Fracking in the UK: expanding the application of an environmental justice frame

ABSTRACT

The development of fracking in the UK is at a crucial stage, with the industry seemingly on the brink of entering an operational phase. Despite this major development, analyses of its ethical dimensions have been limited. Concepts of environmental justice have been applied to the case of fracking to evaluate the ethicality of its development in the UK. However, these have tended to focus on a narrow range of environmental justice considerations. I argue that an expanded environmental justice frame can supplement existing contributions and provide a unified frame through which the ethicality of fracking in the UK can be further examined and evaluated. The paper applies an expanded environmental justice frame, which encompasses themes of distribution, procedure, recognition and capabilities. Considerations of justice as distribution highlight the unjust distribution of basic rights and the insufficiency of compensating benefits for the communities set to host fracking. An application of procedural justice questions whether community consent, even if present, would make fracking permissible when it is perceived as a solution to economic deprivation. I then argue that fracking in the UK constitutes an injustice as misrecognition, given its devaluation of communities through a neoliberal value system. An application of justice as capabilities frame outlines the risk of fracking being inconsistent with meeting basic needs for the functioning of individuals and communities, particularly in rural areas. Finally, climate and intergenerational justice are drawn upon to highlight the ability of the frame to incorporate these further justice considerations.

KEYWORDS:

• Fracking
• environmental justice
• climate justice
• intergenerational justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

James Griffiths http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7479-7874

Notes

1 Fracking in the UK is currently a devolved matter, but with only Scotland having imposed a ban through the Scottish parliament, I will discuss the development of fracking as a UK-wide issue.

2 See Finkel and Hays (2013); Shonkoff et al. (2014); Centner and Petetin (2017).

3 [Emphasis added].

4 See Jackson et al. (2014); Meng and Ashby (2014); Burton et al. (2014).