Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
should any country spend too much in this regard when the bene
ts in terms of cost-
reductions spill to other countries? 16 This provides a rationale for supranational
deployment instruments and R&D support schemes. Of course, if there was a local
learning component, then some of those bene
ts could be appropriated by the
supporting country. But, to our knowledge, an analysis of the degree of the local
appropriability of learning investments does not exist, which certainly indicates a
fruitful avenue for further research.
Third, other criteria are taken into account by policy makers when implementing
new or reforming existing support schemes, including equity, social acceptability
and political feasibility. These criteria are interrelated to some extent. Equity refers
to the distributive impacts of the instruments, which may have more or less ben-
e
cial effects on different countries and actors within those countries. RES-E
support and other policies may not be socially acceptable and may be rejected by
the population. Social rejection may have a broad character (i.e., civil society is
against the deployment of renewables or against deployment support) or a local
component (i.e., the not-in-my-back-yard syndrome). Therefore, social acceptabil-
ity and political feasibility go hand-in-hand. There is a surprising lack of research
on the equity impacts and political feasibility of existing and proposed RES-E
support schemes ([ 3 , 72 ] represent two notable exceptions in this regard).
Of course, the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of support are two main cri-
teria to judge the political feasibility of instruments and design elements (i.e.,
ineffective or costly instruments are attractive for policy-makers), but they are
simply not suf
cient to assess the possible success or failure of proposed instruments
for RES-E support. Obviously, assessing social acceptability and political feasibility
goes beyond the traditional frontiers of economics (except for political economy
analyses) and should be addressed by sociologists and political scientists as well.
Analyses based on multicriteria decision analysis techniques would be highly
appropriate in this context. This methodological tool has scarcely been used in
previous research (a notable exception is [ 69 ]). Finally, when several criteria have
been considered, they have been isolated from each other. In reality, they interact
and, thus, trade-offs are unavoidable, i.e., improvements in one criterion may only
come at the expense of worsening other criteria (see [ 51 ] for further details).
2.7 Strong Emphasis on Harmonization Versus Subsidiarity
of Support Schemes in the EU
2.7.1 The Usual Claim
There is an old debate in the EU about the advantages and disadvantages of har-
monizing the support schemes (see [ 40 , 73 , 74 ]). Harmonisation can be de
ned as
16 Of course, there are other local bene ts of supporting RES-E, including reductions of local
pollutants and a lower dependence on foreign fossil-fuel resources.
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