Confidence Building and Stakeholder Involvement in Nuclear Waste Management. the “Glocalization” of Social Acceptability

In most of the nuclearized countries, the public agencies in charge of the development of a technical solution for the safe management of the radioactive waste were confronted to a strong opposition coming from anti-nuclear movements and local populations. These movements of contestation paralyzed all the decisional processes, leading the different agencies to transform their approaches and integrate what they call the “social aspects” (or the “problem of social acceptability”) of the waste into their research agenda.

In this context, this paper examines the way in which the nuclear sector has developed different strategies to react to this generalized contestation. It precisely analyses one of these strategies: the setting up of the “Forum for stakeholder confidence (FSC)”. The FSC is an international arena that was created in 2000 within the Radioactive Waste Management Committee of the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) at the OECD. The FSC gathers representatives from different national nuclear organizations and aims at facilitate the sharing of experience in order to “ensure an effective dialogue with the public with a view to strengthening confidence in the decision-making processes”.

Drawing from qualitative fieldwork conducted in Belgium, document analysis and non-intrusive participation in meetings of the FSC, I will argue that the setting up of this international arena, in his ability to centralize all the experimentations made regarding public participation and stakeholder involvement in different countries, and, therefore, in his ability to develop an diffuse “good practices” of public participation can be seen as a “strategy of glocalization” as defined by Ulrich Beck (2003).  This new kind of multi-level strategy, that is almost invisible at the local and national level, seems to be very effective in preventing the apparition of new wave of contestation and will durably alter the social agency of local actors.