Anti-fracking campaigns in the United Kingdom: the influence of local opportunity structures on protest

ABSTRACT

Hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) was a controversial issue in the United Kingdom that sparked national and community-led groups to organise protest mobilisations. To date, however, the social science literature has largely focussed upon general anti-fracking discourse rather than on the physical, community-led mobilisations that emerged from the frustrations of people directly affected at a local level by threats to their community. This paper develops and applies a novel conceptualisation of political opportunity structures at the nexus of the national and local levels to more fully explore the usually overlooked role of local-level structures in interaction with the national level in shaping protest. It uses protest event analysis with data derived from two key activist-specific sources. The analysis draws on data from over 1,400 protests occurring across 69 counties from 2011 to 2019. In so doing, this paper observes and accounts for variance in the form and frequency of community-led anti-fracking protest events within and between different areas of England across the life course of the protest episodes. This paper finds that trends in protest frequency and form over time correlate to shifts in opportunity structures, particularly regarding local and national-level interactions, and that this can be usefully conceptualised through a local-national-state-nexus.

KEYWORDS:

• Fracking
• protest
• opportunity structures
• local-national-state-nexus
• protest event analysis
• United Kingdom

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1.. Permitted under Section 79 and Schedule 6 (para. 3) in the ”Town and Country Planning Act” (1990), for instance, where development holds national-level significance. The UK government expressed interest in classifying fracking as ‘nationally significant infrastructure’, which requires planning consent solely from the national level (Vaughan, 2018a).

2.. Anti-fracking protests also occurred in Balcombe, Sussex, in 2013 (Bomberg, 2017), although fracking was not intended at Cuadrilla’s site (O’Hara et al., 2013). Similar occurred at UKOG’s Surrey-based Horse Hill site, and Rathlin’s West Newton sites, East Yorkshire.

3.. Two categories, ‘training events’ in direct action and ‘other’, including fundraisers, were excluded for not fitting the protest event definition.

4.. At Cuadrilla’s Preese Hall site where tests resulted in tremors and a fracking pause in England (Green et al., 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua Garland

Joshua Garland is currently part of the Network for the Advancement of Social and Political Studies (NASP) as a PhD researcher with the universities of Milan and Turin, Italy, and is formerly a graduate student at the University of Exeter, UK. His core interests extend to social movements, the environment, and visual sociology.

Clare Saunders

Clare Saunders is professor in Environmental Politics in the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter. Her primary research interest is environmental protest. She has published widely on this topic in Environmental Politics, British Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics and other major journals.

Cristiana Olcese

Cristiana Olcese is a sociologist interested in social movements and creative empowerment. She teaches at the University of Exeter.

Delacey Tedesco

Delacey Tedesco is a lecturer in the Politics Department at the University of Exeter. Her research interests lie at the intersection between politics and geography, publishing on themes including urbanisation, decolonisation and fashion.