Resource regimes and the success of local renewable energy projects

While national governments and parliaments adopt policies to speed up the development of renewable energies, the local implementation of renewable energy projects often faces economic, ecological, and social challenges. The existing literature primarily focuses on conditions which foster local acceptance and policy integration to explain the (non-)realization of renewable energy projects. In contrast, property rights have not yet been explicitly considered as conditions. This study applies the institutional resource regime approach to investigate the joint impact of property rights and public policies on the local implementation of renewable energy projects. Drawing on a comparison of twelve cases which encompass solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal energy projects in three countries, the results show the importance of property rights within the project area, and the insufficiency of public policies alone to facilitate successful renewable energy projects. More specifically, public landownership and revenue sharing increase the chances of project success, as this entails the involvement of local democratic institutions and supports the resilience of project promotors against political contestation.