The transition makes it possible to envisage the continuity of a process initiated within natural processes and which continues in the social environment -

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  • The change in the name of sustainable development - recently become “sustainable transition” - would mark a desire for more radical change, according to our partner The Conversation.

  • Yet the origin of the use of the term "transition" to talk about environmental change remains rather obscure.

  • This analysis was carried out by Catherine Larrère, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Created in 1971 under the chairmanship of Georges Pompidou, the French Ministry of the Environment was renamed in the 2000s, Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Development;

then became, in 2017, the Ministry of Ecological and Inclusive Transition.

This succession of names sums up fairly well that of the global and national objectives of public policies aimed at remedying the deterioration of the environmental situation.

The objective of sustainable development - introduced in 1987 in the UN report " 

Our Common Future

 " and clarified in the declaration of the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 - has certainly not disappeared, as shown by adoption by the United Nations in September 2015 of the 2030 Agenda which sets 17 sustainable development goals aimed at eradicating poverty while protecting the planet.

27 years before Greta Thunberg, the young Severn Cullis-Suzuki, aged 12, challenged world leaders on the environmental issue at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (1992)

However, the notion of transition, energy or ecological, has taken on more and more importance, as shown by the change of name of the Ministry of the Environment.

What does this recourse to the term of transition mean?

Should we see the consequences of disillusionment with sustainable development?

Transition rather than crisis

Since 1992, social and economic inequalities have increased throughout the world, while - especially if we consider them globally - the results of the fight against the degradation of the ecological situation are more than disappointing.

The announcement of a "transition" would mark a desire for more radical change.

But the word is vague and polysemous: what transition is it?

Perhaps we want to be able to decline the transition at different levels and different sectors: ecological transition, energy transition, transition of the agricultural model?

But how can we think of the unity of all these transitions?

And what does transitional use indicate in terms of ecological and social change?

In the absence (to our knowledge) of an in-depth study of the uses of the word, the origin of the use of the term transition to speak of environmental change is rather obscure.

US President Jimmy Carter, aware at the end of the 1970s that the energy crisis necessitated a fundamental change in American society, would have preferred the term transition to that of crisis, because he considered it less distressing, and likely to to tie the future to a planning and managerial rationality (see on this subject the analysis of the historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz in the chapter "The myth of the energy transition" of the collective work Collapsus).

Archive Ina on the oil shock of 1973. (INA Politique / Youtube)

But the term also has a more militant and more radical origin: it refers to the movements of cities in transition launched by Rob Hopkins in Totnes (England), where activists proposed to the 8,500 inhabitants of the town to draw up an "action plan of energy reduction ”to resist the announced shock of peak oil.

Thus the transition is part of a double reference: that of managerial public policies, that of political initiatives and independent social movements.

Diet change

The use of the term transition becomes clearer, in our opinion, when we know that it is borrowed from systems theory, where it designates a process during which a system passes from a dynamic equilibrium regime to a other.

By "system" is meant a set of elements or components in interactions, forming a more or less organized dynamic structure, and more or less autonomous with respect to the external environment (environment, natural or other).

The concept of system is used in many scientific fields: physics, chemistry, sciences of the universe, engineering sciences and technologies, to the human and social sciences, including biology, ecology and sciences. of the environment.

The term is therefore transdisciplinary and allows, by moving from one field to another, to overcome the duality of the natural and the artificial, like that of the natural and the social.

In ecology, the reference to the system has played a particularly important role, with the introduction by Tansley, in 1934, of the concept of ecosystem, then, from the thermodynamic interpretation made

of it

by Eugene's

Fundamentals of Ecology

. Odum, published in 1953 and which have long been, and some still remain, the benchmark ecological scientific theory.

The reference to systems (from ecosystems to social systems that are sometimes referred to as socioecosystems) is thus the common language of many ecologists who find there something to explain the situation and justify action, while establishing relationships as well. with the natural sciences than with the human and social sciences.

A continuum from natural to social

Compared to other terms used to characterize social change, transition therefore has many advantages.

The terms expressing social change - revolution, reform, reaction, conservatism - borrowed from political, historical or social sciences, are strongly dualistic, relegating what pertains to nature out of their scope.

Conversely, the transition makes it possible to consider the continuity of a process initiated within natural processes and which continues in the social environment.

Unlike the crisis, which is supposed to be temporary, it designates an ecological, lasting and irreversible change.

The transition therefore does not have to be created from scratch, the passage from one system to another is an "inevitable process, already under way, which is deployed at several scales and involves a wide variety of actors" (see below) subject the chapter "Transition" in the

Dictionary of ecological thought

).

It is a question of supporting it, which requires piloting skills.

When Barbara Pompili, current Minister for the Ecological Transition, declares in an interview with the newspaper Le Monde, that "we are going to accelerate the transition of our model", it is in this systemic conception of the transition that she is situated.

This can refer to the change of agricultural model, which involves moving from conventional agriculture - productivist - to agroecology or organic farming.

But this more readily refers to the energy transition, which, according to the energy transition law for green growth adopted in 2015, is the heart of the ecological transition.

Energy can indeed be seen as the engine of economic systems, as it is precisely what connects them to natural processes.

If resources are threatened with depletion, the energy system must be changed, and this will have chain repercussions on the economic model.

However, from one energy to another, the succession is never linear, the appearance of new sources of energy in no way eliminates the previous ones, which we continue to use.

We are therefore always dealing with an energy “mix”, the adoption of which depends on social and economic processes, which require political trade-offs between contradictory interests.

The transition is not only the accompaniment of a self-initiated process, it is decided at the political level.

The political dimension

It is also at the political level that we can take into consideration the other pole of the transition, that of social processes, political initiatives: local experiences using energy production controlled on site, permaculture initiatives, etc. which, beyond forms of agricultural production, are also alternative ways of life.

However, depending on whether one places oneself at the managerial pole or at the pole of popular initiatives, one can arrive at very different transition recommendations.

Our "Ecology" dossier

The interests of large electricity production companies, the propensity to centralize political decision-making processes, the cultural hegemony of an engineer and technocrat's imagination are in favor of nuclear energy, which we will highlight that it is carbon-free.

While the inhabitants of a region who live with nuclear power, whether it is the siting of power plants or waste management, will tend to be wary of a type of energy that affects their daily lives. and presents political drawbacks (authoritarian and concealed power) as well as long-term health and ecological risks.

In Dijon, the Lentillères district is celebrating its 9th anniversary (France 3 / Youtube, 2019)

We thus see that the managerial perspective, favored by the systemic approach to transition issues, cannot suffice to account for a change that is sufficiently profound to call for a transformation of forms of life, which cannot be taught or learned. commands, but necessarily calls for initiatives from civil society and based on democratic political skills.

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This analysis was written by Catherine Larrère, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.


The original article was published on The Conversation website.

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