Understanding the spatial and temporal dynamics of public attitudes and community responses to shale gas: an integrated approach

This research project will analyse how public attitudes and community responses to shale gas unfold in space and time. Given that public protests about hydraulic fracturing ('fracking') have taken place in several countries including the UK, understanding public attitudes and community responses to shale gas development is a key social science research area, with relevance for UK policy and for developers' 'social license to operate'.

To date, cross-sectional research on public attitudes to shale gas has predominated, with little detail on how attitudes might vary across geographical areas or evolve over time. Moreover, little in-depth research has charted the lived experience of UK communities in places of shale gas development or the operator engagement that has taken place there.

To address these gaps, this project will implement a mixed-method approach combining spatial, qualitative and quantitative tools. We take a multi-scalar approach with a particular interest in the evolution of public attitudes at the societal level, and the relations between stakeholder and community engagement around particular shale gas development projects at the local level. Informed by frameworks derived from research on other controversial energy technologies, we aim to address the following questions:

RQ1. How do public attitudes to shale gas evolve over space and time in response to unfolding events and changing discourse?
RQ2. What is the lived experience of communities affected by shale gas site preparation, exploration and extraction?
RQ3. What rationales and practices are employed by shale gas stakeholders, including operators, to engage with communities and how is this engagement perceived and responded to?

The proposed research will develop new understandings of public attitudes and community responses to shale gas informed by theory from human geography and social psychology. Drawing on core concepts of geographical differentiation, spatial proximity and place attachment, we will develop and apply a novel methodological basis for analyzing socio-economic aspects of shale gas.

The work programme is divided into four interdependent tasks. WP1 will construct a platform to integrate data at national and local scales, with environmental (both topographical and subsurface), political and socio-economic characteristics overlaid with data on the evolution of public attitudes (WP2) and lived experience and stakeholder engagement (WP3). A final work package will synthesise findings from across these strands (WP4).

The project will have multiple impacts, including:

Capacity building - fostering the development of less experienced investigators and post-doctoral researchers through the targeted co-management of research activities and co-production of written outputs;

Public and stakeholder engagement - with national and local stakeholders in each case study area, from public, private and NGO sectors;

Influence on policy and practice - working with the project's international Advisory Board to widely share findings expected to attract local, national and international interest;

Wider academic impacts - through a series of high profile scientific publications, new datasets, conference and seminar presentations.

The proposed project will adopt an engaged research approach and will benefit multiple stakeholders at national and local scales.

The project will benefit shale gas communities by providing opportunities for residents and action groups in three case study locations to give voice to their sense of place and lived experiences, attitudes and understandings of shale gas. This will be achieved through research activities (walking interviews, focus groups) and participation in local and national engagement events that aim to provide spaces for bringing stakeholders together to enable public debate on shale gas. The project will directly impact upon involved citizens and partners engaged through the project, through skills development, and ensure research outcomes and outputs to which they have contributed are visible, relevant and useful. By sharing research outputs (e.g. maps of license areas from WP1; 'attitude maps' from WP2; digitized versions of participatory mapping and elicited photos from WP3) that capture and reveal public attitudes and community responses to shale gas in accessible formats, we will inform and be informed by our case study communities and ensure maximum impact of the project within, across and beyond our case study locations.

The project will benefit policy makers at national levels (e.g. BEIS (OUOGAS) as main target, Defra, DCLG, Treasury etc.) but also local government in shale gas development areas, the shale gas industry (e.g. UKOOG, specific operators) and other science and regulatory stakeholders with an interest in shale gas development (e.g. British Geological Survey, Health and Safety Executive, Environment Agency). The project will benefit environmental civil society organisations with an interest in energy, climate change and landscape conservation (e.g. CPRE, FOE, WWF, Greenpeace, 10:10 Climate Action, Green Alliance as well as shale gas action groups, e.g. Frack-Off). Stakeholders will be invited to join the project advisory board and will benefit from research providing in-depth, robust knowledge about public attitudes and community responses at a level of granularity and robustness unavailable in the UK to date.

For national policy makers, survey findings will overcome a serious methodological limitation of DECC/BEIS Public Attitude Tracker Surveys - the use of repeated cross-sectional research designs that cannot capture evolution in individuals' opinions over time. Our longitudinal research across three survey waves, coupled with analysis of social media, will therefore provide unprecedented information about public attitude change over time that will be of strong interest to national policy makers.

Stakeholders from public, private and NGO sectors will benefit from research findings that provide feedback about how engagement activities with publics at societal and local community scales is interpreted and evaluated by different societal groups, and will provide important information about levels of public trust in these stakeholders and how this evolves over time. Research on stakeholder (including operator) engagement with communities in case study locations will lead to a deeper understanding of effective engagement with shale gas and recommendations for practice (e.g. timing, frequency and type of engagement activities undertaken).

The project will benefit society as a whole through the provision of accessible outputs (e.g. an atlas of maps) that are shared using social media, a dedicated web presence and science events (e.g. ESRC Festival of Social Science, British Festival of Science). These will aim to inform and enable public debate on shale gas development, by providing robust research findings on societal-level public attitudes and understandings and local level community responses; how these evolve over time and underlying factors explaining these.