Out of sight, out of mind? The importance of local context and trust in understanding the social acceptance of biogas projects: A global scale review

Social acceptance is considered the main non-technical barrier to the development of bioenergy projects. This paper presents the results of a systematic literature review aimed to cover a lack in state-of-the-art literature about socio-cultural factors affecting the acceptance of biogas projects at a global scale. Moreover, this study is aimed at identifying which methods are used for studying this phenomenon, with a focus on the Life Cycle Thinking-oriented ones. Journal articles and conference proceedings were considered. At the end of the screening phases, 54 documents were selected and reviewed. The results showed that acceptance concerns two main issues: biogas plants and its presence in a given location and digestate application on fields. This review showed different results between high-income and low-middle-income countries. As regards the former, trust was the most mentioned socio-cultural factor. Education, as well as women's living conditions were considered important in the latter. However, a contextualisation of every outcome based on local peculiarities is needed in order to understand in a better way the accepting/refuting phenomena of the projects. As regards the second objective of this study, Life Cycle Analysis resulted the most widespread Life Cycle Thinking methodology. In conclusion, the outcomes of this work may be useful to identify the non-technical factors and the most suitable approach that should be considered for a successful implementation of site-specific biogas projects.