Rural communities and unconventional gas development: What's important for maintaining subjective community wellbeing and resilience over time?

Abstract

Unconventional gas development can bring rapid change to local communities who often have limited resources and capacity to deal with them. To focus limited resources and capacities, it is essential to identify the underlying factors which are most important for maintaining perceptions of community wellbeing and resilience in different phases of development. Little extant research identifies how these factors may change over different industry phases (cf. boom-bust cycles). This paper identifies important factors for subjective community wellbeing and resilience in the construction and post-construction phases of unconventional gas development in the Western Downs region of rural Queensland, Australia. Survey data from 400 residents in 2014 and 400 in 2016 were used to examine changes in subjective community wellbeing and resilience between these phases. The most important dimensions underlying community wellbeing in both phases were perceptions of “services and facilities” and “community spirit, cohesion and trust”, with the latter more important in the construction phase. The most important community issues relating to community resilience were perceptions of environmental management, which was unfavourable in both phases, and perceived economic opportunities, which become unfavourable in the post-construction or early operations phase. Subjective evaluations of community planning, leadership and information sharing around responses to unconventional gas development were also seen as limited in local communities. Additionally, communities did not feel heard and there was a lack of trust in industry and government. Finally, this paper discusses implications of these findings. Enhancing services and facilities is an important and relatively straightforward way of enhancing subjective community wellbeing being and resilience. However, community spirit, cohesion, and trust are equally important, though perhaps not given the same emphasis in social investment plans. Concerns about environmental management persist across both phases and local communities need to prepare for a decline in economic activity after the construction phase.