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Accepted Paper:

Understanding and misunderstanding coal seam gas conflict in Tara: a stigmatised identity perspective  
Muhammad Makki (Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining )

Paper short abstract:

This paper explains that the root causes of conflict run deeper than a focus on environmental impacts associated with CSG project development. It is in fact a struggle against stigmatisation that has a history that pre-dates the CSG development.

Paper long abstract:

The crossover of two competing industries, agriculture and CSG, has put the rural Western Downs of Queensland under a great deal of socio-economic and environmental pressure and led to significant controversy. The rural subdivisions of Tara have become the centre of conflict as the residents have fiercely resisted CSG development since 2009. This paper follows the emergence and transformation of the CSG conflict in the community of Tara from 2009 to 2014, including the formation of the "Lock the Gate" movement.

This research demonstrates that what has been perceived in the media and simplistically labelled as a conflict driven by the environmental impacts of CSG is far more complex. Rather than using an environmental lens, this research rather takes a social identity perspective, which has yielded counterintuitive findings. The study reveals that the conflict dramatically escalated because the CSG industry became entangled with the stigmatised identity of 'Blockies', as the residents of 'Blocks' within the Tara subdivisions are called. The 'anti-CSG Blockies' took issue with CSG as a mean to manage, dissolve and negotiate the stigma attached with the label Blockie that socially excluded, discriminated, and marked them as devalued since the subdivisions were established in 1980s. Behind the nexus between the Tara subdivision-based anti-CSG groups and the Lock the Gate movement, no shared encoded meanings or objectives exist. The Blockies' convergence with the movement was merely commensal in nature, which thus provided the rejected self with a positive reference point for being evaluated through the movement's identity.

Panel Land06
The politics of resistance against unconventional gas exploration
  Session 1