How Long Does Social Learning Take? Insights from a Longitudinal Case Study

Social learning continues to attract the attention of researchers in natural resource management, yet little published research focuses specifically on social learning time frames. This article aims to redress this knowledge gap through presenting insigh

Impacts of unconventional gas development on rural community decline

This paper looks at the impact of a new extractive industry, namely unconventional natural gas, on rural decline. Rural decline is defined as comprising loss of rural youth, reduced human capital and increasing rural poverty. Since the start of the current century, the unconventional natural gas industry has been expanding around the world, often in close proximity to pre-existing agricultural communities. The social impacts of this new industry represent a growing area of interest in rural studies. We contribute to this new research area through a case study of coal seam gas (CSG) development in Queensland, Australia, comparing regions where gas development occurred between 2001 and 2011 against a control group of similar regions without gas development. The study eliminated the influence of non-resident workforces by analysing census data based on place of usual residence as well as place of enumeration. A key finding of the study is that regions with CSG development have experienced a growing youth share of the population and, of particular note, a growing female youth share of the population. CSG regions had a higher proportion of youth with university degrees and advanced technical training compared to other rural regions. Poverty reduction was also observed in some specific CSG regions. The extensive spatial footprint of unconventional gas and increased female rural youth populations indicate a diversion from traditional boomtown social impacts observed in previous energy booms. Taken together, the results show signs of mitigating and reversing rural community decline

Income Inequality across Australian Regions during the Mining Boom: 2001-11

As mining expands throughout the world, a growing body of literature is focusing on the relationship between mining and well-being in locations where resource extraction occurs. Although many topics such as employment and migration have been researched, the impacts of mining on income inequality have received less attention from scholars. Income inequality is a highly debated topic and the Gini coefficient (GC) one of the most popular indicators used to measure and discuss it. In this paper we estimate GCs for all sub-State regions of Australia and analyse their changes during the ‘mining boom decade’ (2001–11) across mining and non-mining regions. Our results show that, on average, income inequality increased by around 4.8 per cent in mining regions, compared to 8.7 per cent in the average non-mining region. However, the results also show important variation in changes of GC across mining regions, suggesting that the industry is likely to affect the distribution of local incomes in different ways. The method we propose to estimate GCs for regional areas and the results obtained across mining and non-mining regions provide important insights for future research and for regional policy makers, especially those concerned with the socio-economic impacts of industries such as mining across regions

Local economic impacts of an unconventional energy boom: the coal seam gas industry in Australia

Complementing the scarce economic literature about local impacts of energy extraction booms, this paper empirically investigates economic outcomes related to the new coal seam gas (CSG) industry located across southern Queensland. This Australian state has seen an unprecedented inflow of investments into the extraction of this previously unexploited unconventional natural gas over the last decade. We analyse census data to study income and employment effects associated with the CSG boom, exploiting the quasi-experimental conditions provided by CSG extraction areas (treatment regions) and regions without this development (control regions). Findings show that treatment regions have higher income growth than control areas during 2001–2011 for families residing locally and for individuals present on census night. Employment in the mining sector also shows higher growth as has non-mining employment in some areas. We include comparisons between CSG areas with no major mining history (the Surat basin) and CSG areas where mining was important before the CSG boom (the Bowen basin), to better understand boom effects in areas with different initial mining industry importance in their economies. Local job multipliers are also analysed for Surat basin CSG areas, where positive impacts (job spillovers) are restricted to construction and professional services jobs, while agricultural jobs have decreased