Dealing with heterogeneity and complexity in the analysis of the willingness to invest in community renewable energy in rural areas

Abstract

Community Renewable Energy (CRE) is a central concept of current political agendas aimed at fostering a sustainable energy transition that can be linked to the development of rural areas. To design effective policies and strategies to promote the development of rural CRE, the diverse conditioning factors of the decision to invest in CRE projects should be analyzed. However, to the best of our knowledge, little research has examined this issue and no study has explicitly focused on rural “bioenergy village” projects under a quantitative research design. Moreover, although past research on the decision to invest in CRE has acknowledged the importance of the influence of alternative cognitive factors, the financial determinants of that decision have been somewhat disregarded. Furthermore, the complex and heterogeneous nature of human behavior has not been directly addressed through appropriate methodological frameworks. Applying a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to the responses obtained through a survey on the decision to invest in a hypothetical small bioenergy village project, we analyze a varied set of propositions related to the role of different sociodemographic, sociopsychological, and financial features as antecedents and outcomes. Results reveal the diverse configurations of all these factors that policy makers, promoters of CRE projects, and researchers should consider to effectively contribute to the development of CRE in rural settings