Diversity of Conflict and Concord in the Siting of Natural Gas Pipeline

• In Event: Advances in Theories of the Policy Process

Abstract

Expanding natural gas transmission pipelines is instrumental in the sustainable energy governance of the U.S. The primary reasons are increasing energy demand for gas as well as the growing necessity for connecting shale gas formation to energy consumers. Meanwhile, more than half the current pipelines are over the operating life requiring substantial repair and even replacement. One fundamental challenge in understanding energy infrastructure siting, such as gas pipelines, is “the people.” Siting decisions surrounding pipelines spark intense conflict around economic development and environment. Opposition from residents sometimes delay or block pipeline projects. Yet, the politics related to siting decisions go beyond questions of public perceptions such as NIMBY.

Although studies investigated impacts of the siting of a gas transmission facility in producing considerable controversy, few have explored the characteristics of both conflict and concord over the life cycle of a pipeline project and across different cases. Further, the literature overly relies on surveys on specific populations in a particular period, and small case studies. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of conflict and concord within and between four pipelines siting. We apply the Advocacy Coalitions Framework (ACF) and the Policy Conflict Framework (PCF) to answer four research questions: (1) How coalitions form and strive to influence siting decisions over time and across locations? (2) How actors engage in strategies and tactics? (3) What factors are associated with the variation in the intensity of policy conflict? (4) Can we observe belief convergence among members of opposing coalitions in high-intensity policy conflicts?

The combination of the ACF and the PCF provides a platform for theoretically guided research. The ACF explains coalition, learning, and policy change in cases of policy conflict. The ACF defines public policy as a conflict between actors, who have conflicting goals and information, competing to translate their belief systems into policy (Jenkins-Smith et al. 2014). However, the ACF indirectly conceptualizes and measures policy conflicts through value differences and polarized networks. A new theoretical approach, the PCF, analyzes, compares, and informs governance of policy conflict. The PCF addresses the cognitive and behavioral characteristics of episodes of policy conflicts over time (Weible and Heikkila 2017).

The data sources for this paper are over 800 newspaper articles that span the entire life of four under-construction pipeline projects, at varying levels of conflict and concord among policy actors. Media articles capture public attention (containing public agencies, private companies, local community leaders, interest groups, actively engaged citizens and their affiliate organizations), enable tracking developments over time, and reveal the portability to diverse political systems.

The analysis uses a combination of manual coding and semi-automated coding. We first code every position statement, dealing directly with one or more specific instances of pipeline siting. Employing Discourse Network Analysis, we extract actors’ opinion statements from unstructured raw text data into a quantifiable form and visualize coalitions and conflicts in social networks. The coding also measures the differences or similarities in policy positions of actors involved in a siting decision, perceived threats from opponents’ policy positions, willingness to compromise among actors, and specific types of conflict behaviors. Later, we explore the variance of actors and frames that represent the core and periphery within a governance system, using the Automap text mining tool, with a dictionary of conflict and concord words. We further conduct interviews with a cross-section of core and peripheral actors from different organizational sectors. Interviews suggest that media content analysis offers reliable and similar insights into how we understand siting issues.

The paper concludes with a summary of the theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature. The conclusion explores the dynamics of conflict discourse surrounding pipeline siting decisions, which also advances the study of governance. In answering the four research questions, this research informs both scholars and decision-makers trying to navigate the complex political and policy landscape through which changes and improvements to the energy governance in the U.S. are negotiated.

This research extends the literature on policy conflicts and energy siting controversies. This paper contributes to the various analysis of democratic political systems and how contentiousness over policy issues manifest into participation. Methodologically, this article opens an intermediate level of analysis using media, between large-n survey and in-depth case studies. The paper also contributes to the APSA community by developing coding protocols for network analyses.

Authors

• Jongeun You, University of Colorado Denver

• Tanya Heikkila, University of Colorado-Denver

• Chris Weible, University of Colorado-Denver