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Abstract Scholars have spent decades arguing that policy entrepreneurs, change agents who work individually and in groups to influence the policy process, can be crucial in introducing policy innovation and spurring policy change. How to identify policy entrepreneurs empirically has received less attention. This oversight is consequential because scholars trying to understand when policy entrepreneurs emerge, and why, and what makes them more or less successful, need to be able to identify these change agents reliably and accurately. This paper explores the ways policy entrepreneurs are currently identified and highlights issues with current approaches. We introduce a new technique for eliciting and distinguishing policy entrepreneurs, coupling automated and manual analysis of local news media and a survey of policy entrepreneur candidates. We apply this technique to the empirical case of unconventional oil and gas drilling in Pennsylvania and derive some tentative results concerning factors which increase entrepreneurial efficacy. 

Unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) has become the most widespread form of energy production in the United States. The booms and busts associated with UOGD are not unique to the industry, but the impacts to local communities are. As the industry continues to dominate the nation's energy landscape, and marginalized communities are disproportionately exposed to the extraction processes, it is important to understand the full scope of the environmental and social impacts experienced by communities during booms and busts. We review the literature on both the ecological and social boom-bust impacts of UOGD, noting the dearth of research on bust-time impacts. We conclude by calling for greater research on the long-term impacts of busts, in particular, and on understudied aspects of social impacts like those to public services, infrastructure, and social capital. 

Abstract Scholarship on boom‐busts cycles in resource extraction often assumes that affected resource‐rich communities are at best reactive, at worst helpless, in the face of the large, exogenous shocks this cycle visits upon them. Researchers infrequently examine what communities themselves can do to improve their economic prospects and residents' quality of life amidst booms and busts. In this review paper, we identify and synthesize work scattered across disparate academic and gray literature—in planning, law, community economic development, rural sociology, economics, and political science, among others—to holistically assess what we know about how communities can use local policymaking to manage impacts of booms and busts associated with unconventional oil and gas drilling (UOGD), often called “fracking.” We highlight examples of communities tackling this task using vertical and horizontal governance strategies and distill expert recommendations for how communities can build boom‐bust resiliency generally and in key areas impacted by UOGD.