Overcoming resistance to effective climate mitigation policies is crucial to avoid catastrophic climate change. A key challenge lies in addressing opposition from groups who feel unfairly impacted by the costs these policies create (Colantone et al., 2024). This article tackles a timely and only piecewise studied type of climate policy - wind energy. While wind energy has become an increasingly important tool for meeting climate targets in time, local opposition to project proposals is widespread (Suskevics et al., 2019). This conflict has accentuated the (un)fairness of turbine distribution, and of which communities that are expected to take them on.

This article takes a broad approach to the wind expansion question, looking at its role in a larger distributive conflict (See Aklin & Mildenberger, 2020) both in terms of where turbines are placed, how existing patterns of inequalities may shape local attitudes, and whether the institutional set-up shape how much local attitudes matter for deployment. Largely lacking from the literature are analyses of the overall geographic patterns of local attitudes that go beyond case-specific wind farm characteristics and subgroup focuses, and investigations of how institutional contexts interact with such patterns. By utilizing two decades of Swedish representative public opinion data, geo-tagged turbine registers, and a mid-sample institutional change, I study how geographic variation of material inequality and discontent relate to local attitudes, and to turbine placement. Lastly, these links are studied comparatively before and after a local veto was introduced in Sweden, showcasing the contextual role of institutionalized community veto points.