Policy Change in Renewable Energy Projects: A Case Study of the NECEC Project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As countries face higher environmental and political pressure to combat climate change and accelerate the energy transition, hydroelectricity has secured its place as the prime candidate for a reliable and clean alternative to fossil fuels. However, the expansion of hydroelectric infrastructure has seen protests from local coalitions of preservationists and angry citizens, sometimes aided by the deep pocket of energy competitors, leading to the termination of several projects. This paper seeks to better understand this dilemma between ambitious climate goals and local opposition by analyzing the ongoing case of the NECEC, a hydroelectric transmission line proposed by a Hydro-Quebec-CMP partnership to deliver electricity from Canada to Massachusetts, US via Maine. The case study follows the theoretical foundation of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), a long-standing and empirically supported theory of public policy that emphasizes the role of coalitions in translating beliefs into policy change. In addition to confirming the framework's usefulness in explaining highly contentious cases, this study also provides critical insights into how coalitions spread favorable information, the strategic choice of political instruments, the partisan composition of coalitions, and the added complexity of involving a foreign company. To smooth out future large-scale projects, the paper makes recommendations for decision-makers based on bipartisan public engagement with community embeddedness, as well as better project design regarding fair compensation and reduced visibility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".