Social acceptance. The social acceptance of new products, applications, and technologies is a function of the attitudes, behaviours, opinions and activities resulting from the interactions between stakeholders, the general public or lay society as a whole and the proposed technologies. Social acceptance of a technology is thus the result of a complex relationship between technology and society. Deep social research on hydrogen acceptance would provide insight into the state of public and stakeholder acceptance (including sociopolitical and market actors), and about relevant factors affecting those levels of awareness and acceptance. This would result in useful information to understand better how society and stakeholders respond to innovative technologies and applications. Therefore, XXXXXXXX will focus on understanding the influencing factors in the acceptance process (taking into account a certain technology, project or system specification). This will focus in particular on the specific transition phase of market implementation, between the demonstration and market phases. The aim of the HYACINTH project is to provide evidence-based knowledge that helps to optimize the societal management of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies in the transition phase. The following questions are among those to be considered when seeking to understand acceptance processes and their implications in the transition phase of hydrogen energy and FCH technologies:
Social acceptance. The concept of social acceptance is often used by policy analysts, but few researchers have offered clear and useable definitions (FIGURE 4.1). In a 2007 study on renewable energy, Xxxxxxxxxxx and his colleagues (Xxxxxxxxxxx, Xxxxxxx, & Xxxx, 2007) identified three dimensions to define the concept of social acceptance. Socio-political acceptance refers to the public opinion and the acceptance of key political and economic actors. Community acceptance refers to the acceptance of the local population, the communities that are directly affected by the installation of new technologies. Market acceptance is related to the market adoption of an innovation. This distinction is very interesting for MAtchUP: Wüstenhagen highlights that even when the public opinion is positive at general level (high socio/political acceptance), the situation can be different when people need to change the way they work and live, as technologies impact their “backyard” (low community acceptance). MAtchUP is clearly addressing this area: in general, most of (if not all) people are favourable to investments that can make our cities more environment-friendly, safer, more inclusive and providing better services. However, some works may impact directly on people’s life in terms of buildability, for example, and/or feed someone’s prejudice on the correctness of the process behind. With this in mind, the first 3 variables that MAtchUP should consider are those that (according to Xxxxxxxxxxx) most influence community acceptance: “Distributional justice” (how are costs and benefits shared), “Procedural justice” (is there a fair decision-making process giving all stakeholders the possibility to participate?), “Trust” (whether the local population trusts the intentions and information of the investors and other actors from outside the community).
Social acceptance. Source: Wüstenhagen, Wolsink, Xxxxx, 2007 Considering that smart cities bring to market a bunch of new technologies and solutions, investigating social acceptance calls for a deeper understanding of what drives common acceptance of new technologies. While “awareness” will be clearly the prerequisite for their acceptance and use, academic models identify several other factors. The first model in this area is the highly criticized but still very much adopted Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), based on TRA (Theory of Reasoned Behaviour) and introduced by Xxxxx back in 1989 (Xxxxx, 1989) (FIGURE 4.2). The model identifies 2 factors that affect the decision to use a technology, notably: “Perceived usefulness (PU)” – defined by Xxxxx as "the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would enhance his or her job performance". “Perceived ease-of-use (PEOU)” – defined as "the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would be free from effort". Although the initial theory was designed for the introduction of PCs in a work environment, it is generally applied also outside it and PU is generally referred to the usefulness of a system independently from its work purpose. According to Xxxxx, a prospective user’s overall attitude toward using a given system is hypothesized to be a major determinant of whether or not he or she actually uses it. Attitude is in turn a function of PU and PEOU. The latter has a casual effect on the former. System design features influence both (they have an indirect effect on attitude and actual usage through their direct effect on PU and PEOU).
