The great discoveries of the past two and a half centuries – the steam engine, electromagnetic induction, the electric power grid, the internal combustion engine, the transistor, personal computers, the internet – change not just the way we live, but an entire global economy. Nothing, however, created more change or made more millionaires than one discovery. By the early 1900s, the iron carriage had made its appearance on the streets of our booming cities, but a new kind of engine and a new kind of fuel would be needed to make a “gasmobile” run. Oil.

Despite the many advances, however, since the start of the petroleum era, ecosystems are failing because of increased industrialization, combustion pollution, and greenhouse gases. Are we seeing the beginning of the end, the twilight of our most gleaming idol? Is the next great global energy transition being forced upon us? In the words of Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi oil minister from 1962 to 1986, “the Stone Age did not end for lack of stone and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.” Alas, short-term profits and share price is still being valued over environmental degradation and global warming.

This chapter first illustrates the fundamental characteristics of natural gas, including: (i) History of natural gas; (ii) Where natural gas resources are currently located across the globe, also with a focus on the difference between conventional and unconventional resources; (iii) Technological aspects of natural gas exploration, production, and transport; (iv) Global natural gas production, consumption, and trade trends. It then outlines the characteristics of natural gas markets in different regions of the world, and how they differ from oil markets. To conclude, the chapter discusses the geopolitical issues associated with access to natural gas.

Polycentric governance systems can promote conflict as overlapping units contest their authorities, roles, and interests, but also provide venues that mitigate conflict. Conflict can lead to learning and institutional adaptation that enhance the functioning of polycentric systems, but conflict can also become entrenched and impede adaptation. Understanding the nature of conflictual interactions in polycentric systems and how those systems provide conflict resolution is critical to understanding performance. This chapter examines conflict and conflict resolution in two polycentric systems that govern hydraulic fracturing and shale development across two US states: Colorado and New York. It examines the extent that conflicts have been resolved and whether learning or adaptation of the governance systems occurred. The chapter considers how the authority, information, and resources of the actors explain incentives for conflict and conflict resolution within the polycentric systems. We observe differences in the conflict interaction patterns, as well as in the performance of polycentric governance in these two settings.

How can communities, associations, governments, and other organizations work better together? This chapter looks at putting polycentricity into practice for improving governance, focusing on collective action among autonomous decision centres in contexts of cooperation, competition, conflict resolution, and social learning. Practising polycentric governance may involve assessing and appreciating the ways in which a situation is already polycentric and might be improved; applying principles and mechanisms to craft specific institutional arrangements for polycentric governance; and facilitating the emergence of polycentric governance, including co-creation of more inclusive networks, common knowledge, and 'power with'.

Governing complexity tends to produce complex governance. This book has aimed to provide a conceptual and empirical analysis of polycentric governance that can help carry detailed research on the determinants, change and performance of polycentric arrangements into a future research program as well as new fields of application. The chapter reviews the main points of the preceding chapters.

This chapter addresses the challenges of establishing and sustaining governance arrangements conducive to environmental citizenship. The significance of this concern is illustrated by Australian experiences with governance arrangements seeking to promote citizenship among rural landholders in natural resources conservation. The chapter draws from Vincent Ostrom's thinking about polycentric governance, who drew from de Tocqueville. Ostrom identified ‘the way people think and relate to one another’ (corresponding with the meta-constitutional level of analysis in the Institutional Analysis and Development framework) as vital for governance that is capable of promoting citizenship, and the citizenship required to sustain polycentric governance. Progress in empirical investigation of relationships between polycentric governance and environmental citizenship is reviewed. One relationship of this kind is illustrated by policy reform in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin.

This chapter compares insights from our empirical cases of three kinds of interactions: cooperation, conflict and conflict resolution, and competition. The elements of authority, information, and resources affected incentives and interactions differently. Focusing on interactions as a unit of analysis points to a variety of performance criteria that may be appropriate. These criteria for assessing outcomes and processes cannot all be optimized at once, as trade-offs are evident, and different types of interaction are likely to entail different performance combinations. In our case studies, no performance criterion scored high across all cases, and no case performed well across all performance criteria.

Constitution-making involves a 'Faustian bargain' in which individuals and smaller communities give up some of their autonomy for the sake of the benefits brought by larger-scale societies. Transitioning from small-scale quasi-egalitarian societies towards a complex, but more hierarchical, political system makes possible collective action and the provision of public goods at much larger scales, including defence, establishing larger common markets, and basic infrastructure. After introducing the concept of the 'Faustian' bargain, the chapter explains how constitutive rules create such bargains. We turn to the role of monitoring, conflict resolution, and sanctioning as means of building commitments to constitutions, providing for stability and flexibility. The chapter illustrates these relationships using two cases of constitution-making: the multi-level governance of New York City watersheds, and post-conflict situations in which leaders of different ethnic groups come to agreement.

The delivery of public goods often spurs competition between different authorities. Competition for scarce natural resources also triggers the creation of multiple decision-making centres as different actors seek venues where they can exert authority. Competition takes multiple forms and is linked with cooperation and conflict resolution to shape the rules governing resource users' interactions. We compare the evolution and performance of market-based water reallocation, and associated institutional reforms, in two polycentric water governance arrangements: the Ebro Basin of NE Spain and the US portion of the Columbia Basin. The chapter examines how authority structures, information and capacity influence competitive interactions within and across constitutional, collective choice, and operational levels of action. Polycentric governance arrangements vary in their distribution and coordination of authority, which shapes competition and performance. The comparison reveals trade-offs between efficiency and other performance criteria; efforts to facilitate efficient water reallocation may limit accountability and representation, and vice-versa.

Political science does not offer a distinct subdiscipline to address the subject of energy. Insofar as political science has addressed energy, it has focused on issues often neglected by other disciplines, notably the role of geopolitics and international relations, and the domestic politics of resource-rich states. Apart from the different subfields, we examine different approaches including realism, constructivism, liberalism and Marxism. The rise and fall and rise again of academic articles on energy in leading political science journals is reviewed and linked to exogenous forces such as the price of oil. Two distinct energy topics which have received attention are nuclear power and the oil crises of 1973–79 because of their wider geopolitical ramifications. Perhaps the most prominent or consistent thread through studies of the politics of energy is the question of energy security or energy independence. Finally, in recent years, energy has increasingly emerged as a focus for study in environmental politics and climate change politics in particular.

The crafting of good energy policy raises philosophical questions with respect to the deliberative processes through which policy should be formed, and with respect to the specific content of the policies arrived at. This short essay begins with a brief account of the conceptual difficulties that arise when we think about just energy policy and the benefits and harms our energy policies bring to future generations. It moves on to focus more narrowly on questions of good deliberative process. More specifically, the essay addresses a set of issues concerning whether there is a defensible version of the ‘precautionary principle’, and the proper contributions to policy formation of technically trained experts versus laypersons. These issues are explored via illustrative examples relating to climate change, to nuclear power and to disputes over fracking.

This chapter discusses the importance of the legal aspects of energy policy. It advances two main propositions: (a) different legal expressions of similar energy policies have different implications for the effectiveness and overall impact of a policy, and (b) the choice of legal expression is highly constrained by (i) law as a technology (i.e., the tools available to translate a policy into legal terms), (ii) the need to fit the policy within a broader legal framework and (iii) the underlying economic, social and political considerations affecting the choice of certain legal expressions. The chapter illustrates these two propositions by reference to three case studies relating to the extraction of shale gas in the EU, decarbonisation in the United States, and state support for renewable energy in India.