Local matters: Political opportunities, spatial scale, and support for green jobs policies

Hess, David J.; Quan, Daniel C.; Skaggs, Rachel; Sudibjo, Magdalena N.

doi:10.1016/j.eist.2017.03.003

Cited by 20 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Green job creation is then often considered essential to achieve a "green economy"an economy that aims at reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities. [1][2][3][4][5] The increasing popularity of green jobs since the early 2000s has been closely followed in international scholarship. This scholarship is often concerned with one of two topics: the extent to which green jobs are supported and sought as part of climate protection ambitions rather than by economic development ambitions only; and, the factors that affect the creation and maintenance of green jobs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the knowledge economy advance the green economy? An evaluation of green jobs in the 100 largest metropolitan regions in the United States

Lee

Heijden

2018

Energy & Environment

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Institutions of higher education are significant economic engines and innovative places in local economies: they directly employ large numbers of people, often with well-paying jobs; they are magnets for businesses that service the student population; they educate and often assist students in securing first jobs; and they partner with local organizations and businesses to provide students with hands-on experiences while “giving-back” to the community. In this article, we examine the impact that institutions of higher education have as an engine of growth for the green economy and, specifically, assess their impact on the development of green jobs. Green jobs have been touted as an important strategy to simultaneously address both the economic downturn and environmental degradation. This article empirically assesses the impact that the knowledge economy has on the presence of green jobs in the 100 largest metropolitan regions in the United States. Our findings suggest that enhanced higher education and sustainability-oriented departments and centers have a positive impact on green job development in urban regions.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the knowledge economy advance the green economy? An evaluation of green jobs in the 100 largest metropolitan regions in the United States

Lee

Heijden

2018

Energy & Environment

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“…These factors highlight that communities respond to new technologies in complex ways that belie perceptions of pro-and anti-innovation communities (NIMBYism). Batel and Devine-Wright [18] and Hess et al [19] further posited that redressing the incoherence between national and local trends will require examining how actors independently and collectively interact and make decisions at scales ranging from individual communities to national action.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

SolarView: Georgia Solar Adoption in Context

Tidwell

Nelson

et al. 2018

Data

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The local-national gap is a problem currently plaguing the adoption of emerging technologies targeted at resolving energy transition issues that are characterized by disparities in the adoption of innovations and policies on a local level in response to national policy implementation. These disparities reflect a complex system of technical, economic, social, political, and ecological factors linked to the perceptions held by communities and how they see energy development and national/global policy goals. This dataset is an attempt to bridge the local-national gap regarding solar PV adoption in the State of Georgia (U.S.) by aggregating variables from seven different publicly-available sources. The objective of this activity was to design a resource that would help researchers interested in the context underlying solar adoption on the local scale of governance (e.g., the county level). The SolarView database includes information necessary for informing policy-making activities such as solar installation information, a historical county zip code directory, county-level census data, housing value indexes, renewable energy incentive totals, PV rooftop suitability percentages, and utility rates. As this is a database from multiple sources, incomplete data entries are noted.

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“…A burgeoning area of research, studies of this 'local-national gap', seek to establish a space for national policy analyses and studies of individual motivations with community-level dynamics. Social, political, community, and market acceptance all play a role in the emergence of specific energy technologies in communities, as well as how they are deployed and to what ends [14][15][16]. Rather than focusing on how local opposition (or support) for an energy technology, studies of the local-national gap emphasize understanding how individual and community decision-making processes reflect the larger networks of norms and values that shape their daily lives.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Surveying the Solar Power Gap: Assessing the Spatial Distribution of Emerging Photovoltaic Solar Adoption in the State of Georgia, U.S.A.

Tidwell

Nelson

2018

Sustainability

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Despite a global push in the development and implementation of widespread alternative energy use, significant disparities exist across given nation-states. These disparities reflect both technical and economic factors, as well as the social, political, and ecological gaps between how communities see energy development and national/global policy goals. Known as the “local-national gap”, many nations struggle with fostering meaningful conversations about the role of alternative energy technologies within communities. Mitigation of this problem first requires understanding the distribution of existing alternative energy technologies at the local level of policymaking. To address the limitation of existing adoption trend analysis at the scale of local governance (e.g., county governments), this paper demonstrates a novel method for contextualizing solar technology adoption by using the State of Georgia in the United States as an exemplar. Leveraging existing work on the Gini Coefficient as a metric for measuring energy inequity, we argue these tools can be applied to analyze where gaps exist in ongoing solar adoption trends. As we demonstrate, communities that adopt solar tend to be concentrated in a few counties, indicating existing conversations are limited to a circumscribed set of social networks. This information and the model we demonstrate can enable focused qualitative analyses of existing solar trends, not only among high-adoption areas but within communities where little to no adoption has occurred.

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Local matters: Political opportunities, spatial scale, and support for green jobs policies

Cited by 20 publications

References 34 publications

Does the knowledge economy advance the green economy? An evaluation of green jobs in the 100 largest metropolitan regions in the United States

Does the knowledge economy advance the green economy? An evaluation of green jobs in the 100 largest metropolitan regions in the United States

SolarView: Georgia Solar Adoption in Context

Surveying the Solar Power Gap: Assessing the Spatial Distribution of Emerging Photovoltaic Solar Adoption in the State of Georgia, U.S.A.

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