4,5]. Taken together, these concerns have placed significant obstacles in the path of renewable energy deployment, leading to delays or even abandoned projects with consequent impacts on national policies for climate change mitigation [6–8]. In response to these objections, policy and practice has emerged in which energy developers distribute benefits to communities affected by their proposals (e.g. [9,10]), mirroring practice in other development

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sectors, notably mining [11,12]). While it is typically not a material consideration in statutory planning procedures nor a mandatory obligation on developers, following strong policy recommendation, industry has voluntarily devised guidance for community benefit provision that has been endorsed by government ([13,14]; REUK, 2016; IWEA, 2018). While ‘community’ can have multiple meanings [15,16], it is the community of locality, defined by its spatial proximity to the infrastructure project, which has predominantly been used to identify where benefits should be distributed. However, the boundary of what is considered spatially proximate – where the line is drawn on a map to include areas and communities deemed to be affected by a given project and exclude those deemed not to be affected – has been overlooked by research. This is a significant gap, given increasing awareness of the importance of spatial dimensions of energy transitions [17,18]. Taking the geographies of energy transitions seriously necessitates placing the ‘local area’ or the ‘host community’ involved in renewable energy infastructure siting generally, and community benefit provision specifically, under greater scrutiny. We address this gap by investigating how the boundaries of a

Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (P. Devine-Wright), [email protected] (F. Sherry-Brennan).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2019.04.002 Received 30 November 2018; Received in revised form 26 March 2019; Accepted 4 April 2019 Available online 02 May 2019 2214-6296/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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community benefit fund were identified, negotiated, contested and implemented, using a high voltage power line in Ireland as a case study.

similar manner to proposed shared ownership schemes in the UK [33]. The Act stipulates that residents living beyond the 4.5 km distance, yet still within the same municipal boundary, are eligible to purchase any remaining shares that might still be available following the offer to those living within 4.5 km. Also stipulated under the Act, the Green (Community Benefits) scheme provides grant funding for local projects with collective outcomes that enhance environmental, cultural and educational facilities or activities (e.g. the provision of nature trails, playgrounds, renovation of village halls and teaching materials on renewable energy for schools; [34]). In Scotland, the Highland Council [35] recommended that wind farm developers distribute benefit funds for each project, with the first £100,000 allocated to the local community, but without a specific spatial distance indication. Beyond this sum, 55% of any further funds would be distributed to the ‘local area’; 30% to non-local areas impacted by the project to a lesser degree (e.g. from construction traffic or power lines) and the remaining 15% to a broader regional area in a ‘Highland Trust Fund’ (Highland Council, 2012; cited in Markantoni and Woolvin [36]). It is clear, then, that ‘community’ is understood in heterogeneous ways in contexts of benefit provision, and these understandings are not restricted to those living nearby. Given that onshore projects are intentionally sited in sparsely populated rural areas at a distance from settlements, and can be extremely large in size, thus generating large benefit funds calculated in proportion to the capacity of the project, this has led to calls to ‘rescale’ benefit provision away from a purely local focus to support investment across wider spatial areas [32]. Similarly issues are found in the offshore wind energy sector, where technologies are intentionally sited at a distance from human settlements. A review of community benefit provision in UK offshore wind projects found five alternative definitions of community in benefit provision, encompassing the local community living nearby, the impacted community negatively affected by a project, a community of interest (e.g. recreational users of a place who do not live locally), community groups (i.e. not for profit organisations) and an all-embracing definition of community that refers to larger social and spatial units (e.g. those living in the region where a project is sited) [16]. However, there is little evidence that policies drawing on more spatially extensive definitions of community have been widely supported. In one of the few published studies of the governance of community benefit funds, Markantoni and Aitken [37] used a qualitative method to investigate how the fund was set-up, managed and allocated in the case of the Farr wind farm in the Scottish Highlands, a 92 MW onshore wind farm consisting of 40 turbines that will distribute a total of £3.5 million to local communities across its lifetime ([38], n.d.; cited in Markantoni and Aitken [37]). Distribution of the fund centred on two local villages with each working separately, employing different approaches to decision-making procedures on fund applications. Both villages opted out of the Highland Council policy, preferring instead to retain all of the available funds locally. Despite producing useful findings concerning matters of transparency and representation, by focusing on ‘the two communities nearest to the site’ ([37], 976), the research provides little detail about the spatial dimensions of fund governance and allocation, in particular practices of boundary making and processes of inclusion and exclusion. Taken together, these examples indicate that defining the area or community impacted by a renewable energy project is not straightforward. As Aitken [29] noted, topography can be a significant issue. In a locality with undulating hills, residents living closest to a project may be less visually impacted than others living further away. There is also the matter of what Esteves and Vanclay [11] describe as ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ impacts of infrastructure projects, since impacts can occur at some distance from a project site. For example, mineral extraction can involve large numbers of truck movements to bring source materials to a given site, along with the removal of waste materials. Large-scale renewable energy projects may require new transportation infrastructure to enable construction machinery to reach the project site and new grid infrastructure to connect the project to the electricity network. For these reasons, spatial proximity, whilst important, is a crude indicator of impact. There is also a politics to impact definition (Kerr et al., 2017), with

2. Practices of benefit provision Large-scale renewable energy projects are controversial since they produce inequitably distributed outcomes, with the benefits typically accruing at national or global levels and the impacts felt by local residents [19]. In response, the provision of benefits has become a common practice, particularly for wind energy projects [16,20]. Benefit provision comes in several forms ([20], Kerr et al., 2017), for example as a financial offer (e.g. £5,000 per MW/h installed for a wind farm project, REUK, 2016), ‘in-kind’ contributions from the developer (e.g. to pay for local environmental improvements or new amenities) or investments in the local community (e.g. training, education scholarships for youth) [21,16]. Benefit provision varies in timing, including one-off awards or investments, as well as annual payments or schemes for the lifetime of an energy project (Kerr et al. 2017). Comparative research has shown that benefit provision varies across energy sectors and tends to be associated with controversial energy projects, notably onshore wind farms, high voltage power lines, hydraulic fracturing of shale gas and the underground disposal of radioactive waste [22]. Academics have critiqued the use of benefit provision as an instrumental tool to reduce opposition, instead emphasising a justice perspective where benefit provision is a tangible way of addressing the unfair distribution of burdens in energy transitions [23,24]. Research has noted the strategic nature of industry discourse, noting that wind energy developers avoid discourse of compensation in order to prevent any assumption of harm arising from their projects [20]. There is, then, an important distinction to be made between providing compensation and providing benefit, with the former designed to redress a clearly identified harmful impact, while the latter is less clearly linked to impact and is voluntarily provided by developers for several reasons - to acknowledge the role of host communities; to create positive impacts; to boost their reputation by acting as a ‘good neighbour’ (i.e. corporate social responsibility) or to gain a social license to operate for their industry [16]. Experimental studies on hypothetical projects have shown that when benefits are framed as bribes, levels of public acceptance decrease [25], likely arising from a conflict of values when monetary compensation, described as a ‘secular value’ disturbs ‘sacred values’ such as health or landscape quality [26]. However, if benefit provision is seen to be one element of a broader process of community consultation [27], or is seen to be obligated by national policies rather than the discretion of the developer [28], then acceptance can increase. Fieldwork in real case studies supports the finding that benefit provision may have unintended consequences, showing a potential ‘boomerang’ effect if such funds are interpreted as bribery [20] or when funds are distributed in ways that are perceived as unfair [29,30]. Research has drawn attention to ambiguities in the definition of ‘community’ used by policy makers and developers in energy transitions generally and benefit distribution specifically [15,29,31,32,16]. In part this relates to the difficulty of defining who or where is affected or impacted by a given energy project [16]. To date, the predominant approach is to distribute benefit to a community of locality or ‘host community’, revealing a definition rooted in spatial proximity [15,32]. However, what is considered proximate is typically left undefined in UK policy. Community boundaries are presumed to be self-evident, with best practice guidance encouraging developers to scope ‘an in-depth understanding of the community or communities who are hosting the wind farm’ ([9]: 22). More specific spatial definitions for community benefits have been devised and implemented in other contexts. In Denmark, the 2009 Renewable Energy Act specifies several measures that aim to distribute benefit to those living close to wind energy projects. Under the Co-ownership scheme, developers are obliged to offer residents living within 4.5 km of a wind farm the right to buy shares worth at least 20% of the value of the project. Of note is the fact that this measure provides benefit to individual shareholders rather than the community as a whole or to specific community groups, in a 167

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Fig. 1. 110 kV tower pylon in an Irish landscape (image provided by EirGrid).

these examples reflecting impact defined by national government (Denmark), regional government (Scotland), commercial developers in consultation with communities [9] and communities themselves [37]. As well as reflecting heterogeneity across sectors and countries, these practices involve actors with different resources and the power to influence outcomes, raising important issues of justice and fairness over where benefits are distributed and who decides ([32]; Kerr et al., 2017). Departing from the position that justice and geography matter together [39], boundary setting in community benefit distribution encompasses two key justice dimensions: procedural (how are decisions taken?) and distributional (where and to whom are benefits and impacts distributed?) (cf. [40]). Calls for procedural justice require the identification of those who are most affected. Yet ‘spatial boundaries, delineated on political, environmental or cultural grounds, are often involved in such a definition but are rarely unproblematic’ ([40]: 628). Studying boundary setting can build on insights from the environmental justice literature, where a constructivist perspective argues that space, including definitions of scalar concepts such as local and regional [41], cannot be taken for granted. Instead, boundaries should be viewed as social, political and discursive constructs that are continually made and remade through social practices [42], including those of policy makers, developers, activists and researchers [40]. Geographers have scrutinised the politics of these spatial practices. Actors can hold different perspectives on space and will draw on different meanings as a strategic resource to fulfill their respective aims and agendas [40]. Drenthen [43] argued that two contrasting perspectives are often implicit in ‘NIMBY’ (Not In My Back Yard) conflicts. Developers and policy makers tend to draw on a universalist, Cartesian view of space, based on a quantitative view of proximity (resonant with the definition of the impacted community in the Danish Energy Act as anyone living within 4.5 km of a wind farm) while objectors tend to hold a view of space described as an ‘ethic of the particular’ that emphasises meanings, emotions and values associated with a unique and distinctive place [43]. Siting conflicts can be intractable since these perspectives are often implicit, providing a challenge to communication and negotiation between the parties. Further insight into the complexities of boundary setting is provided by a study investigating participation in community-led wind farms. Simcock [5] used interviews with project leaders and local residents to investigate the spatiality of procedural justice – who should be allowed to participate in each wind farm? Comparing two cases, analyses revealed that the legitimacy of the boundaries drawn to identify ‘the local community’ was subject to criticism in each case, but for contrasting reasons. In Norton, Yorkshire, some interviewees regarded the boundary as too small, unfairly excluding villages visually impacted by the wind farm, yet sited on the other side of an administrative boundary in an area not involved in the statutory planning process. In Sleat on the Isle of Skye, some interviewees regarded the

boundary as too large, unfairly including villages deemed to be less affected by the wind farm in comparison to other villages at closer proximity to the site. Although definitions of community were widely acknowledged to be ‘subjective and variable’ ([5]:14), these concerns were outweighed by a consensus that public participation was nevertheless greater than is typically the case in company-led wind farms. With consultation judged relative to this norm, general acceptance of the projects was found. In summary, while the challenge of defining the community or area that is impacted by a renewable energy project is recognised by energy social science, little research has empirically addressed the geography of benefit provision - how boundaries are drawn to include areas and communities deemed to be affected and to exclude those deemed not to be affected. We aim to extend this knowledge base in two ways. First, we place the ‘host community’ under greater scrutiny by following practices of boundary making in the context of a community benefit fund associated with an energy project in the Republic of Ireland. In this, we are not only interested in where lines on a map are drawn, but in the discourse (i.e. the language and underlying perspectives, cf. [44]) that are used to communicate, explain and justify those boundaries. Second, we broaden the scope of a literature that is largely focused on wind energy projects by focusing on the case of a high voltage transmission power line. There has been increasing interest amongst grid operators in the use of benefit funds for similar reasons to the wind energy literature – increasing community acceptance of new power line proposals (Sander, 2012, cited in Keegan and Torres [45]; Renewables Grid Initiative [10]). However, internationally, there is an absence of policy guidance to inform grid operators in how to provide community benefits. Nor has in-depth research into benefit provision in power line cases been undertaken to date. To address these gaps, the research questions addressed by the study are: 1 How was the boundary of a power line community benefit fund identified, negotiated and contested? 2 What understandings of space, community and impact were held by the project stakeholders? 3 How was the boundary put into practice in decision-making for funding awards? 4 What lessons can be drawn to inform future cases of power lines specifically, and renewable energy projects more generally? 3. Methodology 3.1. Research design and context A single case study design was adopted since it allows for the analysis of specific 168

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contexts in depth [46], providing information that can be used to summarise and develop general propositions and theories [47]. The grid company involved in this case devised a policy of benefit fund distribution in 2014, in response to a national policy recommendation for benefit provision in Irish energy infrastructure projects [48]. The size of the fund is derived from a formula agreed by the national regulator that varies according to the voltage of the line (15,000 euros per kilometre for 110 kV lines; 30,000 euros for 220 kV; 40,000 euros for 400 kV). The community fund is the primary focus of this research, and sits alongside payments made to land and property owners situated within close proximity (i.e. within 200 m) of new power lines [49]. The company policy of community fund provision was trialled for the first time in the context of a new 110 kV power line located in the east of Ireland in 2017. 110 kV lines consist of twin wooden poles that carry electricity cables, as well as steel lattice towers that are 15 m in height where the line changes direction (see Fig. 1 for an image of a 110 kV tower pylon in an Irish landscape context). The line connects two rural towns (Mullingar and Kinnegad) across the counties of Westmeath (22 km) and Meath (2 km), and has been uncontroversial, with planning consent granted in 2013. Given a total length of 24 km, the total funding available was 360,000 euros, administered as a one-off community fund. The grid company collaborated with two stakeholders in order to better understand the issues involved in working with different types of partner organisation to distribute the community fund. Small grants (< 10k euros) were managed by the local council across whose territory most of the line crossed. Large grants (between 10-50k euros) were managed by a charitable organisation with a national remit and experience of community grant management arising from corporate donations and philanthropy. Although separate modes of distribution were employed for small and large grants, each was conducted in close cooperation throughout the process. The company produced an information brochure to spread local awareness of the community benefit fund [50]. This described the fund as aiming to ‘create positive social impacts in this area’, targetting local charities, community and voluntary associations, with suggested projects involving training and employment, education, environment and community facilities [50]. Applications for small and large grants were evaluated separately by different panels. For small grants, the local authority formed a panel that included elected councillors, council staff and representatives from the grid company. For large grants, the charitable foundation formed a panel made up of two grid company representatives, two from the foundation and two from the community, with an independent chairperson.

depth semi-structured interviews were employed with the stakeholders involved in the scheme, individuals involved in evaluating the applications and both successful and unsuccessful applicants. The total number of interviews conducted was 13, comprising 6 stakeholder interviews that were conducted in two waves, before and after the evaluation process, and 7 applicants (4 successful, 3 unsuccessful). The transcribed interviews amounted to over 10 h (616 min) of data, as well as just over four hours (249 min) of stakeholder phone meetings and 22 h of meetings observed. All interviews were audio-recorded and fully transcribed. The qualitative database of secondary materials (e.g. stakeholder reports), field notes and interview transcripts was subject to thematic analysis [52], which involves immersion in the dataset and repeated reading and re-readings of verbal materials. An initial sift was undertaken by one of the researchers to code data in relation to each of the research questions, using NVIVO software. Key nodes concerned references to boundaries and space, and references to the map across the different forms of data. A second stage involved this coded material being shared with the second researcher. Separately, each researcher subjected the coded materials under each question to analysis, identifying underlying themes for example concerning procedural and distributional justice, stakeholder expectations etc. A third stage involved this preliminary analysis being shared between the researchers during extensive discussions with the view towards reaching a consensus about the themes underlying quoted materials. A fourth stage involved the writing up of the analysis, a process that involved both researchers. Across this process, the researchers were guided by existing literature on rigour in qualitative data analyses (e.g. [53–55]), in particular ensuring that the findings produced fulfil criteria of credibility, dependability, confirmability and transferability [53].

3.2. Method and sample

4. Analytic findings

A qualitative method was used to reveal discourses of boundary making in participants’ own words, giving voice to actors including stakeholders, successful and unsuccessful applicants. Data was collected using three methods: documentary analysis, participant observation and indepth interviews. Documentation produced by the grid company and other stakeholders was collated, including policy documents from national government and the grid company on community engagement, advertisements about the funds posted by the company in local media, minutes of fund management meetings, media reporting about the funds (both before and after awards were made) and maps showing the community fund boundary areas. Participant observation was employed to identify processes of stakeholder interaction, representing a form of ‘thick description’ to describe social relations [51]. Three kinds of event were observed: weekly phone meetings amongst the stakeholders during the period prior to the launch of the fund, the launch event and the evaluation panel meetings. Weekly phone meetings were audio recorded with the consent of the stakeholders. However, some evaluation panel members refused to give consent for audio recording of the discussions at panel meetings due to the concern that they might receive complaint, even litigation, from unsuccessful applicants following award decisions. The output of this observation was a corpus of field notes that recount both verbal and non-verbal communication amongst those in attendance. In-

Findings are structured in three sections, reflecting a narrative capturing the temporal emergence and evolving practice of boundary making across the case study. First, scoping work and boundary setting is analysed; second, how the boundary was presented to and received by the applicant groups; third, how it was put into practice by the evaluation panels when making funding awards. In each section, discourses underlying boundary making are interpreted and discussed in relation to existing literature. All quotations are anonymised, with numbers used to distinguish each interviewee (e.g. ‘Stakeholder 3,2′ refers to Stakeholder number 3 in the 2nd wave interview).

3.3. Positionality Writings on positionality argue that there is always a relationship between researcher(s) and researched, implicating issues of power and interpretation such that representations do not merely reflect social reality but are constitutive of it [56]. This research was proposed by the second author, discussed with stakeholders involved in the case study, and co-funded by the grid company (see Acknowledgements). Both researchers maintained a self-reflexive position throughout in which they maintained cordial relations with the participating stakeholders, yet retained a critical independence of thought with regard to the aims of the research, methodology, how the findings were interpreted and their implications for policy and practice.

4.1. Stage 1: setting a boundary for the community fund In 2016, the grid company commissioned a charitable foundation (the same organisation that later administered the large-grant awards) to undertake a scoping study on fund distribution. The scoping study recommended that a boundary should be agreed for the purpose of identifying a catchment area within which applications from voluntary and charitable organisations could be sought, but did not indicate where it should be drawn [57]. The report used discourses of impact and proximity to characterise the area within the boundary, discourses that would come to set the tone for the ensuing fund: 169

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Fig. 2. Initial version of the boundary map (image provided by EirGrid).

put the boundary through the middle of two nearby settlements – Mullingar and Kinnegad. For this reason, as well as the recommendation of the scoping report, the stakeholders agreed to extend the boundary to include each settlement in its entirety, culminating in an area consisting of a band of radius 2 km around the central rural parts of the line with bulges around the settlements to the west and east. While aspiring to spatial consistency, the discourse of stakeholders was reflexive in recognising limits to a purely rational approach to boundary setting. This flexibility combined formulaic and subjective modes of boundary setting in order to reach a position that was justified as ‘pragmatic’ and ‘reasonable’, accommodating what has been seen in the literature as mutually distinct spatial perspectives [43].

‘In terms of the geographical area, the recommendation is to agree a boundary. In essence applications should be invited from organisations most impacted by the transmission line including the main towns Mullingar and Kinnegad and community voluntary and charitable organisations located within a certain radius on either side of the transmission line’ ([57]:10) Establishing the specifics of the boundary was one of the first issues to be addressed by the three stakeholders involved in fund administration (the grid company, local council and charitable foundation). A representative of the charitable foundation expressed concern that failure to draw clear boundaries would lead to a ‘chaotic’ situation where they would have to respond to numerous inquiries from community groups far and wide, citing previous experience of administering a fund associated with a wind energy project as an example to avoid:

‘I know … that you can apply logic and reason but there's no scientific rule, there's no formula that can be applied to every scenario.’ (Stakeholder 3,2)

‘The first community benefit fund we did was in the Cavan area and it was chaotic because there was no map [i.e. no boundary was identified] and the whole county applied.’ (Stakeholder 3,2)

It was recognised that the result of such flexibility would be an imperfect assessment of the ‘impacted zone’, including potential applicants that might not even know the line was there. However, the alternative – to draw the line through the middle of the town – was viewed as unacceptable:

Identification of the boundary was informed by the scoping report, local authority boundaries and the environmental impact statement, which used photomontages to scope landscape and visual impacts within 2 km of the line route. As with the scoping study, discourse of impact characterised the language used by stakeholders when defining the area where the fund should be distributed. An ‘impact zone’ referred to the area within which local communities were considered to be directly impacted by the line, with the boundary serving as a ‘reasonable’ device to restrict applications to groups located within the area and to communicate this clearly to stakeholders and wider publics. Initially, the stakeholders aimed to keep the boundary a consistent 2 km radius from the power line, suggesting the objective, Cartesian spatial perspective noted by Drenthen [43]. However, it was quickly realised that this would

‘But you couldn't draw a line through the town, the middle of the town either, so you have to take a pragmatic view.' (Stakeholder 2,1) In rural areas, the legitimacy of the boundary was contested prior to the launch of the fund by a local councillor. Initial negotiations focused on the villages of Ballinabrackey and Castlejordan that were situated outside yet at close proximity to the initial 2 km boundary. Due to close proximity, the stakeholders agreed to ‘bulge’ the line to the south east of the boundary to include these villages (See Fig. 2 with Castlejordan situated just outside of the line). However, requests from the councillor to include two larger villages that lay approximately 6 km beyond the proposed line to the north and south were refused, following discussions that the larger 170

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Fig. 3. Final version of the boundary map (image provided by EirGrid).

settlements of Mullingar and Kinnegad, which were included within the boundary, had services and amenities used by those rural residents. When interviewed, the councillor expressed concern that too flexible an approach to negotiating the boundary would set a dangerous precedent:

reluctance to ‘dilute’ the impact of the fund by spreading it over too large an area, while indicating awareness that the resultant boundary map was a symbolic as well as practical tool, visually illustrating the limited impact of the power line. Once a discourse of impact had become the principle basis for legitimising the boundary area, in contrast to a discourse of ‘spreading the benefits’ as employed in certain wind farm cases [16], one of the stakeholders noted that it was in the interest of the grid company to restrict the boundary to as small an area as possible:

‘I thought the boundary was fair, I would just have liked it to have included two other areas because they are rural parts of…populated rural parts of Westmeath that could have benefited from something. But if you change the rules then you have to change them again, precedents would have been set … I was looking at the map and going, 'Aw, can we not just move it here?' But again, if you move it there, then you've to move it there and move it there…'

'I suppose the message EirGrid were trying to portray as well that this had minimal impact … you draw the line out you are indicating that this has wider implications and bigger impacts so I suppose from the perspective of EirGrid, that the narrower the line is shown perhaps then the public perception of impact is less' (Stakeholder 2,1)

These negotiations revealed tensions between an abstract view of space drawn a set distance around the power line and the social conception of a ‘hinterland’ that represents how locals actually use the area, where they feel a sense of belonging and a connection with people and place [40]. As expressed by one of the fund applicants:

4.2. Stage 2: presenting the boundary to potential applicants in ‘the impacted community’

‘So this is a small village but it represents a huge rural hinterland around it and that hinterland of all that area around Gaybrook and over to Coralstown and back again to Kinnegad, it's all part of our community – people are very strongly affiliated with this village even though they are in that rural hinterland, this is the community that represents them’. (Applicant 3)

Once the stakeholders reached consensus on the boundary, the grid company produced a brochure to present the fund to potential applicants, to explain its purpose and how it would be governed [50]. This document continued the dominant framing of the fund as justified by discourse of proximity and visual impact to define the area where funds would be distributed. A map was included in the brochure to show this geographical area, indicating both the route of the power line and the boundary of the fund (see Fig. 3). The accompanying text emphasised that spatial proximity was fundamental in determining the eligibility of potential applicants:

Although stakeholders acknowledged that residents living inside the boundary would use settlements outside of the boundary for services and amenities, there was a consensus that making frequent adjustments to the boundary would depart from their aspirations for spatial consistency and undermine the boundary’s legitimacy. Instead of responding to these challenges by extending the boundary a consistent 6 km distance around the power line, the stakeholders agreed to restrict the boundary to 2.5 km in the main and to bulge it in certain places. The stakeholders expressed

‘Our focus is to support community led projects near to the new Mullingar-Kinnegad line. For this reason, the main criteria we use when making a grant is the location of the project. On the opposite page, you can see a map of the area where this Community Fund will operate. Your project needs to be in this area to apply to this fund’ ([49,50]:5). 171

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inequitable. Here, the boundary was viewed as an absolute marker of space, with any applicant considered to be outside of that boundary, regardless of their proximity to it, viewed as ineligible:

Interviews with applicants to the fund indicated that community groups regarded the boundaries to be fair, drawing on similar discourse of proximity and impact, even if the methodology employed was not widely understood:

‘There has to be an equity piece there. You know you can't say to somebody half a mile out the map [i.e. an applicant group who are situated half a mile outside of the boundary line] 'oh yeah you're fine to come in' [i.e. you are eligible to apply for award] and then someone else 'no you can't.' (Stakeholder 3,2)

'I remember thinking "I wonder how they figured where to draw the line?" Were they using some scientific formula or something? But I thought it was fair in the sense of what they were trying to do, saying, “Look, this is the area we're affecting, this is the area that we have picked”. (Applicant 5)

By contrast, the council’s view of applicants revealed a spatiality that was both more ‘fuzzy’ and more fluid. In terms of being fuzzy, drawing on a classic paper by Zadeh [58], it represents a view of space that is based on a continuum of eligibility (e.g. far outside, just outside and nearly inside, just inside, far inside) rather than an absolute binary (outside or inside) [58]. From this perspective, an applicant sited ‘just outside’ but very close to the boundary line might still be deemed eligible to apply for an award. In terms of being fluid, this view of space is interested in where the users of a project are located, not merely the applicant group. A mobile view of space recognises permeability across the boundary, with a particular concern for the users of a project who might live inside the boundary but travel to a project located just outside:

Applicants were aware that the boundary included places where people could not see the power line, and therefore were not visually impacted by it. However, inclusion of these places was not considered unfair. Several applicants remarked that they would not contest a less ‘scientific’ or more subjective view of the boundary if it was not in their interest to do so, as it was viewed as limiting competition from other community groups. 'But it wasn't worrying me because I knew I was inside the area anyway because I was in Mullingar so I'll let other people haggle with them over it!' (Applicant 5) Similarly to the stakeholders, applicants employed diverse spatial perspectives when contemplating the ‘impacted area’ of the power line. Here, interviewees moved flexibly from a more group-centered position characterised by self-interest to a more abstract and objective position with less of an immediate stake in where the line was drawn:

‘I'm thinking of one now just looked at it this morning there, it's got to do with a childcare just outside the area, there's maybe lots of children actually going to that centre from within the area but because it's outside the [boundary] it's not going to qualify but so that's where drawing boundaries doesn't capture, you know.’ (Stakeholder 2,2)

'Well I suppose if I'd looked at it objectively I might have thought "well, maybe this is a way of EirGrid limiting the areas that can apply for funding"; but from a not objective point of view, being in a village that was covered by the area, it stood in our favour we thought that at least it meant there wasn’t going to be as much competition in terms of what was going on' (Applicant 3)

At the evaluation meetings, copies of the map were available to the panellists for reference. However, designating the applications to be inside or outside of the boundary was also not straightforward, if there was a discrepancy between the location of an applicant group and the site of their proposed project, or if the catchment area of group membership was part or wholly outside of the boundary. For example, conflict arose at one meeting over an applicant from Meath who was situated within the boundary but applying for equipment to be located outside of the boundary. Despite support from one of the panellists who was a councillor for that area, there was strong opposition from other panellists on the grounds that awarding funds to a project based outside of the area would undermine the legitimacy of the fund, invite external criticism and increase the potential of being sued at a later date, even if the group were based inside. These concerns over external criticism and legal challenge echoes previous research on stakeholder expectations of danger to their proposals arising from communities that could mount a challenge at any time [59]. Once awards had been decided, the stakeholders reviewed the geography of successful applicants and realised that awards were not evenly distributed across the ‘impacted zone’ but concentrated in the two large settlement areas and in one small village, with few awards in rural areas. Subsequent disquiet indicated that this uneven spatial distribution was considered unfair. In particular, the council representative responded with empathy for applicants viewed as ‘the little guys’ from sparsely populated rural places who were considered to be disadvantaged in comparison to ‘the bigger ones’ from urban areas:

While some applicants referred to the fund as a bribe to ‘smooth’ the process by limiting objections to the line, this discourse was combined with an assessment of an overall positive and long-term benefit of the fund arising from the grid company ‘putting back something’ into the area. Here the scale of the fund (360,000 euros) was seen to have significant economic benefit, and favourably compared with other available community grants. 4.3. Stage 3: implementing the boundary in fund decision-making The boundary played a role in fund decision-making in several ways. It influenced the selection of individuals on the evaluation panels, the inclusion or exclusion of both applicants and applications, and how decisions were taken to award funds. Members of both small and large grant panels were made up of representatives from the grid company, the stakeholder organisations managing the grant scheme and members drawn from the local community. The rationale for the latter was explicitly geographical, seeking to bring local knowledge into the evaluation process: ‘They were asked then to nominate we'll say two elected representatives from the local municipal district to participate in the evaluation team so it's, they nominated two of the elected members to [the panel], both elected members have close connections or actually one of them is actually within the geographic area so they have a particular interest in that particular area’. (Stakeholder 2,2)

‘That's the only thing that's disappointing now when I'm looking back. But how would you word it in that way? It's rural areas, it's unusual because it's Mullingar submitting (the thing) but rural areas are the ones that should have benefited from it [the community fund]. And a lot of the places within the two kilometre [radius] there was nobody living there … so of the ones that could apply for it, the bigger ones, they all went for it. I do feel that it could have been – we could have done something just to make sure that the little guys – it's great to give out money to them.’ (Stakeholder 2,2)

Prior to the panel meetings, the local authority and charitable foundation conducted eligibility checks on all applicant groups. As well as checking charitable or voluntary group status, they worked to ensure that the applicants’ spatial location – as reflected by their address for correspondence and local knowledge of their practices – indicated their eligibility for award. Here contrasting spatialities are revealed by the discourse employed by different stakeholders. The charitable foundation emphasised the need for consistency in boundary application, presenting this as a matter of fairness, with any variability regarded as

Despite some uncertainty over how to address this issue, this stakeholder held the view that a fairer outcome of benefit provision would come from deliberately favouring applicants from rural areas. This resonates with literature on geographies of capacity and responsibility, where the absolute 172

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response to local objections to the siting of energy infrastructure, intended to bolster acceptance particularly amongst communities directly impacted by proposals. Given their increasing prevalence across technology sectors, notably wind energy, the legitimacy and fairness of benefit provision are significant issues for the low carbon transition and deserve greater scrutiny. This study aimed to address a dearth of research into the spatiality of community benefit funds, placing a spotlight on where boundaries of exclusion and inclusion are drawn that define the ‘locality’ of a project, where money should be distributed, and how fund boundaries are identified, contested, negotiated and implemented. The study reinforces the general insight from human geography that boundaries are social constructions that require work to become legitimate, yet are rarely as straightforward as they might appear on a map [40]. Policy guidance provides developers with little detail on how to draw the line in boundary making, in part arising from the diversity of contextual issues that vary from place to place across energy projects. These include local topography [29]; proximity of the site to existing institutional boundaries (e.g. parish, county); the distribution and density of settlements in the surrounding area; levels of social cohesion between or within these settlements; and where consultation took place during planning consultations [5,37]. Yet guidance to adopt a case-bycase approach with an emphasis upon stakeholder consultation and consensus seeking [9] overlooks ways that legitimacy and fairness are constructed, arising from the framings employed by the stakeholders involved, and the broader interpretations of the fund amongst potential applicants. Three over-arching conclusions are apparent. First, in previous studies it has been asserted that contrasting spatial perspectives tend to be employed in siting conflicts, leading to tensions between Cartesian views of space reliant upon objective measures of spatial proximity (held by stakeholders) and an ‘ethic of the particular’ manifest by a sense of place uniqueness and feelings of attachment (held by communities) [43]. Our study revealed that both perspectives were employed by stakeholders and community groups, indicating a flexible application of the formulaic and the idiosyncratic, objective and subjective within a more general discourse of pragmatic governance. While the grid company might be expected to adopt a Cartesian perspective, embedded within a technocratic approach to infrastructure siting, the findings illustrate a continued willingness to couple this with sensitivity to context, at least to a degree. By emphasising pragmatism and reasonableness, the stakeholders preserved the legitimacy of the boundary despite widely acknowledged imperfections, such as including those who were recognised to be unaffected, yet continued to employ a discourse of proximity and impact to justify who was considered eligible to apply and how funding decisions were made. Second, the fundamental decision to ground fund-making in discourse of (visual) impact can be seen to have certain consequences. While it offers stakeholders the opportunity to address inequities in infrastructure siting [19], it also can be said to present a general imperative to restrict the boundaries of the ‘impacted area’ to as narrow an extent as possible in order to demonstrate the limited impact of the proposals. As noted in previous research, alternative discourses - including ‘spreading the benefit’ - have been employed by policy makers and developers in other contexts [16,20]. If a discourse of spreading the benefit had been employed in this case, it may have fostered the drawing of a more spatially extensive boundary line that included more distant settlements and hinterlands used by residents to access amenities and services, as well as family and friends. Future research can examine whether the adoption by developers of an ‘all-embracing’ understanding of community that spreads benefit more widely [16] leads to stronger perceptions amongst communities of project impacts, positive or negative, as reflected by more spatially extensive boundaries. Third, the findings indicate the importance of how the fund is represented more generally, and what it is compared or ‘anchored’ with. In the case of community wind farms, favourable comparison with a lack of consultation in many company-led schemes led to a tolerance of acknowledged imperfections in drawing the boundary around who was able to participate in decision-making [5]. In this case, the size of the available fund was favourably compared with the paucity of resources available to

implementation of boundaries based on spatial proximity, while at first glance appearing to be equitable and fair for all, actually serves to maintain or reinforce existing asymmetries of capability and capacity [40]. The aspiration for equitable distribution of fund awards across the ‘impacted zone’ was interpreted by the stakeholders as a dilemma concerning whether to make awards based on merit or based on geographical distribution. The need for an approach described as a ‘balancing act’ that combines merit and geography represents an additional way in which fund governance worked flexibly to combine consistency with variability [5]. 'I mean, obviously on the quality side I don't think we can fund things for the sake of it if the quality isn't there, equally though it is difficult if one area, for whatever reason, has a number of applications and that area geographically is quite limited. So it is a bit of a balancing act.' (Stakeholder 1,2) ‘if you took a literal interpretation of applications you might say we would give them to the most meritorious, but if there are, there's another criteria which is geography. If you have a Mullingar (…) route, and you put all of it in Mullingar, it's probably not a good outcome.’ (Stakeholder 3,2) A further manifestation of stakeholder concern about the spatial distribution of funding awards was the relative emphasis placed upon one small part of the ‘impacted zone’ that crossed into a different municipal area, if only for 2 km of the 24 km line. Unlike other rural parts of the impacted area, and in part arising from knowledge of a separate and controversial power line proposed for that county, it was considered unacceptable by the grid company not to distribute funds to this area. However, this was made problematic due to the limited number of local applications – none for large grants and only 3 of 68 small grant applications. At the start of the small grant evaluation meeting, the rationale for the boundary line was explained by a representative of the grid company, paying particular attention to the 2 km section of the line within County Meath. However, no awards were made to Meath, arising from the applications being deemed ineligible or lacking the quality necessary to pass the evaluation criteria. As a result, a special arrangement was sought where a pro-rata calculation of funds for 2 km of the line length (30,000 euros) was made available, to be distributed afterwards by the local council. While this was viewed as a potentially less rigorous decision-making process, it was also viewed as an imperative: ‘We have committed to spending the funds, we have to spend the funds and given that it's only such a small amount, if we were spending two hundred thousand in Meath and we'd only spent fifty, I think we'd have to go for a second round of application and evaluations. ‘(Stakeholder 1,2) Ultimately, the absence of challenge from the community on where to draw the boundary was interpreted as reinforcing the legitimacy of stakeholder decisions: ‘We'd no grumblings from applicants.’ (Stakeholder 3,2) This alertness to ‘grumblings’ reveals that, even with little public protest evident in this case, a defensive positionality resonant of NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard) was present that regarded publics as a potential danger [59], with the stakeholders mindful that the legitimacy of their projects and fund governance may be contested at any time, with consequent risks of reputational damage. A representative of the grid company associated the power line with wind farm objectors in this way: ‘I think there's always a fear of opposition, of people who are opposed to transmission grid development, wind development, that they would cast negative aspersions on the rationale for the fund and quite publicly express that opinion.’ (Stakeholder 1,2) 5. Discussion Community benefit provision has emerged as a policy and industry 173

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community groups in a time of austerity in the community sector in rural Ireland. Even when the fund was seen as a bribe to ‘smooth’ over potential objections, and even if the boundary line was viewed as an imperfect, although necessary, requirement for fund governance, the overall view about ‘giving something back’ to the area was chiefly positive. These findings have several implications for practice. First, boundary setting, however imperfect, remains of practical utility as an instrument of fund governance. While boundary setting seems necessary to outline the catchment area from which applications are sought, the discourse(s) used to justify it offers more flexibility than the emphasis upon the ‘impacted area’ highlighted in this case. As Rudolph et al. [16] make clear, multiple definitions of community, impact and benefit are available to development companies. In particular, ‘spreading the benefit’ offers a positive message that can enable wider boundaries to be drawn that are more reflective of how social relations are actually practiced by comparison to the consistent application of linear measures around an ‘impacted community’. Even if a discourse of ‘impact’ is adopted, additional methods can be employed to define the affected community or area that include both objective and subjective data. These include measures of population density, concentrations of socio-economic disadvantage as well as local residents’ views about where their community lies and what its boundaries are. Combining these methods would enable more robust boundary making in future cases, for example leading to greater appreciation of ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ impacts that may be felt some distance from the site [11]. By fostering a more active role for communities in the ‘co-production’ [60] of fund boundaries as well as broader fund governance, it could reflect a different balance of power between stakeholders and communities (Kerr et al., 2017) than was reflected in this particular case where decisions about how much funding, where it was allocated, to whom and for what purpose, were all taken by the stakeholders. Future research can examine whether employing more collaborative approches to boundary setting increase the perceived legitimacy of benefit governance, build capacity and foster relations of trust between developer and communities, outcomes that are not trivial in more controversial contexts of development than studied here. Second, any boundary line will produce challenges in judging the ‘locality’ of an applicant or an application. Initial assessment of the eligibility of the applications could therefore employ the following criteria: Where is the applicant group based? Where will the project be based? Where are the majority of the users of the project based? Application forms could be structured to produce this information and answers to these broader questions could determine applicant eligibility in conjunction with the map. When applications have ‘fuzzy’ boundaries [58] that mix ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ across these criteria (e.g. when the project straddles a boundary line; when users come from both inside and outside of the designated area), applications could be favoured where a majority of these answers are ‘inside’ and the rationale for a decision on eligibility set out transparently. Future research can examine the prevalence of these different spatial perspectives amongst stakeholders, including whether, as in this case, the application of a ‘fuzzy’ spatiality in funding awards was strongly objected to as posing a risk of legal challenge from unsuccessful applicants. In addition, future studies could investigate the prevalence of these perspectives amongst local residents, how they relate to the perceived legitimacy and fairness of the community, and to community acceptance of the project. Third, to address concerns about the spatial concentration of benefit fund allocation, future evaluation processes could have several stages. First, applicant eligibility could be determined, including the assessment of ‘locality’. Then, evaluation could begin with assessment of the merit of each application to produce two outcomes: first, a rank order of eligible applications from strongest to weakest; second, an acceptability threshold, i.e. a level above which all applicants are considered ‘good enough’ in principle to fund on merit. A second stage of evaluation could then focus on all applications above the acceptability threshold and take any other relevant considerations into account, for example spatial distribution and socio-economic disadvantage. Fourth, employing multiple rounds of award offers the possibility to

transcend apparently irreconcilable dilemmas in the application of different values - whether to award funds to the ‘best’ applications (the meritocratic principle) or to spread funds as widely as possible across the impacted area (the ‘casting the net’ principle, which produces only winners from the process); whether to restrict fund awards to a narrowly defined ‘zone of visual impact’ or to expand awards to ‘spread the benefit’ by including spatial settlements further distant yet utilised by residents in sparsely populated areas. Combining these approaches within a broader and longer-term benefit strategy can involve award rounds each with different goals and criteria. In turn, this can better acknowledge geographies of capacity and responsibility in benefit provision [40], where tangible efforts are made to avoid reproducing existing asymmetries of capability through spatial concentrations of fund award. Future research can draw on these findings to examine how boundaries are constructed in energy projects with greater controversy, notably power lines of higher voltage and wind farms. Large scale energy projects lead to the distribution of large scale benefit funds, and may necessitate multiple rounds of award and procedures of decision-making. In more controversial cases, issues of trust, legitimacy and fairness are likely to be paramount in determining community perceptions of fund proposals and governance and require similar in-depth research involving multiple methods of data collection and analysis. As noted by Walker [40], in such cases both the evidence used to diagnose impact, and the ways in which this evidence is interpreted, is likely to be the subject of challenge, with the result that differences and disagreements are emphasised as much as negotiation, compromise and consensus-seeking. It is an open question how generalisable the findings from this linear case study are to more spatially clustered forms of renewable energy infrastructure such as wind farms. However, strong similarity is suggested by the ways that the stakeholders involved drew on wind farm comparisons when considering lessons learnt from past mistakes in boundary setting or when expressing their expectations of community objections. The fact that a similar rationale for benefit provision – addressing local impacts – was used in this case and is highlighted in wind farm research also suggests some similarity [16,20]. Anecdotal evidence indicates that many wind farm developers adopt a Cartesian perspective on space when identifying boundaries of benefit provision, drawing a circle around a given project with a specific radius in order to define the ‘impacted area’ or ‘host community’. For example, Good Energy offer a local energy tariff to residents living with 2 km of their wind farm in Delabole, Cornwall [61]. SSE Airtricity offer a community fund to any community within a radius of twelve miles of their wind farms [62]. Such measures may also bisect local settlements, as was the case here; imperfectly represent ‘upstream’ impacts [11] or the ‘hinterland’ of local communities. The fact that boundary practices clearly vary across wind energy companies and forms of benefit provision suggests that future research is required to catalogue these differences in greater detail, and to interrogate the assumptions about space, community and impact that underlie them. 6. Conclusion This study has illuminated ways that boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are drawn that define the ‘locality’ of an energy project, and how such boundaries are identified, negotiated, contested and implemented. Discourses of impact and proximity were predominant, within a pragmatic approach that was largely accepted by community groups even if the outcome was a boundary line widely acknowledged to be imperfect. Community groups recognised the fund both as an instrumental tool to secure their acceptance and a means to address impact and share benefit, as long as it served their particular interests. Recommendations are made to ensure that future benefit provision is sensitive to context, legimate and fair, acting as a means to address inequities of impact in the siting of large-scale energy infractructure where burdens mainly fall upon nearby communities [19,23]. By emphasising ways that justice and geography matter together [39], researchers across the social sciences can ensure that boundary making in benefit provision is subject to scrutiny, avoiding a lack of fairness 174

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in decision-making procedures and the distribution of outcomes, in order to produce a just transition to a low carbon future [63].

[29]

Appendix A. Supplementary data

[30]

Supplementary material related to this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2019.04.002.

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