Collaborative Research: A Comparative Diagnosis of Policy Conflicts: Examining Unconventional Oil and Gas Development across the United States

每个社会都会经历与政府政策制定相关的冲突。这种冲突影响了各国政府解决社会问题的能力。使用水力压裂的非常规油气开发是一个有争议的政策问题的一个例子，这个问题往往与政策冲突有关。然而，关于围绕这些有争议的问题的政策冲突的来源、特征和影响的知识仍然不发达。此外，尽管围绕石油和天然气开发的冲突似乎很激烈，而且越来越多，但并非所有的石油和天然气政策问题都是相互冲突的，也不是所有的冲突都是激烈或难以解决的。因此，该项目探讨了过去十年与石油和天然气开发有关的国家一级决策的差异，以便了解不同的政策背景如何影响冲突的强度及其结果。通过这项研究，提出的项目提高了对政策冲突的科学认识。新的知识有利于非常规石油和天然气开发的利益相关者，对了解如何诊断和引导政策冲突感兴趣的个人，以及对政策冲突的理论方法感兴趣的学者。使用新的政策冲突框架(PCF)作为分析指南，该项目的目标是提供概念和理论上的澄清，说明解释政策决策之间政策冲突强度差异的因素，以及与石油和天然气开发治理有关的政策冲突和政策决定的预期影响。在此过程中，本研究检验了新发展的假设，这些假设涉及：1)政策冲突设置如何影响冲突的强度；2)拟议政策的设计如何影响政策冲突的强度；以及3)冲突的强度如何影响拟议政策的变化程度。该研究还考察了政策冲突强度的分布，并评估了与政策冲突有关的政策决策的过程和结果。研究方法包括确定州级监管机构和立法机构中围绕非常规石油和天然气开发的所有政策决策的总体，并对与这些政策决策相关的新闻媒体进行编码。然后，研究小组从这些人群中抽取样本，并使用访谈、调查和政策决策的机构分析来收集冲突的来源、特征和影响的关键指标。在应用政策冲突框架的过程中，这个拟议的项目建立了关于政策冲突的泛化和本地化知识。

Every society experiences conflict associated with government policy making. Such conflict affects the capacity of governments to address societal problems. Unconventional oil and gas development that uses hydraulic fracturing is one example of a contentious policy issue that is often associated with policy conflict. Knowledge of the sources, characteristics, and effects of policy conflict around these contentious issues, however, remains underdeveloped. Additionally, while conflicts around oil and gas development appear to be intense and growing, not all oil and gas policy issues are conflictual and not all conflicts are intense or intractable. Therefore, this project explores differences across state-level policy decisions related to oil and gas development over the past decade in order to provide an understanding of how different policy contexts influence the intensity of conflicts and their outcomes. Through this research, the proposed project advances scientific knowledge about policy conflicts. The new knowledge benefits stakeholders of unconventional oil and gas development, individuals interested in understanding how to diagnose and navigate policy conflicts, and scholars interested in theoretical approaches to policy conflicts. Using a new Policy Conflict Framework (PCF) as an analytical guide, the goal of the project is to provide conceptual and theoretical clarification about the factors that explain the variation in policy conflict intensity across policy decisions, along with the expected effects of policy conflicts and policy decisions related to the governance of oil and gas development. In doing so, the study tests newly developed hypotheses related to: 1) how the policy conflict setting affects the intensity of conflicts; 2) how the design of proposed policies affects the intensity of policy conflict; and 3) how the intensity of conflict affects the degree of changes found in proposed policies. The research also examines the distribution of the intensity of policy conflicts, and evaluates processes and outputs of policy decisions related to policy conflicts. The research methods involve identifying the population of all policy decisions around unconventional oil and gas development in state-level regulatory agencies and legislatures, and coding news media related to these policy decisions. Then, the research team takes a sample from this population and uses interviews, surveys, and institutional analyses of policy decisions to collect key indicators of the sources, characteristics, and effects of conflicts. In applying the Policy Conflict Framework, this proposed project builds generalized and localized knowledge about policy conflicts.