The regulation of unconventional Fracking has kept German politics busy since 2012. At that time, the Regional Government of Northrheinwestfalia – where at that time up to 60 per cent of the surface was under exploration for fracking projects – adopted a Fracking Moratorium, indicating that the administrative bodies in charge would no longer give allowances. The Regional Government wanted to put pressure on the Federal Government which would have to pass new legislation tailored for the special case of fracking – so far fracking was – and still is – regulated under the Bundesberggesetz (the federal mountain-law) which emphasizes that soil resources must be recovered while the participation of local communities or the consideration of environmental concerns is given little relevance. While in 2012 and 2013 several scientific studies tried to explore the potentials and risks of unconventional fracking in Germany, in the first half of 2013, local groups, networking and acting with the help of the internet, managed to place the issue at the center of the political debate. However, a first attempt to adopt a comparatively moderate regulation law put forward by the conservative-liberal government failed in 2013. The recent Big Coalition decided in 2015 on the main aspects of such a regulation, leading to a de-facto ban of unconventional fracking until 2018. So far, the proposal has not been adopted in the Parliament, while media report that fracking industry keeps lobbying against the de-facto-ban.
The proposed paper is a qualitative case study that analyses the politics of regulating fracking from the perspective of PPIDA (the political process inherent dynamics approach. PPIDA is an analytical approach to analysing policy processes (Böcher/Töller 2015) that assumes that political processes neither solely result from interest struggles (as public choice theory would suggest) nor that they are driven mainly by the search for adequate problem solutions (as policy analysis often tends to suggest). Rather, in our PPIDA-approach (and similar to what garbage-can-models would suggest), policies are seen as the result of complex and intrinsically dynamic political processes and as such, of the contingent interactions between different explanatory factors, namely: Actors trying to realize their interests (sometimes driven by party politics, sometimes by their wish to solve problems and sometimes by their wish to increase their own power over opponents or to impede the projects of their political adversaries); Institutions (formal and informal rule structures on various levels) influencing actors’ perceptions and behavior, not only by producing compliance but also by provoking idiosyncratic reactions; Problem structures, such as the physical and technical characteristics of environmental policy problems as well as the expected distribution of costs and benefits of possible regulation measures among different societal groups; Policy instruments: The ideological aspects of policy instruments are at least as important for their use as their problem-solving capacity (technological aspects). Situational Aspects: accidents and incidents in environmental policy-related or other fields can influence the course of action in an unanticipated way by changing the public agenda or by weakening one political actor while strengthening another.
