Bioenergy futures: A study of imaginaries, framing, cultures, and justification in community controversy over bioenergy development

While Renewable Energy Technologies (RETs) such as bioenergy are increasingly contested, community-level discourse and collective action in support or opposition to RETs remains understudied. This dissertation begins to fill this research gap through three distinct studies using data collected on four communities where bioenergy facility development was under consideration in northern Michigan. First, I analyze the discourse of different actors in northern Michigan around the socio-technical imaginary of bioenergy development, finding that discourse critical of proposed local development invokes powerful remembered histories of clear-cut forests. Second, I draw from the sociology of culture to investigate the relationship between divergent community-level responses to proposed development and the cultural resources built up around industrial development and pollution in particular places. Third, I extend insights from French Convention Theory to examine how actors in community-level disputes appeal to a select number of higher principles in an attempt to truncate debate. These three papers will contribute to theories of community-level responses to RETs that help explain how community factors shape social responses to RET development.