TENTRANS: Large-scale renewables = large-scale local benefits?

You know that three-legged chair that often comes up when discussing energy? The one where one leg is the environmental aspects and the other is the economics. What about the third leg, the social one? The one which we engineers and economists tend to be slightly annoyed and perhaps also a bit puzzled by. Well, in this interview, at least my perspective on the social aspects has been broad and significantly. Our very competent guests will make me and hopefully you much smarter on the social aspects without set in the 10 trans project that's short for tendering sustainable energy transitions. The project delves into an interesting South African procurement program for renewable energy, which beyond the megawatt hours also requires concrete social benefits for these surrounding communities and with six gigawatts capacity installed or on the construction, that is actually a whole lot of environmental and economic and not least social impact. Welcome to energy policy costs, research-based dialogues on the many sides of energy policy. From Technical University of Denmark's Sustainability Division, I'm your host, Daniel Sniem. Today we are joined by research associate, Halle. Actually, I'm not sure I got your last name right, Vlokas. Yeah, that's not bad, it's Halle Vlokas. I'm center for complex systems in transition at Stellan Bosch University in South Africa. Halle is also a consultant, but I'm sure she will explain more about that later on. Today we're going to cover the research on community engagement within energy projects, renewable energy projects specifically. And this takes our podcast in an interesting turn since it introduces the human factor in relation to green transition. So welcome, Halle, and perhaps you can tell a bit about what led you in this direction starting from whatever beginning you prefer. Thank you, Halle. Yeah, I didn't ever plan to work on energy, I think. At least I didn't grow up having that plan. Yeah, I studied in Germany and got an internship in South Africa when I was 20-21 and through that got introduced to the African context and then eventually ended up living in South Africa. And now it's 13 odd years later and I'm still there and I am working on energy only. The journey to get me into that situation or position is, yeah, I started around 2007, 2008 where I worked in the, in Africa's first clean development mechanism project, which was the Quesa CDM project implementing solar water heaters on local housing. In that project, I worked as a social researcher and then quickly started consulting to municipality in a neighboring province as well on a similar project. So I got introduced into household energy specifically and then after my masters, which I wrote my thesis on those experiences in these projects, I started working at University of Cape Don in the Energy Research Center and there, we had a team on energy poverty and development. So I worked on household energy specifically, looking into parapherene use and fewer words solar water heating, solar home systems, all from a social development perspective. And then in 2011, this is African government started procuring utility scare renewable energy projects through the renewable energy independent power, produced a procurement program. And that program asked bidders to compile socio-economic development plans as part of the bits. And so myself and the few colleagues found, found ourselves being asked by industry stakeholders to assist in bit development because they saw that we were working energy and poverty and they needed to do socio-economic development plans. So they figured we could be of assistance and we did so in workings with a few bits which really helped develop and then quickly realized that the way the policy was seemed to be rolling out if it was to successfully be implemented would not only lead to a lot of opportunities for community development, based on those specific criteria we speak a bit, but more later that I'm also possibly to challenge us because the policy didn't provide much guidance at least from what our reading of the policy was. So from that moment onwards, we decided to try and support the sector and government and communities and civil society to fully embrace the opportunities linked to that program. And in that way, I'm still working eight years later. But just rewinding a bit, so you took your masters and you did a PhD and can you just briefly explain what the subjects are and your field's expertise? My PhD I wrote on the re-program and that was about two years or so into the program when I realized that we were really lacking realistic opportunity to find academic support, academic funding to support the program and their stakeholders involved. And then I had the opportunity to access a scholarship in South Africa, so I resigned for my academic post and used that opportunity was a scholarship to spend three years completely in the field. And the field being was government and was industry and civil society. So I approached it through a transdisciplinary perspective, but then later on scattered down search to speak to action research and then it was even a bit, became a bit more dry and the actual document later on for various reasons. It is a, I brought together institutional logics, institutional work, looking into how the policy was created with regard to community benefits and then how it is unfolding on the ground, looking into various case study projects. So this research that you have done led you into various projects, few of which you are going to discuss today, you have made a report, an IFC report that maybe you can explain the abbreviation and perhaps also bridge it to the 10 trans project which is also an abbreviation that we are also going to discuss today. So can you just give a brief background on this work? At the time of my PhD, I had the opportunity to not only spend time in project host communities and with companies that own projects and are implementing or were constructing at those times projects but also with national government to a certain degree as well as local government. So I got a lot of different insights from the different stakeholders involved in the program as well as trying to mobilize with civil society for resources to support communities to to make best sense of the opportunities that we're arriving with projects and in all of those efforts I tried to support stakeholders which had different capacities to access resources. So I got involved with the industry associations and there eventually we found ourselves setting up working groups and the solar association and the the wind industry association as well. There were various funding proposals underway with NGOs in South Africa. In academia we tried to bring together students and academic staff working on related topics to build a network to see how can academia support the sector going forward. And also individually, I tried to find ways to continue working myself on those subjects. So yeah, it was a grand scheme I suppose I need to call it. In mind, I tried to find international institutions that have appetite to really adhere to attend to the sector and the sector's social performance challenges so there's social implementation of utility scare renewables in a more holistic and international way. So my example in my mind often is the ICMM which is their council attending to methods and mining which is based in the UK. And they have quite a substantial body of staff and provide a lot of guidelines and twerkets and trainings and practice support across the mining sector also on social aspects. So having that in mind, I've tried to sense who in the landscape around renewable energy has appetite to constitute a similar capacity and they started engaging with the IFC, the International Finance Corporation in the US as well as with IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency in Abu Dhabi. Those conversations at different times matured and with IRENA, we got to a point where together with a colleague of mine, we agreed to a contract to basically replicate my PhD which looked into community benefits as Africa but replicate that across sub-Saharan Africa. So in 2017, we spent a lot of time traveling across sub-Saharan Africa, doing field work in IPPs, renewables, independent power producers that either were in construction operation to understand how are they currently whether or not they have to or if it's voluntary how are they currently benefiting communities through skills development programs, job creation, maybe there's interventions that foster agenda equality, but also other community benefits, or maybe benefit sharing arrangements around ownership even. There was a study where it isn't published yet, but we have its forthcoming. And with the IFC, that conversation became really interesting as I had joined Synergy, which is the consulting firm I work for. I've got, as you mentioned earlier, a position as a consultant, a social performance consulting firm called Synergy Global, but then also as a stellar university. So as I joined Synergy, the IFC conversation became interesting and be agreed to do a study globally with a global scope, looking into what are the different ways projects are benefiting communities, which is a similar frame to the arena study, but it's slightly less policy-oriented, but more has a corporate perspective. And that study was now published three months ago and we launched it in Dakar at the IFC Sustainability Exchange World. This study is, I think, now we do have a lot of background on it, and just to mention, I believe this is the study where you have reviewed a lot of reports, a lot of studies on energy projects, you have made a lot of expert interviews, and you've done several case studies across the globe, from Rocco to Columbia to address your specific subject of community engagement and the impacts on local communities. Then moving on from this study into the 10 trends project, just briefly an explanation of the abbreviation, I think you've said it already, but it's a tendering, sustainable, energy transitions, it's been running from 2018 and ending in 2020, so we're sort of in the middle of the project, and I believe today you're going to share a bit of the findings from this project and then from your related research of previous projects. Yeah, 10 trends is a really exciting project for me, it is the first academic project that has found funding to attend to social issues in the re-program, so it is a collaboration between Danish universities and research institutes as well as South Africans, and when the 10 trends proposal was brought to me as a possibility to join, it was really exciting for me because I constantly do look for other academic side or the exciting side opportunities to foster the sector's reflexivity about its own impacts and practices, so 10 trends has a really interesting scope in that regard, we've got three work packages, the one looks into the design of the procurement program in South Africa, the other one looks into local content, industrial development, and in the work package I mainly work on looks into community engagement, so those are their relationships, companies and projects formed with project-host communities as well as other stakeholders in the landscape that are relevant to the project impacted or affected. That specific work package is a collaboration between the Danish Institute for International Studies and Carbon Hagen as well as UNEPDTU, Salemotion University, and the University of Cape Town. I think you touched upon this already, but the motivation for funding this specific project? It was actually the first call, and possibly even the only call until today, which had specifically written in an option to look into REAP, this is African procurement program, it's a thematic focus for academic research, and that I believe this is for various reasons, I mean South Africa has huge renewable energy resources and potential, our energy landscape is fascinating and very complicated as in most places, but we're dealing with specific opportunities and also challenges, and in that context the REAP program really constituted almost a miraculous example of how a procurement program can be wrote out successfully, really fast, unbudded on time, and not only that, but also integrate two different policy objectives, major ones, on economic development and on energy security. So REAP stands out for those requirements internationally actually, and not only does it require companies to commit to certain economic development commitments, which are usually UAE for those to be implemented on a national level, but also it has requirements that force companies and projects to interact with local communities, so settlements within a 50 kilometer radius or district municipalities around community benefit sharing arrangements. So now at the heart of all of this lies the need to build trusted and reliable and transparent and resilient relationships with project host communities and stakeholders, in order to then successfully roll out projects and also distribute benefits, especially with a long-term horizon of the 20 year or longer maybe duration of PPS, so their 10 trans project looking into the community engagement parties where it really goes to the heart of what it means to implement and maintain a place-based investment, in this case a renewable energy utility-scale renewable energy project which is a implementing agent of the energy transition to look into what lies at the heart of making that socially sustainable. I find a discussion of REAP quite interesting because you've already touched upon some of the aspects of it, but the essential ability to combine fundamental sustainability requirements into this tendering where you have the social aspects covered, you have concrete requirements for these social aspects, you obviously have the environmental aspects in the form of the renewable energy deployment, and then you also have the third leg in the traditional definition of sustainability which is the economics and the financing where things obviously have to make a profit in order for the companies to invest, and when I first saw this definition I thought this may be so difficult to fulfill that not many investors may come into it, but then I looked at the numbers and then could see that since 2011 where REAP has run, I'm seeing a number of six gigawatts, so that's 6,000 megawatts of capacity being introduced which is quite a lot of capacity of renewable energy being added to the system. So this is not peanuts, this is actually something that has scale, and I'm interested to find out what you actually found or what you've found so far with your research whether it lives up to these targets and so on and so forth, but perhaps we can just briefly go through some key concepts because I believe you apply some concepts which are at least foreign to me and perhaps also to our listeners, so can you just explain what social license to operate is in regard to your research and then the research we cared out regarding REAP. Yeah, so social license to operate is really key to each of our 62 projects that we currently have feeding into the grid, so we've got a procured capacity around 6,000 that I believe, but our installed capacity is around 4,300 megawatts or so maybe, and we have around four projects which I think are 27 projects, they are currently in construction, so a social license to operate basically is a term used a lot in the corporate sector, comes from the mining sector and other natural resources by industries and it describes the willingness of a society to host a project, an operational business in their big yard, in their neighborhood, in their district or in their region, so a social license is in addition to a legal license, it's not something you can get a stamp on of an approval and then you have it, it's something very dynamic and you can negotiate it almost every day and at night as well, so basically what it allows you to do is to discuss the quality of your relationship with stakeholders as it relates to business risks, so you can translate it into social risks where you say okay, we do have, we are exposed as an operation maybe if we have a PV plan, we are exposed to risks that on the extreme and could be, could come to us in the form of vandalism maybe of our side or strikes or blockages, delays if you are still in construction, those, those aspects, those situations are really an indication that your social license is shaky and maybe currently really, really weak, but then also on the other end of the spectrum you have other indications where of really trusted, reliable, transparent and resilient relationships and the mining sector specifically is quite mature in their social performance practices, so all the practices that relate to how a business conducts its interactions with society whether it is the wider society or the immediate local social stakeholder. But in the mining sector, you would find companies may be serving for the strengths of their socialized and renewable energy. We're not quite there yet. Another key concept before we dive into your findings is the social performance, which is also a concept that is unfamiliar to me at least. I said earlier, social performance relates to the interactions between an operational business with society. And in a nutshell, that is what it is. In more practical terms, it looks into the social risks, social impacts, and social benefits of an operation. And when you look into place-based investments or natural resource-based industries, you can think of activities and issues around human rights, for example, around resettlement, so linked to land acquisition, labour standards, working conditions, community relations, health and safety for community benefits, or those business operations, and business activities relate to social performance and are encompass the understanding of the professional practices that are part of the social performance field. Some proponents of the green transition believes that we are sort of at a war footing. So this is equivalent to the world being a war against climate change and pollution. So the overall motivation of having social acceptance issues versus just putting those wind turbines in people's backyards because they necessarily have to be there in order to have a green transition, which is necessary. But putting judgment on either side, I would like you also welcome not to, but I'm just curious regarding your perspectives on this argument versus the other one. If I get your right, you're asking to maybe justification of disregarding social sentiments and people's perceptions and expectations for what does not stand in their backyard in terms of infrastructure. And the tension is real, whether it is on a policy level, or internationally, as it debated maybe on the UNFCCC level, or national policy to which economic sector, especially in the energy landscape dominates, whether it's coal or nuclear or renewables, as well as it does translate to the ground where you're looking to, which companies and which projects are more successful in land acquisition and in legitimizing their existence locally. And that question around legitimacy is similar to the question of social license. So you can have a social license on a project level, but you can also have it collectively across the entire industry. And there's different spheres where you negotiate those. As you, obviously rightfully point out, we are under tremendous pressure to roll out and deploy renewables or cleaner technologies really fast. And there are various models that are being tested out internationally, whether it is where a national government pre-procures or supports in the land acquisition process so that the climate can go really, really fast. All where it is that you try and bring industry to act really fast through a procurement program, a tendering scheme with tight timelines. There are various innovative models currently being explored and tested in the world, and they all do have advantages and disadvantages. I strongly believe, and from what I have seen, that because we are dealing with place-based infrastructure, because we have social risks and we are exposed to stoppage to the entire operation at the ultimate extreme of dissatisfaction with a specific operation, we can't disregard people's sentiments. The energy transition, if it's the way it needs to take people's expectations on board and actually need to almost be led by social performance practitioners in my area. Obviously we do need technical expertise, and that needs to go hand in hand, but what we are currently seeing is that social performance is gradually, in my perception, at least, moving closer to core business also in energy companies. It has happened already in mining much more, because they have a much longer legacy of experiences of what it takes and what it means to the profitability of an operation if you don't, if you're socially not acceptable locally. In renewables and in energy, I think we are on a very steep learning curve, and, in fact, we need to rapidly professionalize our understanding, as well as much more radically embrace the legacies of colonial histories, especially in sub-Hardad, South Africa, specifically. What does it take to really address poverty and inequality in a sustainable fashion? So, those questions, I don't have answers for, but they are lying at the heart of the ethos of what it is and what it takes to work with people on technology deployment. I am very much in line with your understanding, because I believe, relating back to the sustainability definition, you can maybe have the very strong environmental leg, but if you don't have the similarly strong social aspect or leg on your chair, your chair may fall over, probably speaking. So, let's try and set the scene for the more concrete aspects of what you're dealing with in the 10 trans project and what you've been dealing with in earlier research. So, how does company and community relations look in practice? So, there's lots of different labels or terms used in social performance as their professional field materials, and also as it gets translated into the context of other industries and countries or continents. Company community relations and development is one term used a lot in Australia. We can differentiate between company community relations or community engagement and community benefits or community development as well. It all is concerned with the relationships and benefits of developmental nature within the project-host community or the nearby environment. When you think of a renewable energy project at its early stages of development, land is being seeked and early conversations usually taking place with land owners or government representatives active in the area, maybe community leaders, representation of traditional leadership structures, if it is in a context where such is relevant, which really speak to the early needs around building relationships. In order to even have a project that you can develop for there. So, they're already in renewables. We see that a lot of companies are not necessarily constituted to have skilled capacity on board. So, teams often are operating under shoestring, so from a human capacity and also their financial resources, even time sometimes. So, you might find one person developing a product over a few years alone almost. So, the professional capacity available to those teams in the development phase is really slim on community relations. And we do see a lot of legacy issues coming with that at later stages of the project cycle. So, when a product gets through the various permitting at approving stages and then reaches financial close and goes for construction, the real questions do arise quite quickly around. Okay, who will be employed on site? What skills and what training possibilities are available? Who will be receiving contracts in order to bring materials and service side and all the needs and activities around the operation and construction. So, those questions all require really good communication with local stakeholders as well as ideally a deliberate plan. So, under social performance, you would expect a social performance team to have established a community or a stakeholder map. Then an analysis process and have a stakeholder engagement plan in place, a local procurement plan as well to see what skills and businesses are available locally versus what services do I need to procure from elsewhere, either from bigger commercial centers in the in proximity to side or maybe even from other countries or other continents even. So, all those questions really lie at the heart to how happy basically people living around side are with their construction underway. So, those are some of the critical questions around construction time. And then, as you start operating, there are still some jobs available during maintenance or maybe if it is around taking care of land and the office buildings, maybe fencing, maybe insecurity. So, there are some questions still around employment opportunities, but more so around community benefit. And that is specifically important for projects operating in contexts of high rates of poverty and inequality. And we also do see that not only being relevant to products in Africa or maybe South America or other places where we have high rates of unemployment and poverty, but also actually in Europe and in Canada and in Australia, where you do find economically distressed areas hosting big, expensive projects and what residents associate with such infrastructure is economic opportunity, which is how their willingness to host those projects is usually negotiated. So those questions are important for projects across the world. This type of benefit sharing measures, it sounds quite comprehensive for a company to engage in, to provide an overview of this. Is there a common practice for this in the projects that you have looked at? Yeah, so there are different drivers for benefit sharing. And one which I stress the most right now is demands and expectations from people living in the area, which receives as a project. But it can also be driven by policy like in South Africa, where governments stipulates that private sector who is participating in the generation of electricity needs to adhere to certain rules, so we can speak about those bit more. But then there's also expectations coming from investors, for example, and other drivers might relate to the reputation a company wants to really work on. So what in South Africa is really key is that the policy just stipulates that companies and projects need to employ certain amount of people from the local community, so either from within 50 kilometer radius around side or the district municipality. And that depends which procurement round a project is approved under. Three other criteria are important with regard to local communities. The second one is community ownership. So a certain percentage of the total project share hoarding needs to be allocated to a local entity, a legal entity that represents community residing in that beneficial radius. And that is a minimum of 2.5 percent. So in some projects, it goes up to even 40 percent. I think in average it's around 10 or 11 percent, maybe if I'm not mistaken. Mainly in South Africa, the market responded to this requirement by establishing community trusts, which are quite a popular vehicle or common vehicle in South Africa for community development. We know it a lot from mining but also from the agriculture sectors where you have a board of trustees making decision on behalf of the income that trust receives. Then the third and fourth requirement linking projects with communities, the third one is social economic development. So projects need to spend a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 1.5 percent of their total project revenue on a quarterly basis on social economic development measures. So that could be health, education, arts and culture, sport, activities that fall under social welfare generally. And then the fourth requirement is enterprise development, which is voluntary. So companies don't have to adhere to it. But if they do commit, they need to follow through. And that is a maximum of 0.7 percent of their project revenue that needs to be spend on. On any measures intervention that supports small and medium-sized businesses to participate in the economy and the focus across all our entire economic development scorecard is to support previously disadvantaged individuals and groups to participate more actively and successfully in the economy. So it's based on our BEE legislation or Black Economic Empowerment legislation. There is an approach which has been carried out at least some places in Denmark. I know that when you want to establish a project, you approach the opinion makers or the sort of the leaders in the local society. Whatever leader that may be, not in a formal manner, but the local blacksmith or someone with some kind of reputation in the society. And then you try to convince these stakeholders of the benefits of that project. And then you invite the broader community, but having established a common understanding with the opinion makers to ensure that your project is facilitated by making kind of an alliance with these people beforehand. I'm not putting judgment on this approach because that may be the way that things are actually getting done. But I'm just curious to hear whether you have experienced similar approaches and seen similar methods applied in the projects that you have reviewed. Yeah, it's interesting. When you sit with a work focus that brings together government, private sector and civil society agendas with such a place-based focus. That brings up a whole lot of fascinating questions and dynamics and inevitably so. And regardless of which country you are in or also which project or program or policy you're really concerned with. So there might be a short term informed business rationale to get a project quickly through planning approval and then assume that later on any concerns anyone might have had and couldn't voice would dissipate and I can't comment on that. I have not been involved in projects like that, but I understand that that is the experience in some projects, especially more in Europe maybe. In other context, planning approval is not the big issue as that can be achieved fairly easily. But the bigger task around the engagement work is really during construction when impacts are being experienced by communities, disturbances, environmental impacts during the construction phase. And also in the same time opportunities are being negotiated around employment and skills development programs and benefits and contracts for local businesses. That already requires you to have a somewhat more medium term focus in mind being okay, we have a planning approval and then once we go through construction, how will we get through construction and how will we not only get through construction at some point, but ideally on budget and on time. That requires you to be cut deliberate about how you build relationships and where and their strategies might be to go with their outspoken and easily accessibility leads maybe within a specific setting. But also there soon as you map your stakeholders appropriately, oh as soon as you start constructing you will realize where there might be flaws or blind spots and those assumptions. And if you do your work and form by democratic principles and community development experience and social performance experience and other sectors, so whether it is your type into academic and civil society knowledge or community development or more government like democracy and local economic development or really deep corporate experiences around social performance and industrial relations, human resources. You will inevitably have to develop more longer term strategies for how you build relationships and how you interact with society. So that those that you make it as opposed to construction but also then into operation and that during operations you maintain your legitimacy. So relating to this you have an almost poetic quote in one of your reports which is there are nuggets of wisdom available from each and every person who is working in the sector. So perhaps that answers my question but still I will try to ask it. So your research shows that who should be engaged exactly which are the stakeholders is it essentially everybody touching on the project. Yeah and there you come to the practicalities now what does it mean to be a renewable energy stakeholder and by that it's not a homogeneous group it's it's so many different entities that are involved in in the industry and in my very very simplified example does now but coming from development to construction operation in that in that few years there are a merit of companies and stakeholders involved. So who develops might not be the same company who constructs and might not be the same company that owns and then the ownership changes as well. So it really depends on who has got what scope at what point in time and with that it was what sort of experience and budget and opportunity to think ahead and what are their business strategies. If you develop a project and you know you want to own it throughout the entire PPA duration you probably put more work into establishing good relationships. You know your job is to seek the land and secure a land lease agreement you don't really care as much about like who will get the contracts during the construction site because there isn't really a social license risk to you as a as a private film. So your strategy is different and where we are not at in the sector is to have stand. and guidelines that really help us to have those conversations more progressively and proactively as well, across legal entities and then across stakeholder, so with government and communities as well. So we are still really learning as an industry. Generally, we can fall back onto principles of practice, which is like what does good community engagement mean? And it means you know your stakeholders, you understand the local context, you analyze who's got what interests and what is vulnerable and how, and how do I contribute to those vulnerabilities and how can I then mitigate those? You look into how do I best communicate appropriately with the stakeholders I need to communicate with? Is it a website? Are people online? Is that the most appropriate form? And or do I need to find other ways? And usually it is the merit of different communication channels ranging from meetings, house visits, maybe community meetings, meetings with government, having maybe a community liaison office or physical structure within reach of the product house community, to come and actually ask questions when they arise, maybe also to drop off CVs if there is an employment or recruitment drive for local contractors to come with issues or maybe with proposals as well. You can use Twitter, you can use Facebook and websites and notice boards and newsletters and loudspeaking. And so that can be often announced meetings with loudspeaking with a car and loudspeaker. So there are really, really many different ways and what is important is to adhere to principles. To be reliable, to follow through, to be transparent and those practice principles are the same across industries, across various fields of development and it doesn't really matter if you government or an NGO or a company. You can learn from one another and there is a vast resources towards a tip engine. You just mentioned transparency and this relates to a question, I guess which applies to all kinds of projects regardless of energy or not and all kinds of geographies. But when you do have community engagement and you do have new projects potentially being deployed in your neighborhood, some people may have smaller or larger interests and may thus be more prone to corruption, for instance, or just being in transparent in the decision-making process to have certain benefits, perhaps. I guess you've been answering that question already because you said transparency is important, but do you have a approach to dealing with the corruption or lack of transparency of something on that scale or that end of the scale in sub-projects? Yeah, I suppose my experience is what I already said is when I started the arena research and tried to find out where cross-subs are in Africa, do we have projects in construction or operation and realise we don't have a database, there isn't a map, there isn't a website where I can look. There's maybe one but I need to pay a lot of pounds to get access to and we didn't have that in our project budget, so tons of public information to where operations are placed, that is really difficult, and I'm sure we are making progress on that and certainly have so in South Africa where, for example, I mean, our really unique effort there is the energy block which is run by someone called Stephen Forder and he made it his task with no funding, it was literally his commitment to public awareness and information, he made it his task to map all the REAP programs in the country and display them on a website and he's building up now a really powerful online resource which hopefully will also allow us to add further data to it, so these are really unique and niche civil society driven initiatives to raise awareness and foster transparency. The REAP program was in its early days and I mean still not applies but it has changed slightly in the discourse but the policy as it was documented or manifested through the procurement document those were confidential and there still are confidential, so you have to be a registered bitter bitter which means you need to pay a bidding fee for that as well or to access those documents, so in the beginning of our research when you live in 2012 we managed to put in a public access to information request to get access to those documents legally and then be allowed to publish and those as well, so those were really early days obviously in the industry and the lawyers who have drafted those procurement documents tried to safeguard for all sorts of abuse and misuse and unfortunately compromised transparency tremendously with that, so it did lead to our public debate about REAP and renewables being quite delayed actually and maybe also contributed to some of the tension that we are now feeling where the public debate is very very tension filled and brings together a whole lot of vested interests from various sectors including some that are really really challenging, some economic stakeholders are very challenging to our energy landscape and others which are asking for much more progressive targets to be included into REAP or a similar program which should not only include private sector stakeholders primarily and small have a small margin for community ownership but some stakeholders are asking for publicly owned renewables projects completely and socially owned whether it is Labor and Union owning those projects or maybe community owned land being utilized in the land acquisition process or just having more innovative models that allow the reallocation of wealth and the alleviation of poverty inequality to be fast-tracked through renewables differently and better and more sustainably, so the biggest economic hinges there are leverages land ownership and then asset ownership, so those are the ones we are negotiating and we need to become more smart in developing models around that and those will impact corporate practices but also policy. You may also risk that poor, less literate or less informed people may be thrown under the bus and maybe get projects that they maybe didn't want or what is your perspective on that, it is a double-edged sort I guess. I think the strongest resistance comes in association with cultural heritage and sense of place and those questions really relate to land acquisition and sighting of operations which require tremendous sensitivity, ideally also professional skills or deliberation strategy in order to know how to mitigate for impact and there we have experienced across the continent a few difficult and very challenging examples and experiences in this sector which have costed companies but also communities a lot of time and money as well, so some of the projects or the one which is prominent or the King Young Goblin in Kenya which failed there are some analysis showing how much staff time from the companies was gone at a loss because I tried to save the project and how much investment was wasted basically because the project didn't eventually move ahead but also the time of the community and households and individuals protesting and taking up those conversations with private sector and with their own government, the time they spend and the money they spend and resources to have those conversations and fight for their rights are really significant especially in the context of poverty and inequality, so there is even more of a need to safeguard and be really careful and invest up front a lot on the corporate and government side in order to safeguard already very marginalised and economically distressed communities from having to invest their limited resources into fighting for their rights, so unfortunately globally that is those are conversations, we are sitting with all sectors and all aspects of society and activities, there are on the other end of the spectrum also some really interesting examples I think, like in Rwanda for example, the utilities scale solar plant there's one, it says more PV plant 8.5 megawatt and it's based on land that is owned by an orphanage, so to use village and their lease income contributes to the operating cost of that NGO of the use village, so that's an interesting example I think. We're saying maybe there are some of the utilities scale renewables plants and the one the Unbeppo, Winfum and Luderitz for example, it's based on land that is owned by the town council, so by the local government, and in return there's an income into their town council's budget and that was part of their strategy to diversify their income sources as mining is phasing out in that area and renewables is moving in, so those are innovative models I think of shared ownership and maybe even co-creating in terms of development, which we need to look out for and really learn from and see okay what enabled companies to be innovative, who are those stakeholders, how can we empower other stakeholders to more actively also participate and interesting work there also on a procurement side for example is done by Shalanda Baker at Boston in the US, she's at North Eastern University, she's looking into possibilities to integrate indigenous peoples' rights into procurement design or the REN21, the Think Tank has published a report on empowering, repiring communities or is this making suggestions for tender design and procurement design to incorporate more economic development objectives, so I think we will be seeing much more innovation on that scene, on policy and on corporate practice going forward. To summarize and now you may supplement and correct me if I'm wrong, so what's in it for the companies is that if you engage in a good fashion with communities. Your projects may receive an acceptance which will facilitate the process or make the project faster to deploy and also maintain it throughout its lifetime with acceptance from the local people. And the community may benefit in many different ways ranging from economic local benefits and that education and empowerment is increased in local communities. And I think just to summarize on the government and institutional side, they as I see it may benefit in the way that projects that they have in their policies may be facilitated more expedient and more efficiently by having this engagement with the community that ensures the acceptance of whatever projects that the government or state may have. Yeah, I would stress the importance of the design of products and that are on sighting but also design in terms of the product implementation and during construction. So not only that products are accepted if you engage effectively but they are accepted on the basis of being as just as possible hopefully. They are accepted because they do deliver on their promises and they do include what is possible to be source locally and whoever is possibly being able to be employed or trained and skilled. So those are real material changes possibly in some of the product designs that need to take place in order to reach acceptance. That realise at the heart of why should you engage and why should you better to spend all that time and money on effectively engaging. It allows you to understand what is locally acceptable, what is locally needed, what are the assets available and how to build up on that to that actually effectively contribute to local economic development and that will guarantee you that will allow you to be legitimate development actor and economic player in the region. So relating to that I suppose timing is a relevant issue as well and especially to address conflicts that necessarily arise throughout the time frame of such projects. So what have you found so far in when to engage and when to start the process in projects? Yeah and then we are opening up the conversation to even more complexity because depending on who is the developer and I, classically in South Africa as we've experienced it mainly is private sector companies are developing projects but you also do have projects which are developed by government like in Ethiopia or in Benin currently or in Kenya where government is the developer of projects. So they have responsibility and the requirements to engage really live and rest with them and their teams but you also do have projects that are developed by communities themselves like the Hepburn, Wind Farm in Australia for example 100% community owned and even though the initials of impetus for looking into wind power was given by a private sector driven idea to develop a project the community took it on on themselves to develop the ultimate projects now on the ground. So depending on who you are your engagement and practices might be by default and come very natural because you are a community cooperative or community group and by default you speak to your neighbours because it's just the way you build social capital and build momentum around your idea as a group or maybe if it starts with an individual and then you gather more people around you or if it's a private sector company that comes from the area it's one idea or it comes from the nearby capital or maybe if it comes from overseas so yeah it depends who's got what stakes in the product development phase is at what point in time but generally saying that the rule is to engage as early as possible and as well thoughts through and deliver it as possible and really be inclusive but also very innovative and I say delivered but I also want to stress to be yeah it is hard felt and respectful and honest in the way you do relate to people and that can be done in some cases by people with the right skills and aptitude who might not be trained in social science or as social performance practitioners or if it's in a community setting there might not be the ones that are elected on the community engagement or whatever those roles might be called but more often than not it is good to have some unprofessional on board who has some training and thinking through how to build relationships and what does it take to really bring the right resources on board and put structures and processes in place to allow people to voice their opinion and participate meaningfully. I'm curious whether you have encountered any surprises in your research. I wouldn't call it a surprise and I think maybe I don't have a surprise as such which I could share but what motivates and inspires me is engaging with the people who do do the work of social performance practitioners and who do do the relating work who are experienced to be incredibly strong and innovative and ambitious and visionary people who if they are employed by companies embody the the attempt and the constant experimentation that is required to bridge the corporate paradigm with the civil society experience of living if it is in a in a context that is structurally violent which is marginalized which is dominated by poverty inequality and to facilitate those conversations to be progressive and transformative that really is what drives me to do the work I do. I didn't expect that I surprised so it's not a surprise I'm just really grateful for having the opportunity and chance to work with so many incredible people. I believe there is perhaps a native word for that in Danish it's illshale which means soul on fire so people whose soul is on fire is the people that very often this driving local transition and development very often one man armies doing a lot of work for various projects. Wow that is a beautiful term yeah in South Africa those are one woman armies the people usually employed are female so it's a network of women very few men amongst this and also internationally I see more women doing this kind of work doesn't mean that I'm saying women should be doing this work but it is part of our how things work globally yeah yeah and also yeah it speaks to maybe some of the quality no let's stop that I don't know this kind of get complicated before we finish off I'm curious to to discuss a bit on what's ahead for for the 10 trans project and for for your research in general perhaps maybe starting out with a bit contentious subject is I suppose those mega watts that's been delivered by the the REAP program may alleviate some of the pains that South Africa is currently suffering perhaps listeners have heard about the crisis in the SCOM energy company that results in frequent blackouts and then unstable financial situation for the company and perhaps also for South Africa as a whole and without putting your hands in the wasps nest of politics I would be curious to hear if there is any bridging between between the projects that you're dealing with and the general condition of the country I suppose it falls in a local context that is our context and our reality and as a country we are looking at a really interesting time I believe we we need to overcome a lot of challenges and a lot needs to change very significantly and very fast and most importantly that probably most imminent we require SCOM to regain its sustainability somehow economically as an entity and to be able to provide electricity and energy services as required for economic development and a lot of the the positive ripple and spin-offs we expect to come from that will be helpful how that will be achieved we will have to see the work we do in tendrance in the specific work package on community engagement we engage with three conversations specifically the one is with national government where we have a unit called the IPP office that unit is responsible for the procurement program the management the governance they often we are speaking with the economic development team that is in charge of the looks at the economic development criteria of the program and there we are in dialogue around how to monitor community engagement practices in the sector and the the level of community relations so that is one conversation which links to which to operationalize with some research instruments around interviews and we have a feedback loop to also advise and provide recommendations to the unit that is part of my research always that is not only I don't extract data for the sake of publishing academically I extract data in agreement and in co-creation ideally with those who hold that data in order to then share widely to improve reflexivity across the system. So, yeah, and that National Government is one conversation partner. The second one is Provincial Government, and they've been the Eastern Cape. We have a very visionary team that is put together a forum that meets quarterly and brings together local government stakeholders and renewable energy projects and allows them to communicate on an even footing about where the relationship with communities are at and what other community investment plans currently underway and being designed. So, that relates to the socio economic development enterprise development requirements, which is of the product has stood here too, and it really allows local government and their development planning and IPPs and their development planning to hopefully find common ground or at least coordinate of who's doing what and investing where. So, that is a really innovative niche dialogue we are observing and we're having a research instrument around which surveys there to see how are the members of that forum benefiting and what could be done to further improve their forum. Our third line of inquiry is looking at the work and experience of the work of ED managers specifically. We are interviewing and accompanying and observing the work of economic development managers and their teams in their relationship work and communities and also looking into the practices they are applying to engage as it allows them to plan for the community investment. So, we hosted a workshop in April which provided some training on facilitation skills for community engagement and we brainstormed some of the critical questions people are sitting with maybe the one which came up was should we have a community liaison office or not, is it worse the money or not, what are the price and cons, so those are really practical questions. But then also more reflective work in terms of who am I, what brings me through this position in the company, what are the enabling structures I'm experiencing, what is maybe challenging, what are the blind spots I'm sitting with in terms of my practice development and what could I do and what do I need and what can I ask for to further support me in my professional development and then as a sector more generally what how can we further professionalize and develop and mature the professional practice of relating really well and really honestly and meaningfully with communities to ideally develop in the future really sustainable and fully supported projects. But we have a lot of support in our projects I need to say that generally but we are struggling with as we're struggling with nationally with the legitimacy of renewable energy more collectively. So questions from the project level do you also spill over or reach upwards on to the industry level and policy level. So those are the three lines of inquiry and we are in the process of data collection and really look forward to sharing results academically more wildly. Next year we are taking part in conferences was an industry conference coming up in November October. Yeah, that is the 10 trans project for the next couple of months. Before we finish I would be curious to hear if you have some kind of recommendation for our listeners for an interesting piece of literature or reference or whatever you may offer to them as a parting gift. Yes, I think it's yeah whatever I would like to suggest maybe because I like it the best is another podcast series. It's a very short series I think it's only five or six episodes and it was hosted by Diana Camp who's a research in Australia and she interviewed five or six experts scholars and practitioners from the social performance field around the different practices they are employing in operations and how they reflect on those and what where they see trends in social performance and that podcast series I will provide you with a link. Excellent. I think it's a really nice resource for people who start off thinking about social issues around natural resource based or place based investments or who land in companies as being employed as such practitioners or even people in government who aim to understand a bit better like how our business is constituted or should be constituted around some of the social questions. Thanks so much. That's a very relevant place to maybe I don't know start out before listening to this one or continuing after listening to this one we listeners may decide. I may also add I believe there is a South African band called The Antwort which is a piece of culture that has reached at least at least northern Europe so in case you want something entirely different they may be worth checking out and with that I will say thank you so much. It's been a pleasure and then we took a bit longer than anticipated but we covered a lot of interesting ground and I'll provide resources for our listeners to your report so they can find that in the show notes and yeah with that I'll just say thanks so much. Thank you very much. It was fun. We hope today's episode gave some food for thought. In fact why don't you chew a bit on those findings while I finish my PhD thesis. We will be back with a strong catalogue in 2020 and meanwhile don't forget to spread the word about the podcast if you like it. And as always comments are welcome you'll find contact info in the show notes and with that energy policy cast may be the first to wish you a happy new year. We look forward to giving you more recent research within energy policy in 2020.