AbstractsPolitical Science

The use of hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) to exploit underground gas deposits is a highly contentious current issue, with the socio-technical phenomenon spreading from the US to every inhabitable continent (Willow & Wylie, 2014:223). Proponents point to economic benefits, technological safety measures, and fracking as a cleaner alternative to more harmful fossil fuels, while opponents dispute these claims and draw on mounting evidence of the environmental, health and climate related risks related to fracking. Particularly in places debating whether or not to allow it, fracking developments pose challenges to the scalar structuration of existing legislation and environmental governance. Emphasizing the need for critical social scientific research on the development, this project investigates the politics and construals of scale in the fracking debate and governance related to the potential use of fracking in Northern Jutland, Denmark. This is combined with a view of the inseparability between production of scale and production of socionature. Using methodology from critical discourse analysis in a political ecology approach, textual analysis is carried out on a purposive sample of publicly available publications from main governmental actors and major NGOs active in the fracking debate and governance, approaching the problem definition: How is scale construed and contested on the issue of potential fracking in Denmark by NGO and government actors? Results suggest a varied mobilization of politics of scale by the NGOs, actively using and adding to existing scalar structuration, while government actors are found to engage less with overt politics of scale and rather rely on assumptions and legitimation to construe scale in a more static manner. The production of socionatures is notably related to existing classification along existing lines of scalar structuration of governance, while contestation construes alternative scales of socionature in the call for rescaling of governance. The main value of the findings lie in denaturalizing the production of socio-natures and thus making space for alternative developments in the scalar structuration of environmental governance and energy planning.