Communities ready for takeoff

Abstract

Although much of the social science literature supports the importance of community assets for success in many policy areas, these assets are often overlooked when selecting communities for new infrastructure facilities. Extensive collaboration is crucial for the success of environmental and economic projects, yet it often is not adequately addressed when making siting decisions for new projects. This article develops a social asset framework that includes social, creative, and human capital to inform site-selection decisions. This framework is applied to the Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance project to assess community suitability for biofuel-related developments. This framework is the first to take all necessary community assets into account, providing insight into successful site selection beyond current models. The framework not only serves as a model for future biorefinery projects but also guides tasks that depend on informed location selection for success.

Searching for Culture in “Cultural Capital”: The Case for a Mixed Methods Approach to Production Facility Siting

“…DSTs have been frequently used for facility siting, with much literature in biofuels applying various models to aid biorefinery site selection (see Stewart and Lambert 2011;Zhang et al, 2011;Perimenis et al, 2011;Martinkus et al, 2017;Martinkus et al, 2018;Ghose et al, 2019). A noted issue in the biofuel site selection literature is how to effectively combine social, economic, and environmental criteria in DSTs as many social criteria are qualitative in nature and thus difficult to adapt to quantitative models (Martinkus et al, 2014;Martinkus et al, 2017;Rijkhoff et al, 2017;Martinkus et al, 2019). Noting several limitations in how social criteria were initially incorporated in past studies, Rijkhoff et al (2017) used Emery and Flora's Community Capitals Framework (CCF) to identify community assets necessary for successful development and implementation of complex projects and developed the Community Assets and Attributes Model (CAAM).…”

“…A noted issue in the biofuel site selection literature is how to effectively combine social, economic, and environmental criteria in DSTs as many social criteria are qualitative in nature and thus difficult to adapt to quantitative models (Martinkus et al, 2014;Martinkus et al, 2017;Rijkhoff et al, 2017;Martinkus et al, 2019). Noting several limitations in how social criteria were initially incorporated in past studies, Rijkhoff et al (2017) used Emery and Flora's Community Capitals Framework (CCF) to identify community assets necessary for successful development and implementation of complex projects and developed the Community Assets and Attributes Model (CAAM). The CAAM quantified three social assets-social, cultural, and human capitals-to include in U.S.based decision support tools.…”

“…The CAAM quantified three social assets-social, cultural, and human capitals-to include in U.S.based decision support tools. The authors argued that the CAAM model should be incorporated as criteria in decision support tools for aviation biofuel facility-siting or risk the economic sustainability of their projects but left the weighting of criteria to tool developers (Rijkhoff et al, 2017). The CAAM model was further refined by Mueller et al (2020) through the addition of political capital and exploratory factor analysis to update the indicators used for each of the capitals and to prevent overlap between capital measurements.…”

“…Nonetheless, recent attempts to include more robust quantitative indicators of the often ignored or limited analysis of social criteria is an important development in both supply chain analysis and broader biofuel sustainability literatures. In particular, the CAAM was developed in the United States to incorporate social criteria more fully in DSTs through the development of county-level capital scores to compare performance in social, capital, political, and human capitals (see Martinkus et al, 2017;Rijkhoff et al, 2017;Mueller et al, 2020;Rijkhoff et al, 2021). This model has been updated and refined over time (adding more capitals and refining indicators) but has only been validated in one study examining biorefineries and similar projects in the Pacific Northwest (see Mueller et al, 2020).…”

Incorporating Social System Dynamics in the Columbia River Basin: Food-Energy-Water Resilience and Sustainability Modeling in the Yakima River Basin

“…While livelihoods and well-being are often conceptualized as outcomes of the FEW nexus, CCF explicitly frames capitals as both drivers and outcomes. For example, Schirmer et al (2015) operationalize the capitals and interpret the capitals as determinants of human well-being, while Rijkhoff et al (2017) and Martinkus et al (2017) utilize the CCF to inform decisions about site selection for bio-fuel development. Donoghue and Sturtevant (2007) describe how various projects have used community capitals indicators to estimate community capacity and resilience in towns and cities of the western United States (for related work see Haynes et al, 1996;Harris et al, 2000).…”