Hydraulic Fracturing as a Social-Ecological System: Robustness and Governance Implications of Development

Over the past decade, natural gas development on the Utica and Marcellus shale has increased substantially. Despite major growth in the industry nationwide, the federal government does little to regulate fracking leaving it up to individual states to pass legislation. The Pennsylvania state government has limited the ways in which municipalities can regulate hydraulic fracturing both explicitly in the form of oil and gas regulations and implicitly in the form of constitutional restrictions on state preemption. Home of the first oil well (Rabe & Borick, 2013), little history of natural gas regulation and seen as a major player in the natural gas industry (“Department of Conservation and Natural Resources,” 2018), Pennsylvania serves as an interesting case study when analyzing institutional restraints on the volatile nature of the natural gas social ecological system. Drawing on institutional theory and using a robustness framework this work aims to fill a gap in literature that neglects diminishing local government capacity within the Marcellus and Utica Shale natural gas resource economy. This paper examines the layered restrictions placed on localities by the Pennsylvania state legislature and the overall robustness of policies at state and local levels. We posit that the current state of governance is inadequate at the local level for communities are unable to limit negative externalities of the volatile natural gas industry.