Researcher Chat: David Bidwell on Community Engagement Processes and Perceptions

How does an impactful community engagement process look? How are members of the public consulted, informed and spoken to? This research team looked into how the process itself shapes how communities respond to change. 

Additional Resources:

• “Perceived misinformation in offshore wind: Insights from participants in Northeastern U.S. offshore wind planning and permitting processes” (2025) 
• “Communication silos: A governance network approach to the offshore wind planning and permitting process” (2025) 
• “Uncertainty confounds justice: the offshore wind ‘Devil they don't know’ in the Northeast United States” (2025) 
• “Watered down justice: Experiences of the offshore wind transition in Northeast coastal communities in the United States” (2025) 

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Transcript

Researcher Chat: David Bidwell on Community Engagement Processes and Perceptions

Abbey Greene: The ocean. For many, it's a source of life and peace, but it's also a source of complex issues.

Welcome to “For Shore,” a podcast for talking about those complex ocean issues. 

Energy is a big topic right now: in our bills, in the news…you name it.

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David Bidwell: Any way that we produce energy has impacts, right? And so I think part of the hope is that people who are bearing those impacts are also getting the benefits. People have this sort of natural inclination to want things that are being produced in their backyard to be used in their backyard.

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Abbey Greene: That was David Bidwell, a social science researcher in Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island. Some of his research focuses on the public's acceptance of renewable energy technologies, public participation, environmental attitudes, and decision making.

Poonam Narotam: This podcast comes to you from Sea Grant, a national program that brings top-notch marine science to all U.S. states and territories. This season, we talk with researchers funded by Sea Grant in 2021 about how coastal communities are grappling with new ocean industries. Fishermen, in particular, are experiencing a lot of changes, and Sea Grant is committed to helping them. 

We'll delve into social science, people's perceptions of ocean uses, and how ocean spaces can be shared. We're gonna have candid conversations and, together, we'll make research more accessible and understandable for us all.

Abbey Greene: So, I'm Abby Green of Rhode Island Sea Grant.

Poonam Narotam: And I'm Poonam Narotam of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant. This episode takes a deep dive into community engagement processes for when a new industry comes to town.

The processes by which communities are involved, spoken to, and heard can really shape how they respond to these changes. David gives us a great place to start the conversation.

David Bidwell: So my research has always revolved around how people think about the environment, how they experience things in the environment, how they make decisions. And about 10 years ago, when I came to the University of Rhode Island, I took those approaches and applied them to offshore wind energy.

Abbey Greene: David, to set the stage, can you tell us why the Northeast Corridor became the focus of the first offshore wind farms in the United States?

David Bidwell: One of the reasons why the Northeast has really been the focus of offshore wind development here early on in the United States, one is that there's a terrific wind resource off our coast. It is windy and we know there's a long tradition of sailing in our area. So there's a term used in energy development called “close to load.” We do have some very populated areas in the Northeast. It is expensive to move electricity from one area to the other. And so producing electricity close to where it's used actually saves money in transmission, but it also saves in terms of energy loss. So anytime you are transporting electricity over long distances, through high transmission wires, you are losing a certain amount of electricity. So there is some benefit to producing electricity close to these population centers, where it is being used. 

And then the other reason that we've looked very close to the northeast is that we actually have a pretty extensive outer continental shelf. The water is relatively shallow out to some pretty far distances, which allows people to use existing technology, where turbines are attached to the ocean floor.

Poonam Narotam: One of the Sea Grant funded projects that David helped lead took a look at how people use information in these situations.

David Bidwell: That project is trying to understand what information has gotten out, how people get their information, how people have been engaged in decision making. During the two years that we've done that project is really this issue of misinformation and trying to understand when and how false information, incorrect information, is being shared, what that looks like, how it gets out, how it spreads, and what impacts it may be having on genuine conversations and dialogue. We do know that things that are unfamiliar to people tend to raise greater concern. Things viewed as unnatural raise greater concerns, et cetera. And we also know that in the absence of information, people tend to fill in the spaces. So people don't tend to say like, oh, this isn't something I know a lot about, so I'm not gonna form an opinion. They fill in those gaps. 

Abbey Greene: David describes himself as a sort of social psychologist. In all of his work, he studies how people think. 

David Bidwell: When I started doing this work and I would tell people, you know, I study what people think about offshore wind. They would say, “Well, so what do people think about offshore wind?” And I always say, “well, it's complicated.” We have a lot of ideas in our head, and our opinions and our attitudes are shaped by many factors. It's not very often that we meet people who are all super gung-ho, “Yes, offshore wind is the greatest thing ever,” or people who are like, “This is the worst thing ever that could happen.” We tend to find people more in the middle and as humans we're often pushed and pulled in different directions. 

There's something called a dual processing system, which is sort of system one and system two thinking. I'm gonna start with system two 'cause that's often how people believe that they think about things. So this is the slow, rational, effortful way of thinking about things where you really weigh the pros and cons and you make a calculated decision.

There's also system one mode of thinking, and these are the more, effortless, automatic, ways that we think. So you think about emotions, or cognitive biases that we have, in the way that we just respond at a gut level to things. People's attitudes towards offshore wind and the offshore wind industry are a mix of those two things. I've done a lot of work trying to understand factors that lead to people and what we see are that some of these more rational factors, if you think about them. The pros and cons, how offshore wind will affect the economy, how it will affect our spaces and the environment. Those things all come into play, but we can also find some of these more emotional underlying causes that actually contribute to how people think about those costs and benefits. 

Poonam Narotam: David worked on this project with researcher Emily Diamond, who's also based at the University of Rhode Island. If you wanna dive deeper into it, check out the episode of For Shore featuring Emily. For the rest of this episode, we are going to turn our attention to another project of David's funded by Sea Grant.

With a different set of colleagues, David looked at community engagement processes, and whether and how they reflect the perceptions and experiences of community audiences. This includes commercial fishermen and everyone working within a port, as well as people who interact with the ocean recreationally and tribal nations whose ties to the water are part of their heritage and culture.

Here's David's colleague Emma Korein of the University of Delaware.

Emma Korein: What we're focusing on is how are communities engaged in decision making? are they included in processes? what does the distribution of the costs and benefits of offshore wind projects look like? Because this is a really new topic of research. Our first approach was to explore it qualitatively, which means that we wanted to understand just how people feel about it. What are people's perceptions?

Abbey Greene: Let's listen to David and Emma describe their research process. 

David Bidwell: So what we are doing is looking specifically at five different communities that we feel have been affected by, or are being affected by, offshore wind development. And so these include, New London, Connecticut; Narraganset, Rhode Island; East Hampton, New York; and then a couple of communities in Massachusetts: New Bedford and we consider Martha's Vineyard to be a single community. 

Abbey Greene: East Hampton and Narraganset are communities that dealt with cable landings. New London, New Bedford and Martha's Vineyard are port communities.

David Bidwell: So we have a couple different ways that we're collecting data about people's attitudes here. The first step was a series of interviews. We've focused really in two different kinds of communities. So, one type are indigenous communities. In the northeast, there are either federally recognized or state recognized tribes. We've been working with indigenous scholar Dr. Kelsey Leonard, who is a member of the Shinnecock tribe from Long Island. Then we've had a team working in non-indigenous communities, talking to people who represent government and different organizations, working waterfronts. 

The second big piece of that project is a series of surveys, which we are doing in each of those five communities also. Really trying to make sure that we have good representation from communities that are traditionally marginalized communities, communities of color in the area as well.

Abbey Greene: The interviews took place during the summer and fall of 2022, and they tried to capture the voices of everyone living in these coastal communities.

David Bidwell: Who has an opportunity to voice their opinions or to make decisions. How are different values and interests thought about in the decision-making process? For this, we think about things like, are there meetings, are there opportunities for people to voice their opinions about what's going on? are those opinions and is that input actually taken into consideration when decisions are made? how do people feel like they've been treated throughout the process? or whether they think that the decisions are based on good information or sound science? et cetera. 

Abbey Greene: And they considered how these decisions are ultimately impacting society. 

David Bidwell: How are the benefits and burdens of energy development and energy operation, how are those distributed throughout society? In the offshore wind space, we can certainly think about who is it that is feeling the benefits of those. So maybe they're getting jobs or they're feeling the benefits of reduced emissions, but also, communities that are maybe feeling more of the impacts of either the actual construction of turbines out in the water, but also where those impacts come ashore. Whether they're hosting a transmission line, or port in their community is being used a lot for construction activities and people actually prefer to have energy produced near where it is being used. Any way that we produce energy has impacts. Right? So I think part of the hope is that people who are bearing those impacts are also getting the benefits. People have this sort of natural inclination to want things that are being produced in their backyard to be used in their backyard.

Poonam Narotam: With offshore wind, this concept of fairly distributing benefits and burdens gets messy. A lot of offshore wind farms are cited in federal waters, which can be seen as a shared natural resource. However, individual states are purchasing chunks of power generated in those offshore wind farms built in those federal waters to advance their own CO2 reduction goals.

And to make it more complicated, the cables that transfer power from the wind farm to the grid then pass through state waters to land on shore and can potentially impact local communities. By the time this energy comes to shore, however, it's added back into a regional grid shared by several states.

David Bidwell: We have projects, you know, 15, 20 miles off the shore of Rhode Island or Massachusetts, but that energy is going to New York.

Abbey Greene: The issue of who gets what has driven the creation of community benefit packages. On the one hand, these packages can reward places for hosting development like a landing cable on their shoreline. On the other hand, the idea sometimes rattles people. Here's Emma. 

Emma Korein: Some of these communities had that perception that these benefit agreements were a way of buying out the communities. And in some cases, you can't control whether they perceive it that way.

But one thing that some of our interviewees said that I found really interesting was that the process by which they negotiate these agreements can affect whether people see them as a bribe or as a genuine goodwill benefit to the community. For example, if they come in and say, “We'll give you this bag of cash, let us use your beach,” that's more likely to be seen as a bribe. Whereas if they come in and say, “Okay, we'd like to talk to you and all of your trusted leadership and these local community groups and say, what do you need in this community? Do you need a recreational center? Do you need money to support your tourism industry? Do you want training for potential future employees to work in the offshore in industry? What can we offer that would benefit and uplift your community?” That's seen quite differently. So it's not necessarily about what's given, but the process by which they collaboratively negotiate with the community, versus saying, “We, as the developer, control what you get and how you can use the money.”

Poonam Narotam: The team learned that people also felt like there was a lack of transparency, which ultimately sowed distrust. Here are Emma and David again.

Emma Korein: Offshore wind is a new industry, and therefore there's a lot of unknown variables. Some community members felt the uncertainty about offshore wind was due to a lack of transparency on the part of the developers and government officials, and also just a basic lack of information dissemination on the part of leadership.

They didn't know what sources of information they could trust. We had one example given of someone saying the only communication we got from our community from the developer was a press release. That's not a very warm and fuzzy, trustworthy source of information. They wanted the developers to come and build a relationship with the community and talk to them and have, you know, not these scripted dialogues, but actually have more informal discussions and build relationships within the community.

That's one of our key findings that helps explain where some of this mistrust and perception of corruption is coming from. The advice would be building with communities, being extremely transparent. You know, transparency isn't just, “here's what we know,” but it's also “okay, here's what we don't know.”

David Bidwell: In the risk industry, one of the things that they have landed on as a way that you sort of build community trust is something that they often call an analytic, deliberative process, which is sort of a fancy way of saying the need to bring lots of interests into the research process, to listen to people and the questions that they have and bring people along through that research process builds that relationship of trust, where people know how information was developed, who was developing it, what were the questions they were asking, and who they were accountable to in the process. And that can go a long way in terms of developing trust in information.

Abbey Greene: David and Emma also found that another way to foster strong and trusting relationships is to get real. And sometimes that happens best in informal settings. 

David Bidwell: So those are opportunities to actually meet directly with people face-to-face and have conversations in familiar and comfortable settings. We have found that those informal interactions are really valuable.

So at the Block Island Wind Farm, they did have a gentleman who lived on Block Island and had been there for like 20 years and they hired him and he was able to have those conversations right in the cafe and at the Garden Club and out on the street.

Poonam Narotam: Part of establishing trust is ensuring everyone involved in the decision-making process feels empowered and that their voice matters. Back to Emma and David.

Emma Korein: You know, what's interesting about offshore wind is that it's often discussed in a very global context. But at the end of the day, a lot of the impacts of these individual projects are very localized. We found through our study that local communities feel as though they're at the center of a lot of these offshore wind decision-making processes. For example, small coastal towns are often where the cable will land ashore or where a huge port is being developed for offshore wind. These are key parts of the offshore wind construction and operations. Yet communities felt sometimes they were sidestepped in decisions, they felt that they were unable to actually affect the outcomes of the project.

David Bidwell: One of the things that is there is this idea of social power, and who has had power in the past and who hasn't. And one of the things that I encourage is the opening up of decision making and making it clear who has power in a situation who doesn't, but also starting to share some of the power. One of the things that we've heard on our projects are these concerns about it is a very big money business. And so we need to try to think about those power dynamics and money. And so I think people need to push to change that dynamic.

Abbey Greene: David and Emma, I think this was a great conversation. Thank you so much for giving us your time. David and his team have published several peer-reviewed papers in 2024 and 2025 on both research projects we just talked about. And there are a few more in the works.

Want to learn more? You can find research publications, more resources and other episodes of For Shore on our website: seagrantenergy.org. We're all learning together, so send us your questions.

Poonam Narotam: This episode was produced by Ryan Campos of the University of Rhode Island Inner Space Center. And this podcast would not be possible without the support of our funders: Rhode Island Sea Grant, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant, the National Sea Grant Energy Liaison Initiative, the Northeast Sea Grant Consortium, NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Prince Charitable Trusts, University of Rhode Island. and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution 

See you next time, For Shore!