France has a long history in mining and, to a lesser extent, in hydrocarbon extraction, but these industries were both in decline by the end of the 20 th century. Following the American shale boom in the 2000's, there was a sudden renewal of hydrocarbon exploration in 2010 with new exploration licenses being delivered for unconventional oil and gas projects. These projects first remained confined to specialists of such industries until the end of 2010, when a massive social movement opposed shale gas exploration. This paper aims at drawing a picture of this social movement and its narrative work to obtain the ban on hydraulic fracturing by the French government in 2011. We show that i) public and political perceptions of unconventional gas in general were built mostly during the sudden burst of mobilization in late 2010, with the opponent's narratives encountering almost no resistance, ii) previous knowledge and experience with extractive industries in some areas of France facilitates social license there, but it does not guarantee the development of the industry, iii) the controversy about hydraulic fracturing participated to shape negative perception about extractive industries in France in general, including ore mining.

The article addresses the various uses of expert knowledge during the controversy over shale gas in France and in Quebec (Canada). Cross-fertilization between policy analysis and science and technology studies demonstrates that political uses of expertise better explained the policymaking process in focusing on two specific utilizations: strategic ignorance and politics of time. Using data from press analysis, interviews, reports and documentation analysis, the article shows that social movements can also use strategic ignorance to support their environmental claims and that mastering the pace of the controversy and the policy debates enabled actors to better support their policy claims. The French case illustrates those two arguments while the Quebec case provides a more tradition account of State/Industry's utilization of knowledge production to delay decision and divert opposition.

Analyzing the case of France, this article aims to explain how the development of enhanced oil recovery techniques over the last decade contributed to politicizing the subsurface, that is putting underground resources at the center of social unrest and political debates. France faced a decline of its oil and gas activity in the 1990s, followed by a renewal with subsurface activity in the late 2000s using enhanced oil recovery techniques. An industrial demonstrator for carbon capture and storage was developed between 2010 and 2013 , while projects targeting unconventional oil and gas were pushed forward between 2008 and 2011 before eventually being canceled. We analyze how the credibility, legitimacy, and governance of those techniques were developed and how conflicts made the role of the subsurface for energy transition the target of political choices. The level of political and industrial support and social protest played a key role in building project legitimacy, while the types of narratives and their credibility determined the distinct trajectories of hydraulic fracturing and carbon capture and storage in France. The conflicts over enhanced oil recovery techniques are also explained through the critical assessment of the governance framework that tends to exclude civil society stakeholders. We suggest that these conflicts illustrated a new type of politicization of the subsurface by merging geostrategic concerns with social claims about governance, ecological demands about pollution, and linking local preoccupations to global climate change.

Based on a case study and media content analysis, we rely on insights from the advocacy coalition framework and from the narrative policy framework to conduct a congruence analysis of the French politics of hydraulic fracturing (2010–2017). Despite the lobbying of a resourceful coalition of pro‐fracturing policy actors and their strategy of active participation in various professional forums, hydraulic fracturing was partially banned in 2011 and completely prohibited in 2017. Our results relate this ban to the stronger repetition of a simpler framing of the policy problem by the members of the anti‐fracturing coalition. In other words, coalition members willing to transform their policy beliefs into concrete decisions should frame them into loud and simple policy narratives. These findings call for further articulation between the narrative policy framework and the advocacy coalition framework to account for narratives as the essence of strategies that advocacy coalitions develop for influencing policy processes.

Incertitude et action publique. Définition des risques, production des savoirs et cadrage des controverses Sébastien Chailleux-Centre Emile Durkheim des mouvements sociaux 2 et d'autres sur la sociologie de l'action publique 3. La production et la circulation des savoirs a par ailleurs reçu moins d'attention 4. Le présent article vise à l'inverse à prendre à bras le corps ces trois dimensions en y ajoutant une composante comparative. Cet article se propose de croiser trois approches de sociologie politique-la sociologie des problèmes publics et des risques, l'analyse des politiques publiques et la sociologie des sciences et de l'expertise-afin de montrer leur complémentarité pour saisir les enjeux de la production de savoir et de l'ignorance par et pour les décideurs politiques à travers l'exemple de la controverse sur le gaz de schiste en France et au Québec (Canada) 5 .Trois pistes fructueuses semblent ainsi pouvoir être explorées.. D'abord, la sociologie des controverses et des risques 6 , et plus largement la sociologie des problèmes publics, a depuis longtemps démontré comment les innovations et les progrès technologiques produisaient de nouveaux problèmes 7 , et comment la « modernité » transformait nos relations avec une certitude « probabilistique » 8. Le risque est une variable importante de la décision publique et sa prise en charge interroge les pratiques démocratiques 9. De nombreux chercheurs ont aussi montré de quelle(s) manière(s) un problème public est produit socialement 10 par des acteurs à travers des processus tel que « naming,