Dual enrollment in preferential property tax programs and improved forest management carbon offset projects is recognized as a promising strategy to optimize financial benefits and achieve sustainable management objectives for landowners. Despite this, empirical studies examining this question are limited. To assess the nuances of program compatibility for dual enrollment, a policy analysis and 37 semi-structured expert interviews were conducted to explore state-level forest tax interpretations, enforcement, and county-level discretion, with a focus on harvest and forest management plan requirements. While results indicate relatively high levels of compatibility in the states assessed, none have strategic, long-term approaches addressing enrollment in both program types, with compatibility generally being contingent upon case-by-case evaluations of landowners' management objectives and program requirements. In many instances, compatibility is determined by county tax officials with varying degrees of input from state governments. This decentralized approach can lead to a confusing operating environment, potentially affecting the opportunities for landowners to participate in both programs. These issues are identified as key barriers to the expansion of market participation among small landowners, often who are interested in retaining their tax benefits provided by tax programs and may be concerned about forfeiting them to participate in an improved forest management project.

In the US, local governments are increasingly crucial in driving climate action. Drawing upon previous scholarly work, this study assesses nine local climate action plans in the state of Michigan. It introduces a comprehensive framework integrating climate resilience and environmental justice (EJ) indicators to evaluate plan content. Despite recognizing global climate concerns, qualitative content analysis shows that plans lack localized analyses and actions, hampering planning efforts as a result of insufficient data, minimal coordination, limited funds, and finite policy options. Key aspects like equitable resource distribution, environmental burdens, and community engagement are often overlooked. Without addressing these limitations, local governments lack the tools to effectively implement justice-oriented climate policies.

Why do some liberals oppose renewable energy projects they support in the abstract, while some conservatives embrace projects their partisan identity would predict they reject? Existing frameworks explain renewable energy opposition through material self-interest and group mobilization, but cannot account for the systematic, ideologically patterned deviations that siting conflicts routinely produce. This chapter introduces policy concretization as a theoretical framework to fill this gap. Policy concretization describes the process by which abstract policy commitments become operational through place-based implementation, triggering value disambiguation: the forced ranking of previously co-equal commitments within an ideological tradition. When a renewable energy project is proposed, liberals who simultaneously hold climate and conservation values must rank them; conservatives who hold both renewable skepticism and property rights commitments must do the same. The resulting deviations are not ideological failures but coherent expressions of latent value hierarchies that abstract politics never required actors to articulate. Deviating actors engage in rhetorical shielding, justifying their positions through the vocabulary of their own tradition rather than the opposing one. I develop this framework through a comparative case study of two siting conflicts: Isabella County, Michigan, where conservative farmers and officials supported the state's largest wind project by invoking property rights and economic autonomy, and Amherst, Massachusetts, where liberal residents and environmental activists championed a moratorium on solar development to protect forested land. Together, these cases demonstrate that policy concretization operates across ideological traditions, producing predictable patterns of intra-ideological conflict with broad implications for the politics of energy transitions.

Policy feedback theory argues that policies create constituencies that defend and reward the delivering party. A central insight of this literature is that the visibility of policy benefits—citizens' ability to observe and attribute tangible outcomes to government action—is a key driver of political updating. Yet existing empirical work tests this claim almost exclusively by tracking whether direct beneficiaries change their behavior after receiving a transfer. This paper asks a related question: can the spatial visibility of policy-induced installations generate feedback effects even among those who did not receive an incentive themselves? Clean energy policy is an especially well-suited domain for investigating this question. Unlike purely private transfers, renewable energy installations are physically observable: neighbors see rooftop solar proliferating on nearby homes, and communities share in the economic and environmental benefits of local wind and solar projects. This means that visible deployment may update the political behavior of adopters and non-adopters alike—not because they experienced a government transfer, but because they can observe the material consequences of clean energy policy in their immediate environment. Using geocoded solar adoption records, campaign contribution data, and utility-scale solar project locations, we directly test whether voters who install rooftop solar, and voters who live near individual or community-level installations, increase donations to Democratic candidates. We additionally examine how donation effects vary by candidate level and assess neighborhood spillover effects among non-adopters.

In the U.S., solar energy deployment depends heavily on decisions made by farmers and agricultural landowners. Despite this, relatively few empirical studies center on the trade-offs farmers face when evaluating adoption of small- and large-scale solar. Drawing on a survey of Virginia agricultural producers paired with latent class analysis, we identify two distinct styles that reflect fundamentally different modes of evaluation. Comprehensive Evaluators simultaneously weigh benefits, costs, and mitigation strategies, balancing economic opportunities against installation and maintenance costs, while Cost-Focused Evaluators concentrate on costs while showing limited engagement with benefits or mitigation strategies. Results show that evaluation styles are the strongest predictors of adoption intentions, explaining substantially more variation than familiarity with solar, household income, age, farm size, production type, or ownership. Semi-structured interviews corroborate this pattern, revealing how comprehensive and cost-focused farmers weigh competing agricultural, land-use, and environmental priorities. Our findings suggest that effective solar deployment in agricultural areas requires differentiated approaches that engage fully and transparently with the benefits and costs as evaluated by different types of farmers. Without such engagement, and by assuming uniform evaluations of costs and benefits, policy interventions and outreach efforts risk misalignment with farmers' concerns, undermining adoption and exacerbating siting conflict.