Theme Panel: The Comparative Politics of Clean-Energy Siting

September 8, 2025 APSA Annual Meeting, Theme Panels Comments Off on Theme Panel: The Comparative Politics of Clean-Energy Siting

Co-sponsored by Division 38: Political Communication

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

  • (Chair) Paasha Mahdavi, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • (Discussant) Amanda Kennard, Stanford University

Session Description:
Climate change is one of the most pressing crises that humanity faces, and mitigating the problem requires the rapid deployment of new low-carbon energy technologies. Clean and renewable energy deployment is already generating countless political conflicts at the local level around the world, and the outcomes of these local conflicts will shape the future of the energy transition. This panel seeks to better understand the local politics around clean-energy siting, by examining institutional and behavioral drivers and consequences of clean-energy siting decisions in diverse geographic contexts.

The first two papers examine the local politics of clean energy facility siting in the United States, which is one of the world’s largest historical emitters of greenhouse gases. In 2022, the US finally enacted landmark federal laws—the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act—which together contain hundreds of billions of dollars in investments to promote a transition to a cleaner energy system. These investments support several broad categories of projects, including electricity generation and clean-energy manufacturing. These two types of project generate distinct distributions of costs and benefits and, consequently, give rise to distinct political conflicts. Accordingly, two papers on our panel examine the local politics that arise in the implementation of federal programs that support electricity generation and manufacturing facilities. The first paper asks how incentives for solar electricity generation facilities are distributed among different segments of the population, whether and how misaligned incentives are a source of conflict, and how the lack of transparency or consistently regulated siting processes can impede coordination around the creation of broad and equitable community benefits. The second paper focuses on political communication and public reactions to clean-energy manufacturing facilities in a diverse set of political and economic contexts. The paper asks whether federal investments are generating expansionary momentum or backlash. Together, these two studies speak to the durability of the incentive-based approach to promoting clean energy in the United States.

The third and fourth paper shift the focus from the local consequences of energy facilities to the drivers of siting decisions. The third paper uses Denmark as a setting to examine the political determinants of clean-electricity facility siting within the decentralized institutional structure prevalent in many countries including but not limited to the United States and much of Europe. Building on the premise that local politicians are responsive to the preferences of their own electorate, this article develops and tests a new theoretical model of how local governments site energy developments. The authors argue that energy siting decentralization may hurt both efficiency and the perceived democratic legitimacy of the transition to a zero carbon economy.

Conversely, the fourth paper examines the political determinants of energy infrastructure siting in the top-down decision-making structure common in many parts of the Global South, particularly when projects are supported by external donors. The paper uses sub-Saharan Africa as a setting within which to examine the proportion of fossil and renewable energy infrastructure that can be explained by political targeting compared with geographic endowments. Initial results indicate that, in countries where fossil fuel is disproportionately politically targeted compared to other aid projects, renewable energy projects are also disproportionately likely to be politically allocated. The study implies that international efforts to support the green energy transition likely entrench local elites and raise questions about the efficacy of Just Energy Transition Partnerships.