Local Politics and the Derailing of the UK's Shale Gas Ambitions
Power and Permission
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publishing:20th Jan '27
£171.99
This title is due to be published on 20th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Local Politics and the Derailing of the UK's Shale Gas Ambitions examines how the 2013 UK government declared it was going “all out for shale”, but why, a decade later, no commercial shale gas had ever been produced, the industry had packed up and gone, and ministers were moving from moratorium to outright ban. The book explains why, and locates the answer not in Westminster but in the council chambers, village halls and roadside verges of Lancashire, North Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.
Drawing on a systematic comparison of nine proposed drilling sites, the book shows that Britain’s shale gas failure was political rather than geological or economic, and introduces a distinction that reaches far beyond fracking: between consent, the formal approvals a project can win, and Permission, the working political legitimacy without which those approvals cannot be used. Cuadrilla secured consent at Preston New Road and had to abort operations; North Yorkshire approved fracking at Kirby Misperton and no gas was ever extracted. A comparative chapter on the United States shows the same forces at work under very different institutions. As governments race to build the wind farms, pylons and nuclear plants of the energy transition, this is a study of what happens when national power meets local power, and loses.
Local Politics and the Derailing of the UK's Shale Gas Ambitions will appeal to students and scholars of Political Science, Environmental Politics and Policy and Social Movement Theory.
"Why did a shale-gas industry backed so strongly by the UK Government ultimately fail? This thoughtful and highly readable book provides a persuasive answer by shifting attention from Westminster to the counties and communities in which development was contested. Its distinction between planning consent and political 'Permission' offers an especially valuable way of understanding why regulatory approval does not necessarily translate into development. The book also illuminates why expectations derived from the American shale boom could not simply be transferred to Britain—explaining why pro-development constituencies in the US were largely absent in the UK context. Attentive to place, power, public concerns and coalition-building, and grounded in rich comparative research, the book advances scholarship on shale gas while offering insights of much wider relevance to contested infrastructure and the energy transition. Despite its considerable theoretical ambition, it remains unusually accessible, engaging and lucid throughout."
Dr Darrick Nighthawk Evensen, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Politics, The University of Edinburgh
"Dr Andrew Scott provides a new and important focus on the politics of hydraulic fracturing for shale oil and gas (otherwise known as fracking). The book's distinctive contribution is to shift from the rather insincere 'all out for shale' rhetoric of the UK government under David Cameron towards an in-depth examination and comparison of pro-shale and anti-fracking conflict across multiple drilling sites in England. It shows that local politics and opposition matters even when national governments project a strong commitment to policy change."
Paul Cairney, Professor of Politics and Public Policy,Division of History, Heritage, and Politics, University of Stirling
ISBN: 9781041259350
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
224 pages