Advancing scholarship on policy conflict through perspectives from oil and gas policy actors

While receiving more attention in the policy sciences in recent years, much remains unknown about policy conflicts. This research analyzes 48 in-depth qualitative interviews of people involved in, or familiar with, conflicts associated with shale oil and gas (aka “fracking”) policy proposals and decisions across 15 U.S. states. We ask the question: how do policy actors characterize policy conflicts? To guide interviews and data collection for this study, we rely on the Policy Conflict Framework (PCF). The PCF highlights how policy settings serve as the sources of conflict; the characteristics of policy conflict across settings, between policy actors, and over time; and the varying outcomes. Insights derived from interviews include that policy conflicts are far more complicated to portray than depicted in the literature, individuals shape and understand conflict through emotions and narratives, any descriptions of policy conflicts must account for time and their evolutionary nature, and conflicts involve diverse strategies of winning and mitigation. The conclusion links these findings to the literature to advance knowledge about policy conflict.