Structuring the shale gas controversy: Stakeholders

Stakeholders are all people and organizations concerned by one or several aspects of shale gas exploration or exploitation. It is known that costs and benefits of a project or an activity are not evenly distributed to all stakeholders involved; what is an economic benefit for one stakeholder category can be a cost on health or wellbeing for another category. This is why the identification of stakeholders is necessary to a genuine and strong sustainability assessment. The method for assessing the impact using a multicriteria and multistakeholder method is considered at the deliberation stage (4). Our objective at the moment is to identify the main stakeholder groups.

Review of literature on the issues described above is an efficient method leading us to a list of stakeholder groups. We refer here to groups, or categories, of stakeholders, as individual people and institutions change from one location to another. The important, for the organisation of the evaluation process, is to identify which groups are concerned. Each group has a specific perspective and stand on the controversy; usually this is remarkably stable within a same country from one site to another.

Our review leads us to the following list of groups:

·      Local communities, including land owners and non-land owners;

·      Local authorities;

·      Government and policy makers, including Energy departments, Environment and Water regulation bodies;

·      Energy companies, including major companies involved in gas, local companies, companies involved in renewable energy;

·      Experts of different fields (environment, economy, energy, social) ; and

·      Sources of information: printed, radio and TV, online media, social groups, etc.

It is important to keep in mind this list of stakeholder groups, as each group has specific interests and perspectives on shale gas exploitation. Each of those is legitimate, as long as they can be argued through some type of rationality, and confronted to other points of view. Different stakeholders often refer to different types of rationality, also called “valuation languages” in the ecological economics literature. This makes the deliberation exercise particularly relevant for our evaluation purpose.