The Federalism of Fracking: How the Locus of Policy-Making Authority Affects Civic Engagement

Governing Unconventional Oil and Gas Extraction: The Case of Pennsylvania

“…The system of UOGE governance in the United States is distinctly polycentric (Arnold & Holahan, ; Warner & Shapiro, ). Since the national congress has declined to “federalize” UOGE regulation, and since USEPA—partly due to restrictions in existing federal statutes (Rabe & Borick, )—has adopted the role of secondary overseer, states have assumed primary regulatory authority over UOGE.…”

“…Local governments across Pennsylvania vary appreciably in their inclinations and abilities to regulate UOGE (Arnold & Holahan, 2014). Favoring state-level controlwith the intention of minimizing the formidable coordination problems posed by the fact that Pennsylvania's shale fairways contain hundreds of self-governing local government units that each control land use within their borders, subject to state planning and zoning laws-parts of Act 13 explicitly preempted or constrained some aspects of local self-governance.…”

Conceptualizing the above ground factors in shale gas: Toward a research agenda on regulatory governance

“…Still, it can be assumed that 'early adopters' of the fracking technology (such as Texas) serve as important sites for regulatory experimentation and as "Guinea pigs" 'laggards' can profit from. 5 Latecomers, in turn, may profit from a process of policy learning, either adopting best practice or going a different pathway in order to avoid failures the first movers had encountered. Finally, a federalist stance on fracking would pose that regulatory competition among U.S. states would eventually generate a set of regulatory patterns that are widely regarded as superior to others and hence diffused both horizontally and vertically across the country.…”

“…To the contrary, strong regulatory heterogeneity created a 'hodgepodge' [151], 385) of regulatory frameworks in shale on the state level ( [126] cited in Rabe [121]). So while regulatory competition may on the one hand lead to tailored results for a specific statelevel environment (possibly also contingent on other factors such as state capacity [5] or the ability to compromise [40]), it on the other hand has not generated opportunity for best practice and policy learning. More empirical investigation therefore is warranted, notably beyond the US context, and with a deliberately comparative approach (an exception is Lin [89]).…”

Fractured Relationships

“…The distribution of fracking's costs and benefits places additional stressors on state-local governing relationships (Arnold and Holahan 2014;McAdam and Boudet 2012;Gold and McGinty 2013). Supporters point to broad and often statewide improvements to economic forecasts, state and local government budgets, and significant gains in employment.…”