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Seeking clues for sustainable energy future, this paper focuses on the social dimension of renewable energy developments. It aims to gain insight into this dimension and to clarify its significance. With this purpose, it reviews the general understandings, key assumptions and the different views in the relevant literature, on the basis of two main themes: local opposition and participation. While doing this, it adopts a view that renewable energy developments should be promoted without sacrificing the social pillar of sustainable development. In order to achieve socially acceptable solutions and transition to sustainable society, such a view points to a need for understanding social context of renewable energies and searching for more democratic and fair processes, and above all, a change in the dominant policy paradigms. The "what?" and "how?" questions in the context of our country necessitates further research on the social and policy dimensions of renewable energy. Since the subject has not been adequately addressed yet, this paper is considered to serve as a reference and to open up a new research field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural values have impacts on social behavior and incorporation of culture into positivist oriented human-based studies reveal methodological problems. This paper investigates culture by positivist methods and emphasizes morality, emic, subjective culture and derived ethics approaches. In this paper the need for adoption of intercultural social fact or derived ethics approach in problem researches is conceived. Furthermore by examination of many different cultures, it has been seen that there exist many common value tendencies. Thus finally it is stated that interpretation of differences or similarities of different cultures, these common social facts can be used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In social psychology, the bystander effect, defined as a social dilemma, is related to the probability of help to a victim by the mere presence of others. This dilemma has been generally assumed, by game theoreticians and experimental economists, to represent the same social phenomenon as the volunteer's dilemma. In this paper, we analyze these two different social dilemmas and the main question of the article is whether these two different social dilemmas represent the same social state. We first provide a broad literature review, and discuss the game theoretical foundation of the volunteer's dilemma. Then, we provide an alternative theoretical explanation for the bystander effect and discuss the differences between these two social states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]