How to promote community social acceptance of solid biomass in Europe? Identifying firms' best practices

The siting of solid biomass energy plants can be conceived as a transaction process taking place between two specific economic agents, the investor and local community. The investor is interested in obtaining the use rights for local resources (e.g., area for setting; natural resources to feed the process, release of pollutants into the environment) while the community expects an increase in net benefits (e.g., job opportunities, induced industrial development). This transaction process has been analyzed according to the typical transaction costs theory, where the economic activities are conceived as the result of transactions among economic agents, which are hindered by three main obstacles: i) bounded rationality, ii) opportunism, iii) asset specificity. By applying the New Institutional theory approach, we treat the issue of social acceptance as a transaction cost problem. The aim is to identify the best practices adopted by biomass firms' managers in order to enhance the social acceptance of solid biomass plants at the local community level. In this paper, we conduct a positive analysis where the methodological approach is based on the comparison of six successful study cases. This allowed us to identify twelve measures capable of fostering social acceptance and consequently of reducing the costs related to the investment.