Keep it local? Preferences for federal, state, or local unconventional oil and gas regulations

Abstract

In the U.S., governance for oil and gas development has been increasingly devolved from centralized, relatively powerful governments to lower levels of government. At the same time, state governments increasingly preempt local authority, resulting in significant state-local contestation over oil and gas governance. The purpose of this analysis is to understand what level of government (i.e. local, state or federal) Colorado residents believe should regulate the oil and gas industry (referred to as governance scale preferences) in this era of neoliberalism, devolution, and state preemption. Colorado has been an epicenter of unconventional oil and gas production for years and is one of the most heavily-drilled states in the U.S. The state also lauds itself as being at the forefront of state-level regulation of the industry, key to our concerns here Descriptive results indicated that few support federal exemptions while many respondents endorse local regulation. Further, few variables have consistent results in the binary logistic regression models. Broadly, our analysis suggests that the public seems to endorse a complex, multi-layered system of governance for oil and gas development, suggesting that current efforts to concentrate regulatory power in state governments is at odds with public preferences.