Social acceptability in Québec: a new normative tool for public action

At the heart of debates and controversies concerning environmental public policy and major infrastructure and development projects, social acceptability (SA) has become institutionalized in Quebec over the years, directly related to the concepts of public participation and sustainable development. As an increasingly necessary condition for public action, AS can be understood as a new normative instrument in order to articulate participatory democracy and representative democracy with strong implications in terms of both procedural and distributive justice. In this article, we want to answer four questions in order to better understand and analyze SA for public action: how to define SA and approach it theoretically? It is proposed to conceptualize the concept in the manner of work on the public action instruments of Lascoumes and Le Gales (2004) and Halpern et al. (2014); 2) What trajectory has it experienced over time? We respond to this through an analysis of the corpus of reports from the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE); 3) What do the actors say? We report on the similarities and differences in the testimony of public participation professionals (PPPs) and; 4) What is the scope of this new standard on projects and decisions? Initial findings are proposed on the basis of three important and recent case studies. These four responses allow, from different angles, to shed new light from Quebec’s experience with AS.