Coal and Collective Action in Appalachia: Findings from a New Dataset
2026-06-16
Collective action involving natural resources can be politically consequential. But organisers confronting resource interests or even just operating in natural resource-dependent areas face substantial obstacles. This paper tests three arguments about why such activists can nonetheless sometimes succeed: that local party dynamics are important to dispute outcomes, that small-scale and persistent campaigns have the best results, and that peacefully disruptive tactics are especially impactful. We conduct our analysis using a new dataset comprised of 1,525 reports of actions and their immediate outcomes from the Appalachian state of West Virginia, one of the United States’ major coal producers and a longstanding site of coal-related social conflict. Our results regarding parties and movement participation and persistence are mixed. And, while we find a significant negative correlation between disruption and concessions, we observe very different patterns for labour versus environmental actions: disruption appears to work for the former but not the latter.