Community Support of Ethanol Plants: Does Local Ownership Matter?*

Abstract

Drawing on data from six communities in Kansas and Iowa, we explore the factors that are related to community members' current levels of overall support for local ethanol plants. What are residents' opinions about the benefits and drawbacks of local ownership of ethanol plants? How does that awareness lead to overall support of plants? Our interest is to understand how perceptions of the negative effects of the plant on the local infrastructure and environment and positive effects on the local economy influence the relationship between local versus absentee ownership and people's overall support of the plant. We use chi‐square to test whether respondents' overall support is associated with the ownership of the plant (local versus absentee), and cumulative logit mixed‐effects models to explore the factors that explain the association between ownership and overall support. Findings suggest that community members are less likely to show high support for locally owned plants, and that the greater perceived negative effects of locally owned plants on the local infrastructure and environment helps explain residents' lower support of locally owned ethanol plants in their communities. We posit several explanations for why this might be the case.

Predictors of Pro-Environmental Behavior in Rural American Communities

“…The project “Examining the Community Impacts of Ethanol Production” utilized a mixed-methods approach that included a community survey, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and media content analysis in six communities in Kansas and Iowa. Analysis of interview data, media content analysis, and of other aspects of the project is reported on in additional articles (Bain, Prokos, & Liu, 2012; Bain & Selfa, 2013; Selfa, 2010; Selfa, Kulcsár, Bain, Goe, & Middendorf, 2011). A random sample of households from each case study community was selected for the community survey.…”

Getting to Yes or Bailing on No: The Site Selection Process of Ethanol Plants in Wisconsin

“…“Local embeddedness” refers to the connections the original initiators have to the plant's host community—these connections could be social, economic, or political (see Bain ). As we discuss below, this local embeddedness can lead to conflicts with the host community (Bain, Prokos, and Liu ; Selfa et al. ) and is not always a positive business attribute as some of the literature on local ownership suggests (see Winter ).…”

Fuel, feed and the corporate restructuring of the food regime

“…Some scholars offer detailed examinations of how the broad processes of capital accumulation, outlined so well by McMichael, play out in terms of regressive redistribution within regions (Dauvergne and Neville 2009, Richardson 2010, while others focus on the redistributional shifts, land-use changes and struggles around agrofuel development at the national level (Carolan 2009, Novo et al 2010, Wilkinson and Herrera 2010, Holleman 2012, MintzHabib 2013. Crucially, there are also a number of fine-grained analyses of the differentiated ways in which agrofuels development impact, and are mediated by, local agrarian class structures and ethnic divisions (Gillon 2010, Vermeulen and Cotula 2010, Borras et al 2011, McCarthy et al 2011, Bain et al 2012, Bain and Selfa 2013, Montefrio and Sonnefield 2013. And finally, some scholars have extended agrarian political economy's focus on conflict and social differentiation to the domain of gender relations, by examining the variegated effects that expanding agrofuels production have had on men and women (Rometsch 2012, Julia andWhite 2013).…”