Competing terms for complementary concepts? Acceptance and legitimacy

The large-scale deployment of low-carbon energy technologies – such as wind power plants, heat pumps, or battery storage – is crucial for reducing CO2 emissions and limiting climate change. The success of this transition depends on how these technologies are perceived by civil society and whether key societal stakeholders support or oppose their roll-out. Two major debates addressing this issue revolve around the concepts of acceptance and legitimacy. Acceptance literature examines the drivers and levels of support of novel technologies. Legitimacy literature captures how these technologies are aligned to their institutional environment. Thus far, there is little cross-fertilisation between the two debates. This contribution conducts a systematic literature review of the two research streams to gain a better understanding of how the social dynamics of low-carbon energy technology deployment are conceptualised. The review involved the analysis of 240 articles from SCOPUS that empirically studied the acceptance or legitimacy of low-carbon energy technologies. The findings suggest that the two literature strands are indeed rather disconnected – few articles use both concepts conjointly. They further illustrate that both have distinct research foci and intellectual roots. Acceptance studies tend to focus on individual perspectives towards specific technologies and relate these to the individuals’ backgrounds. In contrast, legitimacy studies tend to focus on the overall alignment of specific technologies or entire innovation systems with the institutional context. Based on its findings, this study proposes a framework to allow for a better understanding of the dynamic interplay between macro-level legitimacy evaluations and micro-level acceptance evaluations.