Paper long abstract:

The paper examines how risks of shale gas exploration and exploitation are framed in public discourse in Poland and how this impacts the emerging institutional order for shale gas governance. Data collected since 2012 through interviews, participant observation and media analysis are analyzed from the perspective of the risk governance. We propose to use the framing approach that has recently become an underlying concept of the performativity of economics thesis to examine how shale gas is being framed as an object of governance, in which spaces actors construct it as a 'risky object' and what implications it has for the emerging institutional order for shale gas governance at different administrative levels. The analysis concludes that at the central level shale gas is framed as a political and economic object and that the uncertainties related to the political role of shale gas in Poland's energy security and the ones related to the construction of shale gas as a commodity are addressed. At the same time, the central governance institutions allocate funding to create spaces for debating technological, environmental and societal risks at the local level. We examine risk frames in these locally established niches to show their diversity and analyze the kinds of practices of risk assessment that evolve in these spaces.