What makes policy for wind- and solar energy on land acceptable? An assessment of perceived policy legitimacy

Abstract Large-scale changes in society are required to achieve policy goals for a transition to a sustainable energy system. Understanding how citizens perceive regional plans for the placement of wind and solar can help policymakers design their policy. Our aim is to examine the perceived legitimacy of the Dutch Regional Energy Strategies (RES), which are regional policy processes to place wind turbines and solar parks. First, we identified important factors that may affect the perceived legitimacy of RES plans, and we tested the effects of the factors in a vignette study among Dutch citizens ( n = 2733). We found that Dutch Citizens, on average, perceive the Dutch RES policy to be closer to legitimate than to illegitimate. We also found that the policy design of concrete plans to implement wind farms or large-scale solar PV installations has a large impact on perceived legitimacy. If policymakers find the perceived legitimacy of local sustainable energy generation to be important, they should consider in their policy design a broad set of legitimacy criteria. This study also shows that our approach is feasible for (ex-ante) policy evaluations, taking into account a broad set of evaluation criteria.