Who's Pulling the Fracking Strings? Power, collaboration and Colorado fracking policy

Abstract

Scholars have looked towards collaborative governance as one means to resolve complex environmental issues and this has travelled to the administrative policy realm in the form of negotiated rulemaking or more recently shuttle diplomacy. What is missing from this administrative literature, and that of collaborative governance literature more generally, is a discussion of the role of power in these processes. This paper provides a case study of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission's (COGCC) collaborative rule‐making, the Statewide Groundwater Baseline Sampling and Monitoring Rule, to serve as a launch point to evaluate the role of power in state‐level collaborative processes. This research provides original interview data from agency staff and stakeholders to explore the ability of certain groups to exercise the power of agenda control to influence the outcome of the process in the controversial fracking arena. Here, the governor and agency staff were important in defining the problem, but determining the available solutions was more open to privileged stakeholders, namely industry. The interviewees suggested that these dynamics carry over to other COGCC rule‐makings and as such future scholars should evaluate the agenda control strategies of these groups to better understand why collaborative policy‐making, especially in the administrative realm, unfolds as it does. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

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