Papers by Laurence J Williams
Environmental Communication, 2025
We employ a mixed-method research design to assess the resonance of key frames used in the UK pol... more We employ a mixed-method research design to assess the resonance of key frames used in the UK policy debate over shale gas development amongst two distinct public audiences. We elaborate a conceptual framework drawn from argumentative discourse analysis and social movement studies. The framework conceptualises resonance as the result of frame plausibility, acceptability and trustworthiness. We utilise semi-structured interviews to analyse how frames resonate with local "campaigning publics" in the case study region of the Fylde, Lancashire, UK. The plausibility of the frames and trustworthiness of key organisations amongst the general public are also assessed through a nationally representative UK survey. We find that, amongst the general public, the frames of the anti-shale development discourse coalition are viewed as more plausible than those of the proshale coalition. This finding offers a partial explanation for the failure of UK shale policy. Our local community interviews identify contrasting views on frame resonance amongst local "campaigning publics". We illustrate these contrasting views on frame resonance by exploring how pro-and anti-shale development interviewees generally held different perceptions about the trustworthiness of key actors and institutions, the promise of economic benefits, and the framing contests over climate change and risk and regulation.
Expect the unimaginable: A document analysis of expectations for 5G in UK newspapers, 2024
I conduct a document analysis of two UK national newspapers in order to assess the technological ... more I conduct a document analysis of two UK national newspapers in order to assess the technological expectations that were expressed about 5G mobile networks over the period 2011-2020. Six themes of expectations are identified in the corpus, namely scepticism over 5G, spectrum and infrastructure, 5G network performance capabilities, technological and industrial competition, 5G as an enabler, and the impacts of 5G. The corpus is dominated by expectations about the national security implications of allowing the Chinese company Huawei to play a role in the UK's 5G networks, and debates over this issue drive an increase in both coverage and expectations in general towards the end of the timeline. A number of strategies used to generate expectation credibility and legitimacy for 5G are identified, as are a number of key performative effects evident within the corpus. The findings reported here build on and contribute to existing work on mobile communications and technological expectations for ICTs, and offer two key conceptual insightsthe identification of an 'expect the unimaginable' discourse, and the identification of subtle discursive strategies that contribute to the realisation of 5G by obscuring choice and preventing resistance rather than generating legitimacy.
Lessons from the Framing Contest over UK Shale Development
Nature and Culture
The framing of shale gas development has received widespread attention, especially in the UK, Uni... more The framing of shale gas development has received widespread attention, especially in the UK, United States, and throughout Europe. However, little has been said about what lessons can be learned from the shale development case about the role of language in use in the construction, contestation and closure of environmental problems. This article teases out and clarifies the subtle variations in the way the concept of the “frame” has been interpreted and operationalized; puts forward an analysis of the difficulty of achieving discursive closure in the UK shale development policy debate; and identifies possible implications of the failure of the “bridging fuel” argument for environmental discourse more broadly, asking in particular if this failure represents a challenge to ecological modernization or its continuation.
UKUH Benchmark Reviews, 2020
The moratorium imposed in 2019 on hydraulic fracturing in England provides an opportunity to take... more The moratorium imposed in 2019 on hydraulic fracturing in England provides an opportunity to take stock and learn lessons from the UK’s decade-long pursuit of a domestic shale gas industry. These lessons will prove valuable in relation to shale gas should the moratorium ever be lifted, but also offer broader insights into the politics of the environment and innovation. These insights relate especially to the infrastructure required as part of the UK’s net zero strategy, irrespective of UK shale policy going forward. This review takes the form of a brief history of the national formal politics of shale gas in the UK over the period 2009-2019, during which so much and yet so little occurred. By UK formal politics, we refer to political action and discourse within the government and legislature of the United Kingdom at Westminster. Distinct formal national political dynamics exist within the devolved governments and parliaments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and are covered elsewhere in this collection (see Cotton 2020).
Policy@Sussex Policy Brief, 2022
The tensions that emerged between delivering energy infrastructure and
giving the public and loc... more The tensions that emerged between delivering energy infrastructure and
giving the public and local communities a say in decision-making during
the UK shale gas controversy offer a number of important lessons both
for any renewed attempt to develop a domestic shale gas industry and
as the UK looks toward the infrastructure required for Net Zero.
University of Sussex researchers investigated formal public participation
in UK shale gas decision-making in order to understand the nature
and extent of the participatory opportunity on offer and learn what
participants thought about these exercises.
This policy brief summarises the findings of this work and makes four
recommendations to institutions that oversee formal participatory
processes on energy infrastructure.
Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2022
We conduct an analysis of a UK-focused corpus of documents that represent key sites through which... more We conduct an analysis of a UK-focused corpus of documents that represent key sites through which the promise of green 5G is produced, circulated and challenged. By the promise of green 5G we refer to an emerging, overarching, dominant expectation that 5G will produce environmental sustainability benefits of various kinds. We employ an analytical approach informed by the sociology of expectations and the concept of technoscientific promises to identify: the various types of expectations and promises upon which the promise of green 5G is built, the ways that the legitimacy and credibility of this promise are boosted, the negative expectations that challenge it, the different ways in which 5G is positioned in relation to the problem of expected traffic growth and how such problematisations direct attention to different solutions, and, finally, a number of other performative effects of the promise of green 5G. The promise of green 5G directs attention towards technological options that aim to render traffic growth sustainable through energy efficiency improvements and away from alternative approaches. This dominant expectation that traffic growth can be rendered sustainable through technological innovation suggests strong commitments to the environmental discourses of ecological modernisation and Promethean environmentalism within this technological community.
Energy Research and Social Science, 2022
We employ a mixed-method approach to analyse four forms of formal public participation in decisio... more We employ a mixed-method approach to analyse four forms of formal public participation in decision-making on shale development in the UKplanning, environmental permitting, public consultation and dialogue workshops. We focus analytically on the kinds of issues that can be raised effectively in such processes and the scope for public influence. This focus is conceptually inspired by literatures on public participation from Science and Technology Studies and on energy infrastructure planning disputes, with our findings building on existing work on public participation in decision-making on UK shale development. We also conduct local community interviews in the Fylde, Lancashire, UK, in order to understand how these processes are viewed by those who have participated in them. We find that these formal participatory opportunities generally tightly restrict the types of issues that are open for discussion, narrowing the scope for public influence. Some of these forms of participation (public consultations and dialogue workshops) take on an instrumental character, serving as a tool to help achieve the policy aim of facilitating a domestic industry. Others (planning and environmental permitting) are designed to be insensitive to public questioning of that policy aim. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, many of our local community interviewees saw these processes as performative exercises in the legitimation of UK government shale gas policy.
‘Going through the dance steps’: Instrumentality, frustration and performativity in processes of formal public participation in decision-making on shale development in the United Kingdom
Energy Research & Social Science
We employ a mixed-method approach to analyse four forms of formal public participation in decisio... more We employ a mixed-method approach to analyse four forms of formal public participation in decision-making on shale development in the UKplanning, environmental permitting, public consultation and dialogue workshops. We focus analytically on the kinds of issues that can be raised effectively in such processes and the scope for public influence. This focus is conceptually inspired by literatures on public participation from Science and Technology Studies and on energy infrastructure planning disputes, with our findings building on existing work on public participation in decision-making on UK shale development. We also conduct local community interviews in the Fylde, Lancashire, UK, in order to understand how these processes are viewed by those who have participated in them. We find that these formal participatory opportunities generally tightly restrict the types of issues that are open for discussion, narrowing the scope for public influence. Some of these forms of participation (public consultations and dialogue workshops) take on an instrumental character, serving as a tool to help achieve the policy aim of facilitating a domestic industry. Others (planning and environmental permitting) are designed to be insensitive to public questioning of that policy aim. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, many of our local community interviewees saw these processes as performative exercises in the legitimation of UK government shale gas policy.
Energy Research and Social Science, 2022
We employ a mixed-method approach to analyse four forms of formal public participation in decisio... more We employ a mixed-method approach to analyse four forms of formal public participation in decision-making on shale development in the UKplanning, environmental permitting, public consultation and dialogue workshops. We focus analytically on the kinds of issues that can be raised effectively in such processes and the scope for public influence. This focus is conceptually inspired by literatures on public participation from Science and Technology Studies and on energy infrastructure planning disputes, with our findings building on existing work on public participation in decision-making on UK shale development. We also conduct local community interviews in the Fylde, Lancashire, UK, in order to understand how these processes are viewed by those who have participated in them. We find that these formal participatory opportunities generally tightly restrict the types of issues that are open for discussion, narrowing the scope for public influence. Some of these forms of participation (public consultations and dialogue workshops) take on an instrumental character, serving as a tool to help achieve the policy aim of facilitating a domestic industry. Others (planning and environmental permitting) are designed to be insensitive to public questioning of that policy aim. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, many of our local community interviewees saw these processes as performative exercises in the legitimation of UK government shale gas policy.
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2022
The energy efficiency and consumption of mobile networks have received increasing attention from ... more The energy efficiency and consumption of mobile networks have received increasing attention from academics and industry in recent years. This has been provoked by rapid increases in mobile data traffic and projected further rapid increases over the next decade. As a result, dramatic improvements in the energy efficiency of mobile networks are required to ensure that future traffic levels are both environmentally and economically sustainable. In this context, a good deal of research has focused on technologies and strategies that can improve the energy efficiency of 5G and future mobile networks more broadly. However, existing reviews in the field of green or sustainable mobile communications on the topic of the energy use implications of 5G overlook a number of issues that broader literatures on the energy use impacts of ICTs suggest could be significant. Addressing this gap, we conduct a literature review to examine whole network level assessments of the operational energy use implications of 5G, the embodied energy use associated with 5G, and indirect effects associated with 5G-driven changes in user behaviour and patterns of consumption and production in other sectors of the economy. In general, we find that these issues and their energy use implications have received insufficient attention in publicly available studies on the energy use impacts of 5G.
Environmental Research Letters, 2020
It is critical to ensure climate and energy policies are just, equitable and beneficial for commu... more It is critical to ensure climate and energy policies are just, equitable and beneficial for communities, both to sustain public support for decarbonisation and address multifaceted societal challenges. Our objective in this article is to examine the diverse social outcomes that have resulted from climate policies, in varying contexts worldwide, over the past few decades. We review 203 ex-post climate policy assessments that analyse social outcomes in the literature. We systematically and comprehensively map out this work, identifying articles on carbon, energy and transport taxes, feed-in-tariffs, subsidies, direct procurement policies, large renewable deployment projects, and other regulatory and market-based interventions. We code each article in terms of their studied social outcomes and effects, with a focus on electricity access, energy affordability, community cohesion, employment, distributional and equity issues, livelihoods and poverty, procedural justice, subjective well-b...
Public understanding of science (Bristol, England), Jan 13, 2015
The prospect of fracking in the United Kingdom has been accompanied by significant public unease.... more The prospect of fracking in the United Kingdom has been accompanied by significant public unease. We outline how the policy debate is being framed by UK institutional actors, finding evidence of a dominant discourse in which the policy approach is defined through a deficit model of public understanding of science and in which a technical approach to feasibility and safety is deemed as sufficient grounds for good policymaking. Deploying a deliberative focus group methodology with lay publics across different sites in the north of England, we find that these institutional framings are poorly aligned with participants' responses. We find that unease regularly overflows the focus on safety and feasibility and cannot be satisfactorily explained by a lack of understanding on the part of participants. We find that scholarship from science and technology studies productively elucidates our participants' largely sceptical positions, and orientates strategies for responding to them mo...
Environmental Politics
Drawing from an extensive content analysis of the UK parliamentary debate over shale gas, we use ... more Drawing from an extensive content analysis of the UK parliamentary debate over shale gas, we use the UK shale gas case to explore how energy democracy themes are used and countered in the framing strategies of discourse coalitions in national political sites. Furthermore, we explore the extent to which these national political sites and discursive strategies are effective as institutions and practices through which to achieve energy democracy. We achieve this through an analysis of the success of the UK anti-and pro-shale gas development discourse coalitions in recruiting national political figures and influencing thinking and decision-making in parliament. In doing so, we bring together the literatures on discourse coalitions and energy democracy. We conclude with implications for both national policy as well as critical inquiry into environmental politics.
The proliferation of the exploitation of unconvetionals, and particularly the use of fracking, ha... more The proliferation of the exploitation of unconvetionals, and particularly the use of fracking, has been accompanied by a range of social and environmental concerns, most notably about the industrialisation of rural landscapes; effects on food production; corporate power, democratic legitimacy, and community disempowerment; possible contamination of water resources (groundwater and surface water); high levels of water consumption; induced seismicity; and questions about how the exploitation of unconventionals and obligations under international climate change agreements might be reconciled. These concerns and others have driven the emergence of diverse and localised grassroots protest groups around the world. The epicentre of the debate in the UK has so far been around Blackpool, the Fylde, and West Lancashire (joined recently by Balcombe, West Sussex). On the 1 st of April and 27 th of May 2011 there were two earthquakes with magnitudes of 2.3 and 1.5 respectively in the Blackpool area. Nearby hydraulic fracturing treatments were subsequently deemed as the cause of these seismic events by a series of studies commissioned by Caudrilla Resources Limited, the company responsible for the treatments, and reviewed by The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC 2012a). As a result in the UK, perhaps uniquely, seismicity has been the main risk "the general public" associate with fracking (Britain Thinks 2012a; O'Hara et al 2013), and Caudrilla has become the public, if not for some, infamous face of fracking in the UK. The fracking and unconventionals debate is still emerging in the UK and perhaps the majority of minds are far from made up on the issue (with perhaps a significant proportion remaining scarcely aware of the issue). This project is an attempt to elicit and articulate lay judgements on fracking and the exploitation of unconventionals and the underlying factors driving them. The projects starting point was the assumption that rather than demonstrating a deficit of understanding revealing the need for one-way pedagogical instruction, public unease may be based on perfectly legitimate and reasonable social, political, and ethical judgements. Firstly, an account of emerging media representations and institutional discourse will be presented, as well as the early stages of social sciences' engagement with the topic. The institutional discourse will then be critiqued as frequently misrepresenting the nature of public concern and being incapable of fully addressing that concern due to the dominance of a secluded risk assessment and management approach. I will then describe and justify the deliberative focus group methodology used here to try and elicit some of the factors structuring public 14 2,281). As they stress "these 'gas-in-place' figures refer to an estimate for the entire volume of gas contained in the rock formation, not how much can be recovered" (Andrews 2013: 3). Furthermore they acknowledge that "not enough is yet known to estimate a recovery factor, nor to estimate potential reserves (how much gas may be ultimately produced)", and that to be able to do so would require more 'refined' methodology requiring production data from wells in combination with "non-geological factors such as gas price, operating costs and the scale of development agreed by the local planning system" (Andrews 2013: 3). Nevertheless it has been suggested that if 10% was recoverable this would represent 25 years of UK gas supply (Macalister 2013), and there remain other areas of the UK with possible unconventional fossil fuel "plays". Research is currently underway to produce a resource estimate for the Weald Basin which sits underneath parts of SouthEast England. 2.2.3 Potential Benefits The third area of debate in institutional discourse on fracking and unconventionals concerns the potential benefits of exploitation, which are primarily economic in character, and which often include degrees of extrapolation and speculation. Predicting how this innovation will translate to different places and contexts is the subject of much uncertainty. It demands the acknowledgement of the complexity and heterogeneity of geology, mineral rights laws, regulatory culture, future global and regional gas markets, export infrastructure and capacity, 'social acceptability', planning processes, tax regimes, population density and many other factors. Uncertainties clearly exist over the likelihood of the 'shale gas revolution' being replicated in Europe to the same degree, at the same speed, and without more opposition, than has been the case in the US. For instance, as already noted, Deutsche Bank strike a cautionary note on shale's economic potential when they warn that "[t]hose waiting for a shale gas 'revolution' outside the US will likely be disappointed , in terms of both price and the speed at which high-volume can be achieved" (2011: 7). Their reasoning in the UK context includes uncertainties over recoverable resources, the speed with which the production phase can be reached and likely local and NGO opposition, as well as disadvantages compared to the US over drilling infrastructure, mineral rights laws and population density (Deutsche Bank 2011). The main potential benefits for the UK are widely seen as being limiting future energy price rises, improving energy security, job creation, and generating tax revenue. A series of reports estimate the likelihood and scale
Drawing from an extensive content analysis of the UK parliamentary debate over shale gas, we use ... more Drawing from an extensive content analysis of the UK parliamentary debate over shale gas, we use the UK shale gas case to explore how energy democracy themes are used and countered in the framing strategies of discourse coalitions in national political sites. Furthermore, we explore the extent to which these national political sites and discursive strategies are effective as institutions and practices through which to achieve energy democracy. We achieve this through an analysis of the success of the UK anti-and pro-shale gas development discourse coalitions in recruiting national political figures and influencing thinking and decision-making in parliament. In doing so, we bring together the literatures on discourse coalitions and energy democracy. We conclude with implications for both national policy as well as critical inquiry into environmental politics.
The prospect of fracking in the United Kingdom has been accompanied by significant public unease.... more The prospect of fracking in the United Kingdom has been accompanied by significant public unease. We outline how the policy debate is being framed by UK institutional actors, finding evidence of a dominant discourse in which the policy approach is defined through a deficit model of public understanding of
science and in which a technical approach to feasibility and safety is deemed as sufficient grounds for good policymaking. Deploying a deliberative focus group methodology with lay publics across different sites in the north of England, we find that these institutional framings are poorly aligned with participants’ responses. We find that unease regularly overflows the focus on safety and feasibility and cannot be satisfactorily explained by a lack of understanding on the part of participants. We find that scholarship from science and technology studies productively elucidates our participants’ largely sceptical positions, and orientates strategies for responding to them more effectively.
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Papers by Laurence J Williams
giving the public and local communities a say in decision-making during
the UK shale gas controversy offer a number of important lessons both
for any renewed attempt to develop a domestic shale gas industry and
as the UK looks toward the infrastructure required for Net Zero.
University of Sussex researchers investigated formal public participation
in UK shale gas decision-making in order to understand the nature
and extent of the participatory opportunity on offer and learn what
participants thought about these exercises.
This policy brief summarises the findings of this work and makes four
recommendations to institutions that oversee formal participatory
processes on energy infrastructure.
science and in which a technical approach to feasibility and safety is deemed as sufficient grounds for good policymaking. Deploying a deliberative focus group methodology with lay publics across different sites in the north of England, we find that these institutional framings are poorly aligned with participants’ responses. We find that unease regularly overflows the focus on safety and feasibility and cannot be satisfactorily explained by a lack of understanding on the part of participants. We find that scholarship from science and technology studies productively elucidates our participants’ largely sceptical positions, and orientates strategies for responding to them more effectively.