The Regime of Invisibility in Closed Spaces of Debate

Our empirical study tackles the definition of shale gas within the French administration and gas companies before social mobilization erupted in 2011. We analyze how and why shale gas was neither considered problematic nor perceived as part of the political agenda, even though it was the object of policymaking. We argue that shale gas was caught up in a regime of invisibility shaped by the actors in charge of dealing with license requests. Invisibility was made possible by the administration's cadastral department, which considered itself as the sole expert in granting licenses, and because of the department's marginal position within the administration, which rendered shale gas proponents invisible to their own hierarchy. This regime of invisibility helped define shale gas as a “non-problem.”