The Appalachian Regional Commission and the Consolidation of the Coal Consensus

Gabriel Levesque, Department of Sociology, McGill University

This paper interrogates the consolidation of the coal consensus as a political idea. In the immediate postwar era, the future of U.S. coal was seriously challenged by oil, natural gas and nuclear power. Within two decades, however, the development of coal power had become a full-fledged political project without much resistance. To address this puzzle, I leverage a year of archival data collection and analysis to develop a formation story that takes the coal consensus as its object. I argue that this major ideational shift was not the result of market forces but was furthered by the work of the Appalachian Regional Commission. From its creation in 1965, the agency acted as a catalyst organization to consolidate the coal consensus as both a solution to the Appalachian underdevelopment problem and to the national energy crisis of the 1970s. This study highlights the role of bureaucracies in fostering ties between stakeholders, brokering political interests at multiple levels, and organizing competing ideas into a coherent whole. In the end, this paper contributes to better understanding the pathways through which ideas influence both political-economic processes and energy trajectories.

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 Presented in Session 30. Natural Resource Economies