Getting Used to It, But ...? Rethinking the Elusive U-Curve of Acceptance and Post-Construction Assumptions

A frequent rationale of planning authorities and developers regarding local resistance to renewable energy facilities carries the assumption of people getting used to changes over time. This invokes a temporal dimension to the resolution of planning conflicts through processes of familiarisation and adaptation, which is also reflected in the so-called U-shaped curve indicating that local acceptance drops during the consenting process and increases again after deployment. However, in this explorative chapter, we caution against simplistic and short-sighted presumptions of post-construction acceptance. In doing so, we juxtapose notions of how the future is conceived and acted on in order to argue for less preemptive measures for gaining local acceptance and more locally beneficial renewable energy projects based on notions borrowed from prefigurative politics and radical planning.