This paper describes the decision-making process regarding the siting of a high voltage transmission line in the southern part of the Netherlands by TenneT, the Transmission System Operator responsible for the electricity infrastructure. TenneT started this siting process by deploying conventional decision-making procedures, which have the tendency centrally to pre-scope, and select the technical, spatial and societal characteristics of such projects. Following the resistance of activist groups and local authorities, a new siting process was set up based on community engagement (CE) and the upfront involvement of local stakeholders, so to include new frames and perspectives and by reconsidering the workings of standard procedures. With that, TenneT opened up decision-making processes. In our paper, we will identify the practical and institutional tensions and challenges that emerged from these attempts to ‘open up’. The work is based on an ‘inside out’ description of the case: one of the researchers undertook an ethnographic study of the siting process, while the employees of TenneT directly involved in the siting process have been invited as co-authors, so to add details and the reflections of practitioners.@en

Local governments are at the heart of implementing increasingly ambitious national plans for wind energy. While support by local governments for these plans has been studied extensively, only few studies have looked into local governments’ contestation of wind energy development. In this paper we analyze contentious governance processes in which local governments join efforts with citizen action groups to oppose projects proposed by developers or the national government. We focus on the strategic dilemmas that local governments face while engaging in contentious governance. Uncovering strategic dilemmas helps to see contestation by local governments as part of a web of governance relationships, thus moving beyond dichotomous understandings of the players involved in wind farm conflicts. Strategic dilemmas also allow understanding of how stances of local governments and their citizen allies change over time, and how strategic and tactical considerations emerge from interaction patterns.@en

We propose methods for an AI agent to estimate the value preferences of individuals in a hybrid participatory system, considering a setting where participants make choices and provide textual motivations for those choices. We focus on situations where there is a conflict between participants' choices and motivations, and operationalize the philosophical stance that 'valuing is deliberatively consequential.' That is, if a user's choice is based on a deliberation of value preferences, the value preferences can be observed in the motivation the user provides for the choice. Thus, we prioritize the value preferences estimated from motivations over the value preferences estimated from choices alone. We evaluate the proposed methods on a dataset of a large-scale survey on energy transition. The results show that explicitly addressing inconsistencies between choices and motivations improves the estimation of an individual's value preferences. The proposed methods can be integrated in a hybrid participatory system, where artificial agents ought to estimate humans' value preferences to pursue value alignment. @en