Papers in Prep

Boom, Bust, Action! How Communities Cope with Fracking Boom-Bust Cycles

Relatively little attention has been devoted to the role of local governance in the boom-bust cycle. Rural development literature tends to offer generic recommendations, such as promoting amenity-based tourism or creating community-based wireless internet, rather than attending to the social and economic particularities of communities trapped in boom-bust cycles. Some experts go to the other extreme, developing detailed case studies and guidance. But it is often unclear to what extent the resulting recommendations apply more broadly.

We examine rules, strategies, and practices that experts recommend be deployed by actors at the local level (county, city, town, township, village, borough, hereafter also referenced as “localities” and “communities”) seeking to reduce the adverse impacts of an extractive boom-bust cycle while harnessing and perpetuating the cycle’s positive impacts. Collectively these activities and their participants form the local boom-bust governance regime, where governance is the collection of processes, organizations, and mechanisms by which political actors influence actions and outcomes. Community members, businesses, nonprofits, and local and state government officials all may participate in governance. We first discuss top-down, lateral, and bottom-up governance approaches generally, then zoom in on management activities helpful in a range of sectors impacted by UOGD booms and busts. We find that communities employ diverse strategies, although much more attention is paid to navigating the boom than coping with or avoiding a bust.

Ideology, Industry, and Vulnerability – Community Members’ Views on Governance of the Shale Industry

Policy studies rarely consider how citizen preferences on specific issues influence the adoption of relevant policies. When it comes to local policy, there are strong reasons to believe that the preferences of officials, stakeholders and citizens all could shape local policy choices; economic development and land use, in particular, are among the most hotly contested of local issues. Residents often strongly express their support, or opposition, to policies that affect their livelihoods, properties, and communities through lenses created by their ideology, industry ties, or socioeconomic vulnerability.

Surprisingly, few studies of the influence of community politics on local policy actually ask residents about specific policy preferences. Instead, scholarship focuses on broader concepts, exploring citizen support for growth management, pro-development ballot measures, anti-growth movements, new development, and urban design and planning, for example. The relationships between individuals’ beliefs, livelihoods, and local policy preferences are hardly examined. But differences in households’ levels of vulnerability to the changing economy and differences in livelihood strategies are likely to affect how people view governance.

In this study, we explore individuals’ local policy preferences associated with the controversial and highly visible policy issue: unconventional oil and gas industry drilling. Some studies have examined individuals’ perception of the industry, but there are gaps in our understanding of factors driving individuals’ perception of community impacts and preferences for the local governance of the industry. To explore the public’s perception of unconventional oil and gas impacts and policy preferences, we collected survey responses from more than 500 households in the Appalachian region in 2021. Households were randomly selected from 30 counties overlying the Marcellus and Utica Shales in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Using this original data, we explore community members’ preferences regarding governance strategies, as related to their ties to the unconventional oil and gas industry (including being a mineral leaseholder or employed in the industry), drilling activity in their community, trust in industry and trust in local government, political ideology, and household socioeconomic vulnerability. Using geographically weighted logistic regressions, we examine their support for local policies such as zoning, setbacks, road use and maintenance agreements, and environmental monitoring.

Our study illustrates that political ideology and trust in industry and government strongly influence policy preferences and perceptions of impacts. Although respondents were overwhelmingly supportive of the industry in the region as a whole, there were notable differences in support for different types of policy instruments, e.g. for road use maintenance agreements versus water monitoring. This study focuses on understanding—rather than making assumptions about—the governance-related perceptions and priorities of individuals embedded in communities experiencing gains and losses from UOGD boom and busts. Understanding residents’ preferences are practically important because some local policies require citizens’ support—and, more fundamentally, because democratically elected officials should strive for constituent responsiveness.