The United States has an abundance of shale plays and unconventional oil and gas drilling now occurs in over 30 states. Major development has occurred in North Dakota, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Michigan, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. The technological advances included the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, new slick water formulations, and improvements in drilling technologies and fracking design such as “zipper fracking”. The upstream sector includes pre-drilling activities, pad preparation, drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and completion. The midstream sector includes pipeline construction and maintenance and processing facilities that separate the products of mixed gas. These processing facilities can be quite extensive, especially in Southwestern Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio, and the panhandle of West Virginia where wet gas predominates. This review presents an overview of unconventional gas extraction in the Appalachian Basin as currently practiced in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) has assessed 46 countries for their technically recoverable unconventional oil and gas reserves. They estimate the global shale gas reserves at 7,577 Tcf (trillion cubic feet) and the global shale oil reserves at 419 billion bbl (barrels). The 10 largest reserves for shale gas are in China, Argentina, Algeria, United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, South Africa, Russia, and Brazil. The European Union also has significant deposits with the majority located in Poland and France. The 10 largest reserves for shale oil are in the United States, Russia, China, Argentina, Libya, United Arab Emirates, Chad, Australia, Venezuela, and Mexico. To date, only the United States and Canada have reached commercial level production for shale gas and oil, followed to a lesser extent by China and Argentina. Australia has seen its efforts concentrate on liquified natural gas (LNG) and export. Most other countries remain in the exploratory phase or have halted development. This chapter provides a brief review of the major shale gas and oil plays based on the extensive assessment done by the EIA, and the current status of their development.

Trump’s America First Energy Plan, which focuses on oil and gas expansion and rolling back regulations, promised to insulate the US economy from the volatile global oil market. In reality, the US shale oil industry, operating within the global oil markets, suffered contractions when oil supplier nations’ price wars caused global oil prices to crash. While the plan promised to bring Americans jobs and prosperity, predicating economic development on oil and gas extraction is a dubious strategy for several reasons. The shale industry, which contributed to the recent boom and expected future production, suffers from a shaky financial foundation. Even prior to COVID-19, traditional investors had begun cutting lending to shale companies and bankruptcies were accelerating. In March 2020, under Congress’s COVID-19 financial rescue package, the Trump administration executed a bailout for the oil and gas industry that shifted financial losses to American taxpayers without securing companies’ agreements to keep workers employed. The bailout replicates the decades-long economic model of the industry, which privatizes profits to the companies, while socializing the costs from the industry, through tax preferences and subsidies for the industry and through various laws that favor extraction over those that suffer from the industry’s adverse impacts.

America faces an energy dilemma – continue down the path of oil and gas drilling or diversify to greater shares of renewable energy. The shale boom in the twenty-first century propelled America to become the largest crude oil producer in the world and a net exporter of natural gas. However, the shale bust from 2014 to 2016 prompted renewed debate on America’s pathway. For decades, successive presidents from Nixon to Obama vowed to end America’s addiction to oil. In reality, federal and state governments granted numerous privileges to the oil and gas sector in exchange for securing energy supply, jobs and tax revenue. In 2017, President Trump took office and launched his “America First Energy Plan,” which expanded oil and gas extraction, facilitated the buildout of oil and gas infrastructure, and hacked away at regulations aimed to protect health, the environment and the climate. The Trump administration’s multipronged actions to favor the oil and gas industry, which went far beyond those of previous administrations, went largely unchecked by the 115th Congress that acquiesced and even abetted its actions. Understanding what the administration did and how it was able to undertake such actions is the first step towards resetting America’s energy and environmental paths.

Polycentric governance systems can promote conflict as overlapping units contest their authorities, roles, and interests, but also provide venues that mitigate conflict. Conflict can lead to learning and institutional adaptation that enhance the functioning of polycentric systems, but conflict can also become entrenched and impede adaptation. Understanding the nature of conflictual interactions in polycentric systems and how those systems provide conflict resolution is critical to understanding performance. This chapter examines conflict and conflict resolution in two polycentric systems that govern hydraulic fracturing and shale development across two US states: Colorado and New York. It examines the extent that conflicts have been resolved and whether learning or adaptation of the governance systems occurred. The chapter considers how the authority, information, and resources of the actors explain incentives for conflict and conflict resolution within the polycentric systems. We observe differences in the conflict interaction patterns, as well as in the performance of polycentric governance in these two settings.

How can communities, associations, governments, and other organizations work better together? This chapter looks at putting polycentricity into practice for improving governance, focusing on collective action among autonomous decision centres in contexts of cooperation, competition, conflict resolution, and social learning. Practising polycentric governance may involve assessing and appreciating the ways in which a situation is already polycentric and might be improved; applying principles and mechanisms to craft specific institutional arrangements for polycentric governance; and facilitating the emergence of polycentric governance, including co-creation of more inclusive networks, common knowledge, and 'power with'.

Governing complexity tends to produce complex governance. This book has aimed to provide a conceptual and empirical analysis of polycentric governance that can help carry detailed research on the determinants, change and performance of polycentric arrangements into a future research program as well as new fields of application. The chapter reviews the main points of the preceding chapters.

This chapter addresses the challenges of establishing and sustaining governance arrangements conducive to environmental citizenship. The significance of this concern is illustrated by Australian experiences with governance arrangements seeking to promote citizenship among rural landholders in natural resources conservation. The chapter draws from Vincent Ostrom's thinking about polycentric governance, who drew from de Tocqueville. Ostrom identified ‘the way people think and relate to one another’ (corresponding with the meta-constitutional level of analysis in the Institutional Analysis and Development framework) as vital for governance that is capable of promoting citizenship, and the citizenship required to sustain polycentric governance. Progress in empirical investigation of relationships between polycentric governance and environmental citizenship is reviewed. One relationship of this kind is illustrated by policy reform in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin.

This chapter addresses the challenges of establishing and sustaining governance arrangements conducive to environmental citizenship. The significance of this concern is illustrated by Australian experiences with governance arrangements seeking to promote citizenship among rural landholders in natural resources conservation. The chapter draws from Vincent Ostrom's thinking about polycentric governance, who drew from de Tocqueville. Ostrom identified ‘the way people think and relate to one another’ (corresponding with the meta-constitutional level of analysis in the Institutional Analysis and Development framework) as vital for governance that is capable of promoting citizenship, and the citizenship required to sustain polycentric governance. Progress in empirical investigation of relationships between polycentric governance and environmental citizenship is reviewed. One relationship of this kind is illustrated by policy reform in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin.

This chapter compares insights from our empirical cases of three kinds of interactions: cooperation, conflict and conflict resolution, and competition. The elements of authority, information, and resources affected incentives and interactions differently. Focusing on interactions as a unit of analysis points to a variety of performance criteria that may be appropriate. These criteria for assessing outcomes and processes cannot all be optimized at once, as trade-offs are evident, and different types of interaction are likely to entail different performance combinations. In our case studies, no performance criterion scored high across all cases, and no case performed well across all performance criteria.

Cooperation is an important way that decision centres interact in a polycentric governance system. Cooperation in governance has been studied by numerous scholars in the field of 'collaboration', although such scholarship seldom explicitly sets it within the framework of polycentricity. Cooperation involves multiple decision centres working across boundaries to pursue shared goals, and it is especially prevalent for addressing complex socio-ecological systems. This chapter examines cooperation in the Puget Sound basin, USA, for ecosystem restoration. This chapter describes how authority, information, and resources affected cooperation in formation of the Puget Sound Partnership and related Local Integrating Organizations, development of ecosystem recovery plans, and implementation of ecosystem recovery projects. It assesses polycentric governance performance in terms of outcomes and processes. The Puget Sound ecosystem restoration efforts exhibit relatively high levels of coherence, representation, and adaptability; relatively low levels of efficiency and accountability; and mixed results on efficacy and network building.

Constitution-making involves a 'Faustian bargain' in which individuals and smaller communities give up some of their autonomy for the sake of the benefits brought by larger-scale societies. Transitioning from small-scale quasi-egalitarian societies towards a complex, but more hierarchical, political system makes possible collective action and the provision of public goods at much larger scales, including defence, establishing larger common markets, and basic infrastructure. After introducing the concept of the 'Faustian' bargain, the chapter explains how constitutive rules create such bargains. We turn to the role of monitoring, conflict resolution, and sanctioning as means of building commitments to constitutions, providing for stability and flexibility. The chapter illustrates these relationships using two cases of constitution-making: the multi-level governance of New York City watersheds, and post-conflict situations in which leaders of different ethnic groups come to agreement.

The delivery of public goods often spurs competition between different authorities. Competition for scarce natural resources also triggers the creation of multiple decision-making centres as different actors seek venues where they can exert authority. Competition takes multiple forms and is linked with cooperation and conflict resolution to shape the rules governing resource users' interactions. We compare the evolution and performance of market-based water reallocation, and associated institutional reforms, in two polycentric water governance arrangements: the Ebro Basin of NE Spain and the US portion of the Columbia Basin. The chapter examines how authority structures, information and capacity influence competitive interactions within and across constitutional, collective choice, and operational levels of action. Polycentric governance arrangements vary in their distribution and coordination of authority, which shapes competition and performance. The comparison reveals trade-offs between efficiency and other performance criteria; efforts to facilitate efficient water reallocation may limit accountability and representation, and vice-versa.