Adult learning and circumstantial activism in the coal seam gas protests: Informal and incidental learning in an environmental justice movement

Abstract This paper outlines adult learning in a rural campaign to prevent mining for coal seam gas in Victoria. In central Gippsland, largely known as the food bowl in the State of Victoria in Australia, a campaign against fracking for coal seam gas has managed to gain a permanent ban on fracking. This policy change would not have been possible without strategic locally based community campaigning that has mobilised protesters in many rural towns across central Gippsland. This paper examines how a diverse movement of circumstantial activists; farmers, tree changers and a small group of experienced environmental activists, have been able to resist coal seam gas exploration and fracking by large mining companies. Situated in the ‘pedagogical turn’ in new social movements, it examines the strategic educative processes that are involved in building a movement for change and the social conditions which enable informal, incidental learning and non-formal learning to occur as activists learn both individually and collectively from one another in the site of protest. Drawing on qualitative case study data and in-depth interviews, this research embodies the dynamic nature of activists’ experiences as they learn to challenge powerful discourses of economic development, in a time of neoliberal economic dominance, by resisting multinational mining companies fracking on their land.