When a wind turbine becomes a dividing line: Social impact, rural communities, and the promise of co-design

I'll be honest. For years, I had a complicated relationship with renewable energy projects.

When I was managing the Rural Adversity Mental Health Program in New South Wales, I saw firsthand what happened when wind farms arrived in small communities without genuine engagement. Neighbours who had lived side by side for generations stopped speaking. Compensation arrangements that left some families comfortable and others feeling overlooked. Uncertainty and noise, in every sense of the word. And beneath all of it, a quieter erosion of something harder to name: trust, belonging, a sense of shared future.

I wasn't opposed to renewables. But I was deeply sceptical that the processes surrounding them had any real interest in the people most affected by them. Too often, community consultation looked like a series of information sessions and a feedback form. Something was done to communities, not with them.

The social fabric of rural communities isn't incidental to their health. It is their health. And when major projects fracture that fabric, the consequences show up in GP waiting rooms, for the people lucky enough to be connected with health services.

So what changed my mind?

Honestly, it was seeing what genuine social impact work can look like when it's done well. The difference between a social impact assessment as a compliance document and one used as a real planning tool is not subtle. The first produces a report. The second produces a conversation, and keeps it going long after the turbines are turning.

Queensland has just taken a step in the right direction. The Planning (Social Impact and Community Benefit) and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2025, which passed this year, now requires wind farm and large-scale solar farm proponents to complete a Social Impact Assessment and enter into a Community Benefit Agreement with local government before they can even lodge a development application. The intent is clear: community impact can no longer be an afterthought or an optional add in. It has to be front-loaded into the planning process itself.

This matters. But legislation can only take us so far. A mandatory SIA is a floor, not a ceiling. What fills that floor determines whether communities experience it as a genuine shift or simply a more elaborate compliance exercise.

What I understand now is that the process matters as much as the outcome. Who gets invited into the room. When. Whether their input shapes something real or just adds to a predetermined plan. Whether the people most affected by a project have a genuine voice in designing how it unfolds, or whether they're handed a ‘done deal’ and asked to comment on the edges.

This is why co-design, done properly, is so important to me. Not co-design as a workshop series, or as a way to generate community buy-in for something already decided. Real co-design that starts early, surfaces the full range of perspectives, sits with the uncomfortable ones, and builds something together that no single stakeholder could have imagined alone.

At Ethicol, we use the Co.Design4All framework (codesign4all.com), a structured four-phase approach that moves from discovery through to debrief. What I value about it is that it takes the aspiration of genuine participation and turns it into something practical and repeatable. It asks: who is affected? What do they actually need? And how do we stay accountable to those answers all the way through? That kind of rigour is exactly what the new Queensland requirements need behind them to deliver on their promise.

The energy transition is one of the most significant social as well as environmental shifts our rural communities will face this generation. The infrastructure is coming. Queensland has signalled that communities deserve more than a tick-box process. The question now is whether the spirit of that commitment is matched in how the work is actually done.

I've shifted from sceptic to believer. Not because the risks have gone away, but because I've seen what becomes possible when communities are genuinely centred in the process. The outcome isn't just a better project. It's a stronger community on the other side of it.

That feels worth working toward.