When a forest is masked by trees: How French subsurface industries involved in decarbonisation and transition policies are instrumentalising poor social acceptance

Résumé :

Many policy-makers and industrialists consider that, over and above technology, social acceptance is the main obstacle to any decarbonised industrial use of the subsurface. Our aim in this paper is to challengeand criticise this point of view, by showing that even if a lack of social acceptance can explain the non-deployment of some subsurface technologies, generalising this explanation to every industrial failure hidessometimes intentionally the different reasons explaining why various promises from subsurface industries have failed to materialise in France. Through an analysis of three subsurface industries over a period of 15 years (underground carbon storage, shale gas development and mining prospects), this article shows how a coalition of subsurface industries and policymakers have built up a narrative emphasising the lack of social acceptability. We first show why the narratives about the lack of social acceptance fail to describe the various conflicts and project failures, and then categorise three different ways the lack of social acceptance is used to describe opponents, hide other reasons for failure and obtain policy reforms. We discuss the limitations of these frames to promote energy transition projects and the use of the very notion of social acceptance.