The impact of stakeholder engagement on local policy decision making

Scholars are increasingly interested in municipal government forays into environmental policymaking. The resulting body of work has opened a window into how the behaviors of grassroots stakeholders and policy advocates shape policy processes and outcomes (Arnold et al. 2017; Few et al. 2007; Lubell 2004b). However, it has paid considerably less attention to the impacts of this advocacy on the actors charged with making the decisions that establish policies: local elected officials (LEOs). To address this gap, this paper examines the interplay between grassroots stakeholder engagement and LEO strategic behavior, and how these dynamics impact local environmental policymaking.

LEOs are increasingly tasked with regulating environmental concerns that do not conventionally lay within the purview of local government, and for which local governments do not typically command the practical, material, and political resources critical for problem resolution (Agranoff and McGuire 2001; Lemos and Agrawal 2006; Marshall 2008). This lack of familiarity and capacity is challenging for LEOs who already balance numerous concerns while negotiating and coordinating with diverse stakeholders, including peers from local government; municipal employees; county, state, and national-level public officials; private citizens; businesses; and civil society actors (Arnold and Nguyen Long 2018; Boin and t’Hart 2003; Howlett 2014a). Grassroots stakeholder participation may improve LEO accountability and knowledge about how to tackle environmental governance challenges (Devas and Grant 2003; Vigoda 2002).

Stakeholders are affected by policy, affect policy, or both (Freeman 1984; Grimble and Wellard 1997). Many types of actors and entities, from public agencies to corporations, hold a stake in environmental policy making. What distinguishes grassroots stakeholders from other stakeholders is that the former “are the people who actually consume natural resources” (Lubell 2004a, b: 342). We extend this definition to include the consumption of environmental amenities, such as groundwater or clean air, and to specify that grassroots stakeholders are “rooted in the scale of everyday experience” (Towers 2000: 23). Grassroots stakeholders draw legitimacy and authority on an environmental issue from their firsthand knowledge of and experience with the implicated natural resources.

In local government policymaking, affected residents are the grassroots. Since Arnstein published her path-breaking work on citizen participation in governance in 1969, support for the engagement of grassroots stakeholders in environmental policymaking has grown and spread widely.¹ While grassroots stakeholder participation is widely theorized to improve policymaking (Fischer 2000; Beierle 2002, 2010), it remains unclear how effective it is in shaping policy processes and outcomes (Reed 2008; Few et al. 2007; Irvin and Stansbury 2004).

Stakeholders often have heterogeneous preferences, but their ability to coalesce around an issue and speak with an uncontested and unified voice may affect the efficacy of their advocacy (Rein and Schön 1977). More specifically, stakeholder engagement can lie in a continuum of contestation. On one end of this continuum, grassroots engagement can be uncontested, where stakeholders are unified on one side of an issue. To varying degrees along the continuum, grassroots engagement can be contested, where different stakeholders press LEOs to pursue different actions. Contestation intensifies as the frequency with which directly opposing sides challenge one another and decision makers on an issue increases and/or as the duration of these contests lengthens.

We posit that not only does stakeholder engagement shape policymaking, but the degree of contestation—a feature of stakeholder engagement—can systematically influence how LEOs treat policy issues. Examining this proposition provides insight into how the dynamics between grassroots stakeholders themselves may influence LEO behavior, adding nuance to the current understanding of whether and how citizen engagement impacts policy design (Howlett 2014b, 2017; Gormley 1986; Smith and McDonough 2001). Moreover, accounting for the impact that contestation can have on policymaking may reveal insights into the challenges of collaborative governance. Collaborative governance is an increasingly institutionalized approach to natural resource management (Emerson et al. 2012; Bingham et al. 2005). While contestation between stakeholders has been identified as a critical barrier to successful collaborative governance (Ansell and Gash 2008), few collaborative governance studies focus specifically on the nature of these conflicts or the specific processes by which they influence policy outcomes. The few studies that have examined these conflicts tend to focus on single case studies (Berardo and Holm 2018), making them unable to examine the breadth of actions decision makers can take when confronting different levels of grassroots contestation on an issue.

To test the proposition that contestation impacts LEO choices, we examine how LEOs in New York responded to stakeholder engagement around the issue of high-volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF), a new technique for recovering hydrocarbons trapped in deep underground shale deposits (Rahm 2011). From 2008 through 2012, 235 municipalities across the state adopted 358 anti-HVHF policies (Arnold and Nguyen Long 2018), often in response to concerns over the technology’s potential environmental and public health impacts. During that same period, more than 60 pro-fracking regulations were adopted by New York municipalities, often encouraged by landowners with drilling interests and economic development advocates who argued that HVHF was a lifeline for the state’s struggling rural communities. New York partially overlays the Marcellus Shale, whose potential hydrocarbon production was projected to create more than 54,000 jobs in the state (Rugh 2012; Jacquet and Stedman 2011). While previous research has revealed how institutional, geophysical, and demographic factors may have contributed to New York localities’ policy choices concerning HVHF (e.g., Dokshin 2016), LEO influence on these processes and outcomes remains minimally understood.

We use content analysis of minutes taken at public meetings (i.e., town board meetings) as well as policy documents to examine 13 cases of municipal consideration of HVHF, 2008–2012. The extent and nature of stakeholder engagement in HVHF policymaking varied substantially across these cases. Our observations suggest that LEOs respond to stakeholder engagement in a patterned way. Contested stakeholder engagement appears to encourage LEOs to deflect responsibility for HVHF regulation to other bodies of government. Contestation also appears to discourage LEOs from placing substantive limits on HVHF, especially when contestation is intense. In contrast, LEOs respond to uncontested anti-HVHF stakeholder engagement by prohibiting HVHF within their jurisdiction. In contrast to previous work that views stakeholder engagement as either effective or ineffective (see Reed 2008), we provide a more nuanced picture.

The State of New York instituted a moratorium on HVHF in 2008. The moratorium’s duration was unclear and, as it ensued, the state’s regulatory approach became increasingly opaque (Arnold and Nguyen 2018). Pro- and anti-fracking advocates responded to this uncertainty by seeking to influence local government policymaking on HVHF, relying on New York’s tradition of strong home rule (Kenneally and Mathes 2010). As the debate on HVHF intensified and widened, numerous stakeholders brought their HVHF demands directly to the attention of local elected officials. Measures to ban or restrict HVHF were frequently sought by tourism interests, concerned that drilling would reduce visitor interest (DeWitt 2012); environmentalists concerned about contaminated groundwater, air pollution, and habitat destruction (Dutzik et al. 2013); and residents were concerned about quality-of-life impacts. In contrast, members of landowner coalitions,² business and industrial interests, and economic development advocates pressured municipalities to adopt HVHF-supportive policies (Smith and Ferguson 2013; Jacquet 2015).

LEO efforts to steer HVHF governance were complicated by the technical and political ambiguity surrounding the new drilling technology. Technical ambiguity arises from persistent disputes among experts which subsequently divide a policymaking community. Some scientific experts argued that HVHF threatens water resources and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions (Howarth et al. 2011). Others countered that HVHF-associated risks can be contained through careful management (Jackson et al. 2014), and that HVHF is a valuable bridge to renewable energy and a pathway to energy security (Engelder 2011). Anti- and pro-HVHF interests brought conflicting scientific evidence to bear and called in their own “experts” to speak on the issue (Dodge and Lee 2015). As a consequence, scientific evidence was often treated with skepticism by local policy participants, and its infusion into debates over HVHF generally failed to bring clarity (Dodge and Lee 2015). In one town board meeting, residents and LEOs disagreed about the value of scientific evidence:

Mr. Goukas [resident] offered a name of a Geologist out of Cornell that has put together findings of potential outcomes from gas drilling in NY State. Mr. Denton [LEO] said that there is a schism between Cornell Departments. Ms. Grant [another resident] said that one thing that she has learned from statistics is that whatever you want to believe you can show. (Town of Colesville board meeting, Aug. 2, 2012)

About 80 miles away, similar views on scientific evidence were voiced by a grassroots stakeholder, making the case for action: “Even if you think it’s safe, new information [is] coming out month after month. Why wait to act?” (Town of Hector board meeting, March 13, 2012).

Technical ambiguity compounded the political ambiguity faced by New York LEOs. Officials considering policy actions other than non-substantive resolutions—that is, considering measures with more regulatory “teeth,” such as bans—were unsure about their jurisdiction over HVHF, since oil and gas drilling was typically regulated at the state level (Arnold and Nguyen Long 2018; Kenneally and Mathes 2010). Uncertainty about municipal authority over HVHF policymaking and two high-profile legal challenges against New York municipalities that did try to ban HVHF³ were key concerns for LEOs. Resource-strapped municipalities pondering anti-HVHF action were unsure about how to construct policies that could withstand legal challenge (Negro 2012). For example, in the Town of Delaware, LEO Harold Roeder cautioned that developers with “deep pockets” could take legal action if the town took substantive action against HVHF (Town of Delaware board meeting, April 20, 2011). In the Town of Hector, LEO Jeff Magnus informed the public that, “there is still the legal issue/aspect; two of three lawyers at Association of Towns seminar answered questions regarding lawsuits with—if you feel lucky in the legal arena then ban fracking; [but] I am not elected to gamble with your money” (Town of Hector board meeting, February 14, 2012). Contemporaneously, demand for local policy action regarding HVHF, both favorable and unfavorable, continued to grow, placing additional pressures on LEOs (Arnold and Nguyen Long 2018).

In keeping with previous scholarship on decision making by elected officials (e.g., McGraw 1990, 1991), we assume that LEOs are primarily motivated by electoral performance. It follows that LEOs will adopt strategies that help them claim credit for positive policy outcomes and avoid blame for policies which constituents might perceive as failures (Leong and Howlett 2017; Howlett 2012; Hood 2002, 2007, 2011).

LEOs may be more responsive to grassroots stakeholders than their peers in state or national government because local officials are relatively easier for grassroots stakeholders to monitor, observe, and access. Additionally, LEOs may be relatively more sensitive to these stakeholder’s ability to “vote with their feet,” choosing to live elsewhere if they do not approve of LEO policy choices (see Tiebout 1956; Sharp 1984). Electoral considerations may encourage public officials to preemptively act on what they perceive to be the preferred policies of the largest share of the electorate (Johnson and Crisp 2003). To do so, however, LEOs must have a clear sense of the actions that those constituents consider desirable and praiseworthy (Leong and Howlett 2017). For example, LEOs from cities with fairly liberal residents may adopt more numerous and stringent environmental policies to cater to known preferences of liberal constituencies (e.g., Sharp et al. 2011; Zahran et al. 2008). However, intense political ambiguity breeds uncertainty about citizen preferences. Moreover, technical ambiguity makes it difficult for LEOs to predict how their choices might impact their constituents in the future. Risk-adverse LEOs can be expected to take what Howlett (2014a, b) calls negative action, which in this case would be to deny that HVHF is a local issue. Ambiguity thus often favors the policy status quo.

Once the public engages, however, maintaining the status quo becomes more difficult. When members of the public primarily array on one side of HVHF (most members of the public in favor of HVHF, or most members against it), we consider the stakeholder engagement to be uncontested. When these interests battle each other, however, we consider stakeholder engagement on HVHF to be contested; this contestation can vary in duration and intensity. This variance in stakeholder engagement is particularly salient to LEOs’ use of policy action.

We use a case study approach to examine in-depth local HVHF policy processes and interactions between LEOs and the public (Hay 2010). The cases were selected based on theoretical and practical criteria. We first considered only those New York municipalities which responded to a survey (n = 481, 31% response rate), administered in Summer 2014, concerning municipal-level HVHF policymaking (see Arnold et al. 2017; Arnold and Nguyen Long 2018). Second, we considered only those municipalities wherein a survey respondent (the municipal clerk) reported that both pro- and anti-HVHF policy interests lobbied⁴ local decision makers. This left 55 eligible municipalities. From those 55, we were able to obtain complete sets of public meeting minutes (2008–2012) for 38 by June 2017.⁵ From these, we identified for focused study 13 municipalities that were similar along multiple dimensions relevant to HVHF policymaking.

Specifically, we reduced the sample from 38 to 13 by excluding from study those municipalities with values more than one standard deviation below or above the mean (for the group of 38) on Democratic partisanship (the percentage of citizens voting for President Barack Obama in 2008), then on population density, and finally on residents’ logged per capita income in 2000. Multiple studies have found that New York municipalities with more Democratic partisans are more likely to adopt anti-HVHF measures, while less dense (i.e., more rural) and poorer municipalities are less likely to do so (see Arnold and Nguyen Long 2018; Arnold et al. 2017; Barnes 2013; Dokshin 2016; Walsh et al. 2015; Zirogiannis et al. 2015). By ensuring that the 13 municipalities left in the sample are relatively similar along these dimensions, we hold the dimensions more or less constant. This implies that if LEO policymaking on HVHF varies, this variation is less likely to derive from differences in contextual variables and more likely to flow from other factors, such as the nature of stakeholder engagement.

We obtained public records of municipal meeting minutes by manually downloading them from municipality websites, where available, and obtaining them with Freedom of Information Law requests to municipalities where they were not. A Python script applied to the entire corpus of meeting minutes was used to identify, on the basis of 13 HVHF-related key words,⁶ 216 public meetings where HVHF was discussed.

Two research team members developed and used a codebook (see Appendix) to analyze the meeting minutes. Codes identified people speaking on HVHF at the public meetings, a speaker’s stance regarding HVHF, and, when relevant, the type of action being discussed at the meeting, be it a request for action by a grassroots stakeholder or a consideration of action by an LEO. The coded minutes were then crosschecked and reconciled by the two researchers.

Each HVHF-relevant statement made during a public meeting was coded, using definitions rooted in the literature on public policy decision making. Deflecting strategies were identified when an LEO said that the responsibility for regulating HVHF belonged to an authority other than themselves, or when an LEO used another authority (town, state, or agency) as a reason to not take an action or to delay an action on HVHF. We treat all resolutions as symbolic policy actions. Adoption of road use agreements, bans, or moratoriums constituted a substantive action.

We have four types of cases. First are cases with no grassroots stakeholder engagement (two cases). Second are uncontested cases with grassroots stakeholder engagement fully on one side of the issue. Stakeholders were assigned codes on the basis of their stated attitudes (positive/welcoming versus concerned) toward HVHF (see Codebook 1 in Appendix). When both pro- and anti-fracking stakeholders contemporaneously place opposing demands on LEOs, we considered these cases to be contested. We then broke contestation down by year in the six contested cases. This allowed us to categorize the contested cases into low and high contestation, where high contestation is marked by longer duration of engagement⁷ and/or greater levels of engagement by the public.

Engagement encompasses a wide range of behaviors, from attending rallies to deliberating at public meetings to organizing community action. We focus here on the type of engagement that is specific to public meetings: deliberating. We measure level of engagement by counting the number of times grassroots stakeholders address LEOs on the topic of HVHF at public meetings in each study year (see Table 1). From 2008 to 2012, grassroots stakeholders addressed their town board on this topic as few as three times (in Bainbridge) and as many as 205 times (in Hector). Grassroots stakeholder participation tends to intensify in 2011 and 2012. With the exception of Hector, most municipalities see fewer than ten incidences of grassroots stakeholder engagement until 2011. Thus, we consider cases where engagement in any year is higher than 10 to be a high-engagement case and those with lower than 10 as low-engagement cases.

The policy outcomes for each municipality (i.e., whether they adopted HVHF policies, what kind, and how many) were determined by consulting an original database of HVHF policies the research team assembled by consulting FracTracker, Food and Water Watch, Keuka Citizens Against Hydrofracking, and the Joint Landowners Coalition of New York. Every 3–6 months, the team checked for updates to these sources, supplementing with Internet searches for news articles documenting local fracking policy passage. We also searched the New York State Public Law Database (NYSPLD) for HVHF-related keywords to identify measures missed by the other sources. When at least two non-NYSPLD⁸ sources documented passage of a policy, we generally considered it verified. If only one indicated passage, we sought clarification via public information requests to the municipality and/or consulting NYSPLD. Finally, we verified timing of policy adoption via public information requests, municipal public meeting minutes, and NYSPLD. Figure 1 demonstrates the variety of HVHF policy adoption among the 13 cases. The municipalities differ in the number of HVHF policies adopted, from zero to four.

The level of public engagement on HVHF varied greatly across municipalities (see Table 1). Two towns, Brant and North Harmony, had no evidence of stakeholder engagement on the issue. Stakeholder engagement was uncontested in Augusta, Covert, Holland, Summerhill, and Torrey. In the six remaining towns it was contested, with contestation low in Bainbridge, Candor, and Triangle and high in Delaware, Hector, and Otego.

The bar charts in Fig. 2 break contestation down by year for each of the six cases with contestation. In all cases, engagement by anti-HVHF stakeholders (dark gray bars) was greater than engagement by pro-HVHF stakeholders (light gray bars).

In the three low-contestation cases, engagement began (and in the case of Bainbridge ended) in 2010. The presence of opposing stakeholder views was very weak in Bainbridge, where stakeholder registered these opinions at public meetings for only 1 year (2010) and discussed HVHF with LEOs fewer than five times that year. In Candor and Triangle, we detected contestation in 2 years; pro- and anti-HVHF stakeholders spoke on HVHF fewer than ten times for each of those years.

Contestation was relatively stronger in Delaware, Hector, and Otego. Otego is considered a high-contestation case because, although contestation lasted only 2 years, the frequency with which stakeholders spoke on HVHF at these public meetings intensified quickly, more than tripling over that period. In Delaware and Hector, engagement stretched out for a longer period, with Delaware showing a fairly even pattern of participation, with a peak in 2010, and Hector showing a pattern of intensifying contestation.

Hector experienced the most intense conflict, in terms of the duration and frequency of engagement by opposing grassroots stakeholders in public meetings. The case of Hector illustrates how contentious HVHF can become and how resulting conflicts can affect LEO behaviors. Here, an LEO acknowledged that the, “past election’s biggest issue was fracking or no fracking, [I] do not like that this line has been drawn, the town is split” (February 14, 2012; Town of Hector board meeting). Contestation at public meetings over HVHF intensified over time. At one point, a sheriff’s deputy was called to maintain order. When questioned about why the deputy was at the meeting, the town supervisor responded, “There are concerns with some people being uncomfortable; i.e., a knife thrown across the table a couple months ago.” At the next month’s town board meeting, the supervisor instructed the public to learn about the rules and norms governing town board meetings by visiting the NY Association of Town’s website and reviewing local laws and procedures for town meetings (Town of Hector board meeting, April 10, 2012).

In this paper, we offer a nuanced account of patterns that arise when publics engage with local elected officials. While some herald public engagement in policymaking as a positive development, increasing the legitimacy of public policy and potentially resulting in more targeted and innovative solutions (Bingham et al. 2005; Fung 2006), others argue that engagement minimally impacts decision making and at best serves as a buffer for elected officials seeking to deflect criticism about process legitimacy (Rowe and Frewer 2000; Kemp 1985). Greater citizen engagement with elected officials may not only fail to promote substantive policy change, but also dampen advocacy as symbolic policy actions satiate grassroots stakeholder demands (Lubell 2004a). While work in this vein emphasizes the importance of institutional design for getting grassroots stakeholders to participate in meaningful ways (Few et al. 2007; Fung 2006; Irvin and Stansbury 2004), it provides little insight into the role of leadership in shaping participation processes and outcomes (Fung 2015). What is more, whereas some scholars emphasize the deleterious impact that conflict may have on public deliberative processes, in practice this literature largely treats the public as a single homogenous entity (see Few et al. 2007; Reed 2008). By focusing on how contested and uncontested grassroots stakeholders impact LEO decision making, we begin to tease apart the patterned behaviors which give rise to different policy outcomes. Thus, we are able to reconcile accounts of futile stakeholder engagement (e.g., Few et al. 2007) with successful stakeholder engagement (e.g., Bingham et al. 2005) by showing what works when, and why.

Our content analysis of public documents captures local-level efforts to respond to the policy and political challenges created by HVHF. The analysis frequently supports our propositions regarding the impact that public engagement has on local HVHF governance. This engagement shapes political discourse around the issue and increases the likelihood of policymaking about it, albeit not necessarily encouraging substantive action. Uncontested publics appear to hold more sway over the policy outcomes than contested publics. However, contested publics still are able to affect the political behavior of LEOs, pushing them to defend their political stances and offer policy action as evidence of responsiveness. In some cases, like the Town of Otego, smaller, discrete policy actions tackling dimensions of HVHF may pave the way for more substantive action later (although we do not explore such temporal dynamics in detail here).

We are also able to provide support for Daviter’s (2015) hypothesis that novel policy processes are an opportunity for jurisdictions to widen or restrict their authority over an issue. This finding holds significant implications for current studies of multi-level governance, where scholars are trying to unpack questions over how conflict and redundancy may be avoided (or used constructively) when rule-making takes place in overlapping jurisdictions (Andersson and Ostrom 2008, for example).

This study does, however, have limitations. It does not consider how specific characteristics of LEOs, such as political partisanship, occupation, and experience in office, may affect their decision making. There is a large literature on how factors such as these affect officials’ incentives and capacities (e.g., Zhang and Feiock 2010; Teodoro 2011). For example, LEOs in less contested cases may share policy beliefs with their constituents and LEOs in contested cases may vary in their beliefs. To wit: In the Town of Triangle, the LEO who championed the Town’s adoption of a road use policy was personally interested in HVHF because he wanted to lease his land to the natural gas industry. LEO characteristics may indeed influence their decision making, but investigating those dynamics lies outside the scope of this current study. Our study assumed that LEO characteristics are roughly randomly distributed across municipalities, such that they would not systematically affect LEO behavioral patterns identified in our sample of 13 jurisdictions. In the future, this assumption should be quantitatively tested across a larger number of cases and qualitatively evaluated through interviews. Finally, this paper only considers interactions between grassroots stakeholders and LEOs, ignoring other actors, e.g., industry or civil society. Future work can delve into how navigating these dynamics impacts LEO behaviors.

The findings provide ample motivation for deepening study. A large-N analysis could be conducted with a simplified codebook and automated text analysis. Such a study could not only indicate how generalizable our findings are, but a larger data set with more variability in contestation levels could also reveal other linkages between policy outcomes and the interplay between LEO and grassroots stakeholder behaviors. Policymaking is made by collectives and the purposive and strategic actions of individuals embedded within these collectives. Therefore, studies of collective political behavior need to be complemented by studies like ours, investigating how individual agents navigate the policy process. Our analysis suggests that individuals in leadership positions can critically impact the direction of environmental policy. One obvious example is the leadership in this area by the Obama administration and its reversal by the Trump administration. Such shifts in policy are occurring across all levels of government. Understanding patterned behaviors of actors who are endowed through the democratic process with decision-making authority is critical to fully understand how local governments may navigate challenging environmental policymaking, and in the process potentially influence outcomes at other levels of governance.