Unconventional Fuel Controversy in Quebec: Between Coproduction of Knowledge and Legal Reform

The paper aims to highlight the coproduction of scientific research concerning shale gas exploration in Quebec. Policymaking has gone through participatory and scientific instruments of public action but also through legal reform. The reciprocating process created a trading area between various stakeholders and actors. While first tackled with fragmented and weakly science-based policies, shale gas exploration was then understood as a global issue necessitating impacts studies and regulation. Policymaking process demonstrated the successful implication of activists and laymen into the sociotechnical controversy as the opponents succeeded on bringing specific issues on the research map. At the same, it showed attempts of deceit from politicians in favor of shale hydrocarbon while they fragmented the controversy between shale gas and shale oil, reframing the issue not on the controversial fracking technique but on the social unacceptance of the industry into populated areas (which allowed shale oil exploration on the almost uninhabited Anticosti Island). Coproduction of knowledge (Jasanoff, 2004) occurred nevertheless in particular through the strategic assessment as it tended to modify the argumentation of the opponents by reducing some concerns and highlighting others (the main issue is not water management as it was underlined in 2010 but methane leaks). Although the diagnosis is finally shared between much of the actors at the end of 2014 compared to early 2010, collective solutions struggled to emerge. The Liberal government, as its predecessor from the Parti Québécois, accepted the ban on shale gas also because of the low price of gas in northern America, and it planned the development of shale oil and supported the construction of pipelines to import Alberta tar sands which rose social concerns about quite the same risks as shale gas. What we considered as a virtuous process of coproduction is about to transform into a strategic deceit because the government has announced new participatory processes about energy planning and shale oil, and new strategic assessment about the whole hydrocarbon industry. It could be a deceit because actors from the civil society are exhausted after four years of participation to diverse forums (three about shale gas and one about energy transition) and those new forums of discussion are now considered as attempts to favor resourceful actors such as companies. The study is based on a set of 18 interviews with the main actors of the controversy, a media analysis of 1200 press articles, the analysis of the official reports and their references, and of the stakeholders’ documentation. The theoretical approach relies the explanatory lens of the coproduction of knowledge and social orders developed by Jasanoff and her contributors (2004).