Delivering the Earning Local Support Academy (ELSA)

The need for a new status quo

In today’s complex and low trust world, ensuring that a project receives broad community support is essential for its success. This is one of the quickly growing needs within project development. Securing community support in the planning stage of a project ensures that the important work developers and communities are undertaking is not compromised, or worse, negated. We call this process Smart Engagement which delivers Smart Projects: projects which are financially successful, technically sound, environmentally compatible, and socially supported.

Ensuring that a project receives broad community support requires getting the project development mentality and host community engagement right before a project gets designed. This needs to be driven throughout the developer's organisation from board and CEO level to the engineering design and implementation team.

How ELSA helps to realise projects

The Earning Local Support Academy (ELSA) helps you mobilise the required leadership, frameworks and skill sets. The pertinent variables that need to be addressed by ELSA in order to motivate groups and individuals within communities to give their support to a project include:

Trustworthiness: People are more likely to agree to examine and consider a project idea if they feel the project developer is trustworthy and credible.
Sense of community and responsibility: Most individuals are driven by a genuine desire to make a positive impact in the world. For host community members to be convinced that a given project can do this, honest sharing of relevant information on all potential negative and positive aspects (perceived and real) is needed.
Access to credible information: People need relevant, accurate and complete information to make informed decisions about whether to support or oppose a project. To do this, proactive listening is needed to understand what people need in order to make an informed decision about a project.
Creating shared value: People are more likely to support a project if they believe it will have a net benefit for them and the community they live in. For host communities and developers to identify and work towards a mutually important goal, they need to get to know their respective needs, concerns and aspirations. To do that, they need to build trustful relationships that can enable the search for, and creation of, synergies. Again, proactive listening is foundational to achieve this.
Competence, autonomy, and connectedness: People are motivated by the development of personal abilities, being included in decision-making on actions that impact their life, and being able to progress in partnership with others for the issues that mean most to them. This requires that project stakeholders are being engaged at the level and on the issues of their choosing.

Overall, people's decision to give their support to a project is often influenced by a combination of these factors. Each community is made up of a diverse set of people, and individual motivations for giving support are complex and multifaceted. Additionally, people's motivations may evolve over time as they gain new experiences and perspectives. Effective project development and engagement strategies need to take all the above into account.

The three key areas that a project proponent has the most influence over include:

the level of transparency around the proposed project,
the quality of engagement with its host community and other key stakeholders, and
the extent to which the project adds value to the local setting.

Understanding and addressing these factors proactively, and adapting to evolving needs and expectations, can help organisations avoid opposition, and, when done well, can even earn local support for their project.

Aiming for Net Gain

One of the tools that ELSA helps participants use to address the above is Sustainable Development Net Gain. This tool aims to ensure that projects are not only successful in and of themselves, but also result in a net positive impact on the host community, and its environmental, economic and cultural well-being, thereby delivering projects wanted by investors, government and the host community alike. To measure this Net Gain we measure the sum of the five capitals of sustainable development. A high Sustainable Development Net Gain indicates that a project will contribute positively to the overall well-being of local and regional society, and leave a positive legacy for future generations. This in turn secures local support and minimises the risks to the investors.

ELSA provides a forum for sharing knowledge and experiences, developing consensus, skills and guidelines, and promoting the adoption of sustainable development net gain practices across the five capitals of sustainable development across different sectors, including energy, infrastructure, extractive, environmental and indeed agriculture and tourism.

The route to the resulting Smart Project follows a framework that balances economic growth and technical innovations with environmental conservation and community considerations.

ELSA is a collaborative effort originating from and building on the 2021 Earning Local Support for Wind Energy Projects in Ireland*.

The initiative brings together a diverse group of stakeholders, including members of host communities, developers, relevant authorities, civil society and researchers to develop and promote best practices for achieving net gain across the five capitals.

ELSA helps articulate the growing array of complex issues faced by projects that need a host community’s support; and it delivers on how to address these. It builds on the five capitals work that has matured since it was initiated in the early 2000s, and provides busy executives and community leaders/members with a practical way to understand and account for the full range of related and unrelated subjects that today’s projects need to address. It also helps local communities define what is most important to the local fabric of their community - a crucial fist step in holding developers to account.

When applied to renewable energy projects, the skillset, mind-frame and experience from ELSA enables project developers and communities to ensure that the energy project not only generates renewable energy but also results in a net gain for community development, vibrancy and cohesion, biodiversity and ecosystem services.

An example of what ELSA helps you deliver in practice

In practice, examples of some of the key skills that you will mobilise through your involvement with ELSA include:

Listen and engage: Designing and delivering proactive & systematic stakeholder engagement to build the will and the way for stakeholders to meaningfully participate in the steps below.
Participatory baseline assessment: Assessing the pre-project state of local environmental, social, economic and technical conditions through working in a developer-community team.
Participatory impact assessment: Identifying the potential positive and negative impacts of a project proposal on local environmental, social and economic well-being in a developer-community team.
Public acknowledgement: Clearly acknowledging the potential negative impacts and agreeing measures to avoid, minimise, or mitigate those.
Synergies: Creating project design briefs that support the local sustainable future, including opportunities to improve community well-being, cohesion and vibrancy, and promote sustainable economic growth and livelihoods, and enhance or create new habitats and ecosystem services,
Deliver Net Gain: Implementing the agreed measures to achieve a net gain across the five sustainable development capitals. This means that the project should leave the host environment and communities in a better state than before the project started.
Monitor and capacity build: Ensuring the team has the required capacity and skill set to deliver on the above.

Much research indicates that local stakeholders recognise that the development of projects in their neighbourhood is required to address a series of challenges. Local people also, rightfully, care deeply for the quality of local development and well-being. They request that any proposed project fully addresses sustainable development considerations on a local as well as regional basis. They want a project creation process to synergise with their efforts to create more sustainable and resilient communities that are better equipped to address the challenges of both today and the future. By doing so, developers in turn demonstrate their commitment to environmental and social responsibility, and build stronger relationships with stakeholders, including local communities and regulatory authorities; thereby reducing business risks and ensuring the continued success of their own enterprises.

This requires a culture of shared learning and capacity building to cultivate healthy developer-host community relationships that can deliver local support for projects of significant importance to society through designing them to deliver net-positive impact on the host environment, economy and society.

The ELSA initiative is an important step towards achieving national and regional climate targets in a way that provides a sustainable future for all. The initiative aims to enable companies and governments to fully understand why it is in their interest to go beyond traditional approaches to project design, environmental impact assessments and permitting. It aims to enable local and regional sustainable development needs be integrated into the overall design of projects and their decision-making process. It mobilises a common language to describe non-financial benefits which are key to ensuring the investments made deliver value for society and the environment, as well as producing the required economic returns for the developer and authorities.

By working with ELSA, developers will be able to not only realise highly successful projects, but will be able to do so in a way that creates more sustainable and resilient communities that are better equipped to address the challenges of the future. By doing so, developers also demonstrate their commitment to social and environmental responsibility, and build stronger relationships with stakeholders, including local communities and regulatory authorities; thereby ensuring the continued success of their own enterprises.

About ELSA

ELSA promotes collaboration and partnerships between stakeholders to achieve its goal. It is designed to foster a culture of shared learning and capacity building for the benefit of all parties. Partnerships make it easier to gain local support for projects of significant importance to society through designing them to deliver net positive impact on the host society, environment and economy.

The initiative is an important step towards achieving national and regional climate targets in a way that provides a sustainable future for all concerned.

The creation of ELSA is being led and facilitated by AstonECO, peer reviewed by Galway University and is supported with up to 80% financial contribution from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland under the SEAI Research, Development & Demonstration (RD&D) Funding Programme 2022, # 22/RDD/874

*undertaken by AstonECO Management, peer reviewed by the University of Galway and 80% funded by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland.