Mechanisms of metapower & procedural injustices in the Colorado Oil and Gas Task Force decision-making process

ABSTRACT

In the last decade, unconventional oil and gas (UOG) has changed the world’s energy landscapes, often outpacing governments’ efforts to regulate it. Yet, few studies focus on the processes of governance, particularly on questions of procedural equity. Here we examine the process of the 2014 Colorado Oil and Gas Task Force (TF), which was established to address regulatory conflicts over drilling, particularly along the Northern Colorado Front Range. The TF aimed to create a level playing field for influencing decision-making. However, we find that several power mechanisms were deployed by the state and the industry, ensuring that those with the least opportunity to meaningfully influence outcomes were also most likely to be impacted by the TF’s regulatory recommendations had the least opportunity to meaningfully influence the process and its outcomes. Thus we advance existing literature on procedural injustice by focusing on the underlying power mechanisms that help structure procedural injustice in these processes.

KEWORDS:

• Environmental justice; procedural justice; meta-power; shale oil and gas; fracking; regulatory process; regulatory conflicts

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This is the author affiliation when research was conducted. Stacia Ryder is now affiliated with the Department of Geography at the University of Exeter.

2. There is a difference between stakeholder capabilities in terms of those with the most and least amounts of power in decision-making processes and as such in terms of their views on whether or not all parties have equal opportunity to influence outcomes of the process. Thus in order to analyze the degree to which a process is just or to evaluate the accuracy and validity of claims of justice or injustice we must examine the degree to which power tilts toward or against those who make claims about justice or injustice, as well as who is defining what constitutes a ‘just’ or ‘unjust’ process. Arguably the bar for what constitutes equal and meaningful influence over a process should be determined by those stakeholders who historically have the least power in these processes. This aligns with critical theoretical approaches and feminist standpoint theory which suggest that people who are marginalized are socially situated in such a way to more easily identify and critique power and power relations (see Collins 1986; Harding 1993; Matsuda 1987).

3. Additional crucial studies focused on broader issues of EJ in the context of UOG include: Clough 2018; Clough and Bell 2016; Kroepsch et al. 2019; Author B et al. 2018; Author B et al. 2019; Meng et al. 2018.

4. Some challenges to this have recently been successful. In 2019, Governor Polis signed into law Senate bill 181, which prioritizes health, safety and the environment and attempts to provide local governments with more authority when it comes to the potential surface impacts of UOG production.

5. Not all members of the TF responded to requests to participate in this study, as such, interview numbers were limited.

6. Yet this is not to say that their disempowerment and lack of capacity to do so manifested equally across and within these groups. For example, only Front Range community organization was represented on the TF and during presentations despite there being a plethora of other active community organizations. At the same time, community capacity to influence local level efforts at regulation within different communities also varied.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by support the National Institutes for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) (R21-ES025140-01).  Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of NIEHS or the National Institutes of Health.

Notes on contributors

Stacia S. Ryder

Stacia S. Ryder, Ph.D. is an environmental sociologist and a Postdoctoral Researcher in Geography at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on temporality, spatiality, scale and mechanisms of power in environmental, energy and climate justice contexts. She is the lead editor of Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene: From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures, available in June 2021.

Stephanie A. Malin

Stephanie A. Malin, Ph.D. is an environmental sociologist specializing in natural resources, governance, and rural development, with a focus on the community impacts of resource extraction and energy production. Her main interests include environmental justice, environmental health, social mobilization, and the socio- environmental effects of market-based economies. She also examines communities building more distributive and regenerative systems. Stephanie serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Colorado State University.