The dynamics in the societal debate on Shale gas in The Netherlands

Abstract

An increasing number of studies show that societal debates might be the constraining factor for implementing new energy initiatives. Environmental awareness in The Netherlands is growing and society and politicians gradually change their stance on the necessity of oil and gas. This study is aimed at understanding the dynamics behind the interaction between actors in societal debates in order to understand changing support. The Dutch societal debate on shale gas was used to study these dynamics. It was investigated how unintended and intended events can explain changes in discourses (ways to view the world) over time. The software package T-lab was used to identify discourses and discourse developments in Dutch newspapers. T-lab uses linguistic and statistical tools to find meaningful patterns in text. Besides that, eleven semi-structured interviews were conducted to validate and supplement the results. Three major discourses were found: ‘Safety and Environment’, ‘Utility and Necessity’ and ‘Procedural Justice’ (Table 1). The content of these discourses changes as a result of external impact, which is amplified by feedback from actor’s responses and from changing discourses. The influence of events on a societal debate can be summarised in five important effects; ‘Amplify’, ‘Abate’, ‘Polarise’, ‘Broaden’ and ‘Trigger’. The case of the shale gas debate has shown that the course of events can lead the debate to reach polarised levels. At these levels, actors tend to reflect less on ‘their discourse’ and more extreme positions are taken. In other words, it impedes stakeholder learning. Therefore, it is important to prevent a debate to reach high polarised levels. The Dutch societal debate on shale gas provides several learning moments on how to prevent this.