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Measuring societal impacts of research is a challenging task in research evaluation. In this article, we describe several of these challenges with regard to causal inference, time lag, side-effects, operationalization, comparability between disciplines, and availability of required data. We show how different approaches deal with these challenges in evaluation practice and focus on a particular approach named “practice impact” in more detail. This approach includes an improved documentation and is sought to have positive effects on innovation processes and synergies with research and research funding. Moreover, dialogue with different user groups is fostered and serves to make evaluation beyond scientific impact desired, feasible, and efficient.
Governments and energy operators are frequently confronted with opposition to the construction of new energy infrastructure and a lack of public support. This is also true for the planning of new high-voltage overhead transmission lines. In this context, a question of interest for policy makers and energy operators is how residents react when they realize that they may be affected by future transmission lines in close proximity to their homes. This study provides evidence of how local residents respond to the announcement of transmission line corridor route alternatives (TLCRAs). By means of a natural experiment, it estimates the causal effects of spatial proximity to proposed TLCRAs during the planning phase of an energy project. The results reveal that proximity significantly enhanced residents’ risk perceptions with respect to landscape deterioration, property/house value reduction, and damages to human health. We also found that increasing proximity decreased residents’ support for grid expansion and increased the likelihood of performing information seeking behavior and becoming a member of a local citizens’ initiative. Finally, our findings suggest that the relationship between spatial proximity and the dependent variables are appropriately modeled by a distance decay function, showing that effects attenuate with increasing distance from the infrastructure site.
Governments and energy operators are often confronted with local residents’ protest against the construction of new high-voltage overhead transmission lines, negative risk expectations, and a lack of public support. A frequently discussed strategy for dealing with these issues is to build underground cables instead of overhead lines. So far, however, there is not much empirical evidence of whether substituting overhead lines by underground cables actually reduces protest or affects public risk expectations and attitudes. This study contributes to filling this gap by comparing residents’ risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior observed at two grid expansion sites in Germany by means of a quasi-experiment. At the time when the data were collected, both grid expansion projects–an overhead line project in Lower Saxony and an underground cable project in Hesse–were at the same stage of the legally defined planning and approval procedure. After controlling for various potential confounders, we obtained results revealing that there are no differences in the risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior of residents interviewed at the two project sites, or only marginal ones. Hence, our findings do not support the assumption that building underground cables necessarily improves the situation with regard to risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior.
Die Planung neuer Hochspannungsleitungen, die für das Gelingen der Energiewende essentiell sind, wird häufig von Bürgerprotesten und einer mangelnden Akzeptanz innerhalb der lokalen Wohnbevölkerung begleitet. Dies kann zu konfliktären Planungs- und Genehmigungsverfah-ren, Verzögerungen und Gerichtsverfahren führen. Eine intensiv diskutierte energiepolitische Maßnahme zur Erhöhung der Akzeptanz besteht in der Substitution von Freileitungen durch Erdkabel, da hierdurch landschaftliche Beeinträchtigungen reduziert und somit Einflüsse einer wichtigen Ursache mangelnder Akzeptanz abgeschwächt werden könnten.
Die intendierten Wirkungen der Erdverkabelung wurden bislang nicht hinreichend evaluiert, weshalb am Institut für Gesetzesfolgenabschätzung und Evaluation eine erste quasi-experimentelle Untersuchung zur Identifikation potenzieller Wirkungen durchgeführt wurde. Der Vortrag widmet sich insbesondere dem methodischen Aufbau der Studie und gibt Einbli-cke, wie die Wirksamkeit politischer Infrastrukturmaßnahmen anhand von großangelegten Quasi-Experimenten überprüft werden kann. Zur Wirkungsprüfung wurden die Reaktionen (z.B. Protestverhalten, Einstellungen, erwartete Risiken) der lokalen Wohnbevölkerung zweier Regionen miteinander verglichen. In beiden Regionen befinden sich Netzausbauprojekte im gesetzlich geregelten Planungsverfahren. In einer der Regionen ist ein Freileitungsprojekt ge-plant, in der anderen ein Erdkabelprojekt.
Zur Gewährleistung der Validität der Wirkungsschätzungen wurden Maßnahmen ergriffen, die die Vergleichbarkeit der beiden Fallregionen sicherstellen sollten. So erfolgte die Datener-hebung zu einem Zeitpunkt, zu dem sich die Projekte in der gleichen Phase des Planungsver-fahrens befanden. Zudem wurden Daten zu denselben Variablen erhoben, es kam das gleiche Stichprobenauswahlverfahren zum Einsatz und es wurde die gleiche Befragungsmethodik verwendet. Darüber hinaus wurde ein Propensity Score basiertes Gewichtungsverfahren ge-nutzt, um verzerrende Einflüsse beobachteter Drittvariablen auszuschließen. Die Studie ver-fügte über eine hohe statistische Power, da insgesamt mehr als 2.600 zufällig ausgewählte Per-sonen in unmittelbarer Nähe zu den vorgeschlagenen Trassenalternativen befragt wurden. Aufgrund des Fallcharakters der Projektregionen war die Studie allerdings auch mit methodi-schen Limitationen konfrontiert, die die Reichweite der Ergebnisse einschränken und die im Vortrag ebenfalls vorgestellt und diskutiert werden.
Purpose – Governments and energy operators are often confronted with opposition to the construction of new high-voltage transmission lines. Besides other factors, a potential determinant of public opposition and acceptance that has gained increasing attention is the fairness of the planning and approval procedure as perceived by the citizens. The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a scale for measuring perceived procedural fairness (PPF).
Design/methodology/approach – The authors developed the ten-item “perceived procedural fairness scale (PPFS)” and assessed its quality by means of item response theory. By using a Rasch rating scale model, the authors tested whether the instrument met the requirements of this kind of measurement model. For conducting their research, the authors used data from two telephone surveys in Germany that were collected in areas that are affected by grid expansion.
Findings – The findings suggest that the scale can be considered a reliable and internal valid instrument for measuring citizens’ PPF.
Originality/value – At the moment, there is no psychometrically rigorously evaluated scale available for measuring PPF in the context of power grid expansion. Therefore, the study contributes to filling this gap and provides a valuable tool for researchers and practitioners concerned with further investigating citizens’ PPF and its relationships with other relevant constructs in the field.
Keywords - Policy, Procedural fairness, Procedural justice, Energy infrastructure, Power grid expansion, Item response theory, Rasch modelling
Policymakers and transmission system operators frequently face problems when planning and constructing new high-voltage transmission lines because of opposition among local residents. Protest varies due to attributes of the transmission lines (e.g., length and size), site-specific characteristics, and the extent of consternation among local residents. The most controversially discussed grid expansion project in Germany is the SuedLink, which has been causing severe protest among groups of local residents. One driver of public opposition is the existence of local citizens’ initiatives. These groups play an important role, for example by influencing the public debate, taking legal action, or mobilizing their members and other citizens into protest. In doing so, they can cause delays due to confrontational planning and approval procedures. In order to deal with these risks, decision-makers need to know about the actual effects of citizens’ initiatives on public protest. So far, however, empirical research on these effects has been sparse. This study contributes to filling this gap by considering one specific aspect of the influence of citizens’ initiatives. It isolates the causal effects of citizens’ initiative membership on members’ individual protest behavior in the context of the SuedLink. Controlling for various potential confounders, our results clearly indicate that the probability of performing protest behavior and the intensity of protest are substantially larger for members of citizens’ initiatives than for non-members.
Freedom of information acts (FOIA) aim to improve the public’s opportunities to access official information from public authorities and hence to increase the level of transparency. Thus, it is important to know whether and to what degree the effects intended by establishing FOIAs are achieved and how their implementation could be improved. Hence, this article presents the evaluation of the Hamburg Transparency Law (HmbTG)– Germany’s first FOIA that binds authorities to disclose government information proactively. The purpose of the paper is to provide a valuable example of how evaluating FOIA might produce useful information for policymakers and public authorities. The analysis results, based on a mixed set of methods (i.e. standardised surveys, statistical secondary data, qualitative expert interviews, and criteria-driven document analysis), lead to the conclusion that the HmbTG was very effective in providing the direct access. On the other hand, it was found that strategies for implementing the law varied considerably between authorities, yet proactive disclosure was overall implemented effectively. Moreover, this law shows some weaknesses to be improved in the future. Besides providing practitioners with valuable insights into how a transparency law may be implemented, the evaluation of the HmbTG also provides researchers with ideas how FOIA evaluation might be conducted comprehensively.