Do public review processes reflect public input? A study of hydraulic fracturing reviews in Australia and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
High volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) is a contentious issue worldwide. It is a crucial policy issue due to its significant impact on multiple stakeholders and, as a result, requires extensive public consultation and exposure. One process deployed in some liberal democracies to address this controversy is forming an independent expert review panel to receive public submissions and then prepare a report for policymakers. Our paper investigated how closely the review panel reports reflect and weigh the public submissions and to explore the subjects in which there is agreement or disagreement across the various reports. This study used the Leximancer automated text analysis software to compare key themes in the sub-national reports and public submissions. We find a consistent pattern across jurisdictions of public submissions reflecting health and environment while official reports focus on industry and economic development. There is a wide range of congruency between the jurisdictions on the capacity of the expert reports to reflect public opinion. Following from this divergence, we aim to contribute to more meaningful discussions regarding effective communication strategies between the government and the public to ensure review panel reports fairly represent public concerns.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".