There remains a number of major challenges for sustainable development initiatives. The first is the issue of social acceptance of proposed initiatives in order to avoid negative attitudes from public officials involved and business operators in the area. Typically, factors associated with the degree of social acceptance include trust in government and business operators, and the perceived risk, benefit, necessity, and fairness.^[1] Social acceptance in this context refers to the levels of public support for, and acceptance of, a sustainable initiative and more often than not, many of the barriers for achieving successful initiatives at the implementation level can be considered as a manifestation of a lack of social acceptance. Furthermore, factors associated with the degree of social acceptance include also trust in businesses and the perceived risk, benefit, necessity, and fairness overall. ^[2] Social acceptance is easily distinguished in three dimensions,^[3] namely socio-political, community and market acceptance (see below):

Figure 1 – The triangle of social acceptance of renewable energy innovation. (Wustenhagen et al. 2007)

Socio-political acceptance refers to social acceptance on the broadest level by key stakeholders and policy actors. Several indicators demonstrate that public acceptance for sustainable initiatives and policies is high in most Member States. However, this could easily mislead policy makers to believe that social acceptance is not an issue at the local level, whereas there is indeed a problem.

Community acceptance refers to the specific acceptance of sustainable projects by local stakeholders, particularly residents and local authorities. This is where many argue that people reject projects typically

when they are in their own backyard (NIMBY). Typical factors that seem to influence community acceptance are factors related to distributional justice (How are costs and benefits shared?), procedural justice (Is there a fair decision-making process giving all relevant stakeholders an opportunity to participate?), and whether the local communities trust the information and intentions of the investors or actors from outside the community.

Market acceptance refers to the process of market adoption of an innovation by consumers through a communication process between individual adopters and their environment (Rogers 1995). For instance, despite the fact that consumers nowadays demand increasing amounts of green energy , in all likelihood this supply would probably come from other distant localities.

Another challenge is ensuring an equitable representation of stakeholders in order to ensure that underrepresented groups in sustainability projects and their specific priorities are not ignored. Similarly, one needs to be aware that issues which have higher representation or voting turnouts tend to be addressed more quickly than other lower vote-grabbing issues. A related challenge is offered by the fact that not everyone is equally aware and educated on the issues at hand. While today’s citizens have more access to information via digital tools, not everyone is digitally competent enough to partake, leaving certain groupings in the dark.