Benefits or bribes? Ethical concerns with the potential corruption of civic obligations through community benefits schemes for wind farms

Abstract

Community benefit schemes have become a common feature of new energy industries, and are especially prevalent in renewable energy developments like wind farms. These schemes arise when businesses—either under their own discretion or in compliance with policy mechanisms—establish systems to deliver in-kind and monetary goods to local communities. The schemes may be morally justified on several grounds, including compensation and distributive fairness. Yet almost from their beginning, community benefit schemes have faced accusations that they amount to bribery. While prior research has illuminated the empirical factors likely to lead to such allegations, this paper employs normative theory to help developers and policymakers better understand when and how this ‘bribery’ accusation articulates a genuine ethical concern. Community benefits schemes are not bribes strictly speaking; they do not involve secret and illegal abuses of power. However, they can influence community members to forgo their civic and stewardship obligations—such as to attend to a local development's potential environmental or cultural impacts—in favour of their self-interest. Fortunately, strategically designed community benefit schemes can deliver important moral goods while minimising the ethical concern that they inappropriately influence civic decision-making. The paper enumerates four key policy principles for designing such schemes for new energy developments: avoiding bribes is a matter of prioritising ethically mandatory obligations, reducing self-interested influences, supporting stakeholder's civic obligations, and developing trust and integrity in relevant operations and processes.