A central feature of any political system is how people interact with their government. In democratic governments and in contentious situations, these interactions include coalition politics. Coalition politics exists when people and organizations from inside and outside of government mobilize and coordinate with others who share their beliefs about what government should or should not do on an issue. In forming coalitions, individuals and organizations may interact with each other either formally, such as joining an association, or informally, perhaps by cooperating to achieve shared goals. These interactions can be as simple as sharing information or as complicated as developing and executing a common strategy for influencing government. The interactions may result in changes to, or the continuation of, public policy that affects short- and long-term outcomes in a society. This book offers a comparison of coalition politics and public policies across seven countries on hydraulic fracturing debates: one of the most salient and contentious issues of the twenty-first century in environmental and energy politics. The comparison relies on a shared theoretical framework, the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), and a set of various but complementary empirical methods.
Hydraulic fracturing is a technique applied in unconventional oil and gas exploitation. Debates around hydraulic fracturing are often highly conflictive with polarized perspectives. Some people fear the potential harms to public and environmental health associated with hydraulic fracturing and advocate policies stopping or restricting the technique. Other people believe the technique provides substantial economic benefits and, thus, favor more liberal policy arrangements for its expansion. These differences in perceptions of the risks and benefits and, as a consequence, in policy preferences, create a threatening condition for both sides of the issue. The result is the mobilization of people into coalitions rooted in differences in perceptions of the risks and benefits of unconventional oil and gas development that uses hydraulic fracturing, and in their divergent positions on the role of government in governing the risks and benefits.
The salience and intensity of the debates over hydraulic fracturing are amplified because the issue intersects with many other issues in a society. The development of unconventional oil and natural gas resources involves questions over issues of national energy independence and the appropriate jurisdictional authority for its regulation in multilevel governments. It intersects with broader issues of renewable and nonrenewable energy development, mitigation and adaptation to climate change, land use, air quality regulations, and management of water supply and quality. Unconventional oil and gas development provides jobs and tax revenues to communities but also subjects some communities to boom-and-bust economic cycles. It often pits surface property owners against subsurface mineral owners within a broader context of natural resource management. All of these intersections occur under scientific and technical uncertainty and concern both potential risks and benefits of hydraulic fracturing. Consequently, hydraulic fracturing debates attract the attention of the news media, mass public, and government officials.
The coalition politics and public policies on the issue of hydraulic fracturing vary within and across countries. In some countries, the policy debates and processes are primarily centralized at the national level of government. In others, they are more decentralized at subunit levels of government. In some countries, the debates focus primarily on oil and gas development that uses hydraulic fracturing, whereas the debates in others focus on hydraulic fracturing as part of a broader energy development strategy. This book compares the diversity of coalition politics and public policy of the hydraulic fracturing issue across seven countries in North America and Europe, highlighting differences in terms of coalition structures, policy processes, and policy outputs across these countries.
Such a comparative analysis fits within an academic field of study on comparative public policy, which is the descriptive and explanatory study of one or more public policies across issues, contexts, or time (Heclo 1972; Feldman 1978; Heidenheimer et al. 1990; Gupta 2012). 1 Public policies can be defined as the actions and inactions of a government or an equivalent authority, which can come in many forms, including laws, regulations, statutes, and government programs. Public policies are at the epicenter of a process that unfolds over time by which citizens and governments politically interact to shape how societies address, or fail to address, issues. 2 Such policy processes occur in a context that exhibits a variety of attributes including forms of government, socioeconomic, physical and biological conditions, culture, and history. Policy processes are also shaped by events such as elections, economic recessions, technological innovations, and natural disasters. The comparative study of public policy can involve exploring different public policies in the same context, different public policies in relation to the same issue, changes to a public policy in the same locale over time, and a range of public policy responses to similar types of crises, among other approaches.
Comparative public policy has been a part of the study of public policy since it began as an academic field in the middle of the twentieth century (McDougal 1952; Lasswell 1956). As in comparative politics in general, the rationale for comparative public policy is that knowledge is best gained about the political interactions between people and their government by controlling for, and also varying, some aspects of public policies, contexts, events, and issues. For example, lessons can be learned about the effects of the structure of government on public policies and the related political behavior when the same issue is studied at the same time across different forms of government.
The challenges of conducting comparative public policy studies are well documented (Heclo 1972; Feldman 1978; Gupta 2012). They can be simplified into finding the right balance between two divergent considerations. One consideration is the need to provide a shared approach across cases that establishes a common language, assumptions, and guidance in conducting the research to make insightful comparisons. This involves guiding researchers to focus on certain elements of a research puzzle and certain relationships among the key elements, while ignoring others. If researchers are studying different components of the research puzzle in their respective case studies, then no comparison is possible. The second consideration is the need to offer flexibility to researchers to identify, describe, and explain the relevant elements of a specific case to make valid and reliable claims. If the shared approach is too rigid, then there might be strength in the comparison but weakness in each individual case study, which misses crucial case specificities. The research strategy adopted for this book, and described in the following sections, is to strike a balance between both considerations, thereby providing enough guidance for researchers to generate insightful comparisons across the cases, while also allowing enough flexibility for valid and reliable research in a single case.
Advocacy Coalition Framework
As any other policy issue, hydraulic fracturing politics is too complex to study in a single location, let alone comparatively across seven countries, without a systematic approach for guiding the research. The approach used to guide the research in this volume is the advocacy coalition framework (ACF). The ACF was created by Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith in the 1980s (Sabatier 1988; Jenkins-Smith 1982; Heintz and Jenkins-Smith 1988; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). The strength of the ACF lies in its capacity to help researchers understand and explain advocacy coalitions, learning, and policy change within a contentious policy issue. This strength comes from the ACF’s transparency in laying out simplifying assumptions, its clarity in identifying and defining concepts for study, and its explicit theoretical depictions of how concepts interrelate (Cairney and Heikkila 2014). Given the potential for intense conflicts in hydraulic fracturing politics and policymaking, and the likelihood for policy change in many countries, the ACF is an ideal approach for guiding this research.
There have been more than 200 applications of the ACF (Jenkins-Smith et al. 2014). Some of these applications have been on energy-related issues, including offshore oil and gas issues in the USA (Jenkins-Smith et al. 1991), nuclear energy policy in Sweden (Nohrstedt 2008) and in the USA (Ripberger et al. 2011), and energy and climate issues in the USA (Elgin and Weible 2013) and in Switzerland (Ingold 2011; Ingold and Varone 2012). Past research highlights some of the insights that can be gained from applying the ACF. For example, research on energy-related issues has confirmed that coalitions are relatively stable in their membership over long periods of time; contentious policy issues usually involve at least two coalitions; beliefs help bind coalition members together; scientific and technical information is an important resource for coalitions in attempting to achieve their political objectives; and policy change can result from major events (e.g., from disasters to elections) combined with an exploitive advocacy coalition.
This book represents the first attempt to synchronize applications of the ACF on the same topic in different countries. Despite the global use of the framework and the high number of publications, this is only the second edited book dedicated to applications of the ACF after one of the initial collections coedited by Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993). Compilations of applications have been published in journals as special issues. These special issues have included a comparative analysis of policy change in countries outside of North America and western Europe (Henry et al. 2014), a compilation of applications in Asian countries (Scott 2012), and a compilation of applications that feature theoretical and methodological advancements in ACF research (Weible et al. 2011a). One of the main lessons from these past compilations is that researchers will apply the ACF in a variety of ways. For example, Gupta (2014) used the ACF to analyze coalition strategies in India about the issue of nuclear energy development, and Han et al. (2014) applied the ACF to explain the suspension of a policy for a hydropower project in China. Collectively, the findings from these past studies can be integrated to advance knowledge about coalitions, learning, and policy change, but they are limited by their different research questions, topics, and locales. This collection remedies some of these past limitations by coordinating the research in each chapter aroun...