Is the gas industry a good neighbour? A comparison of UK and Australia experiences in terms of procedural fairness and distributive justice

Abstract

Australia and the UK share much in common in their governance and legal systems, including a representative
parliament, Common law, and land titles administration. One might therefore expect that approaches to
unconventional oil and gas development would also be similar, given that the countries are both in the early stages of
development. In this article, we examine the different experiences of unconventional oil and gas development in
Australia and the UK. We question whether the onshore gas industry makes a ‘good neighbour’ in two different
contexts that share one common legal background. The analysis draws from 15 years of longitudinal socio-economic
data indicating impacts accompanying coal seam gas (coal bed methane) development in Queensland, Australia
(Rifkin et al. 2015) and an analysis of discourse on social sustainability surrounding shale gas exploration and
development from Lancashire, UK (Whitton et al. 2015, 2017). We conclude that the unconventional gas development
experience is heavily context dependent and that this experience is not described by a simple narrative, nor by snapshot
baseline and impact studies.