The Danish Model for Citizen Engagement in the Renewable Energy Transition (DART)

The project with the full title 'The Danish Model for Citizen Engagement in the Renewable Energy Transition' (DART) is co-financed by the Innovation Fund's Grand Solutions program with DKK 7.5 million.

To avoid climate change, the Danish Government has decided to quadruple the production of renewable energy by 2030. While a vast majority of the Danish population support the renewable energy transition, municipalities and developers still experience substantial skepticism and widespread concern from local citizens and interest groups when wind turbines, solar parks and PtX plants are to be implemented in local sites and communities.

While these challenges have spurred industry and policy makers to perceive citizens living close to renewable energy parks as barriers that risk slowing down the green transition, the DART project takes an alternative approach, which proposes that protesters, by interfering with industrial and political interests, engage in a broader debate about societal change and enact new forms of participatory politics. Thus, the project perceives local resistance not as anti-government or anti-industry, but as venue for citizens to engage in public debates and perform democratic citizenship. With this approach, the purpose is to design a model for engaging citizens and interest groups in the establishment and operation of renewable energy parks. The project is an extension of an already initiated project in the national MissionGreenFuel partnership on the involvement of local communities in the energy field.

The project runs from 2023 to 2026 and is an extension of an already initiated project in the national MissionGreenFuel partnership on the involvement of local communities in the energy field.

External members:

Name	Title		E-mail
Simon Westergaard Lex	Associate Professor, Ph.D.		simon.lex@anthro.ku.dk
Lars Tønder	Professor MSO		lt@ifs.ku.dk