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Abstract In land-use planning processes there often exists a tension between, on the one hand, making efforts to increase the democratic legitimacy of the process and, on the other, ensuring efficiency in the procedures. This is not least relevant in the case of large-scale wind power where development decisions balance between the need to safe-guard local self-determination and the urgency of mitigating climate change. This paper investigates how the issue of legitimacy versus efficiency is managed within the national planning systems of Finland, Norway and Sweden when faced with the expansion of wind power and how the national strategies for wind power planning are perceived by different stakeholders. As the EU Renewable Energy Directives set the conditions for national policy in the field, the empirical work starts with an examination of these documents before moving on to a comparison of the national planning and permitting processes. The results show that the development of wind power has been moving planning procedures away from more inclusive planning methods in favour of more top-down and streamlined ones.

Research suggests that efforts to facilitate wind power development often include strategies that marginalize the participation of local oppositional interest groups in planning processes. The argument in this article is that such strategies are misguided as they move planning debates to less transparent, legitimate and predictable arenas, and as they potentially can impede wind power development. The argument is built through a theoretical and empirical exploration of how local oppositional interest groups, formally and informally, can participate in and influence wind power planning processes. The study shows that these groups engage in formal planning procedures when possible, but when they feel excluded from such procedures they find informal ways to bypass and influence the formal process, such as lobbying and networking. Importantly, the empirical results show that these informal activities often have a considerable scalar and spatial scope, involving the national and international engagement of other oppositional groups and of authorities that would normally not be involved in local planning processes. Through these wide-ranging activities, local disputes become part of a broader contestation of wind power, thus putting pressure on authorities to restrict wind power development not only in the local context, but potentially also on a policy level.

With a fast rise in large-scale wind power development in Sweden and other countries in recent years, issues related to energy justice generally and distributional justice specifically have become concerns in windmill siting. Some research, for instance, has indicated that it is easier to build windmills in economically marginalized communities. The evidence for this, however, is still limited. Thus, this study aims to statistically evaluate the extent to which the decisions to approve or reject windmill proposals in Sweden can be explained by factors related to the socio-economic characteristics of people living in the areas surrounding windmill sites. The study is based on an odds ratio analysis of decisions on all windmill proposals in Sweden, in which georeferenced socio-economic data on an individual level for all inhabitants within 3 and 10 km of the windmill sites are studied. The results show skewness in the distribution of windmills, with a higher likelihood of rejection in areas with more highly educated people and people working in the private sector, compared to a higher likelihood of approval in areas with more unemployed people. This skewness, while not necessarily unjust, warrants further policy and research attention to distributional justice issues when developing wind power.