The discursive sources of environmental progress and its limits: biodiversity politics in France

ABSTRACT

France has made considerable progress on biodiversity policy in the last 15 years. However, the literature on French environmental politics remains unclear as to how effective this progress has been and what kind of political context has conditioned this progress. To answer these questions, I present here four discourses that characterize French biodiversity politics, discourses that have emerged from a documentary analysis, stakeholder interviews, and participatory event observations. I show that progress is conditioned by three discursive factors: the dominance of ecological modernization discourse, which only goes so far in enabling progress and transition; the continuing importance of economic development discourse, which is reluctant to further biodiversity conservation; and the limited prominence of two more radical discourses, ecological solidarity and ecological collapse, which are not taken up by the government but benefit from significant support in civil society.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental politics
• France
• environmental discourses
• ecological transition
• ecological solidarity
• biodiversity policy

Acknowledgments

This research was undertaken as part of my PhD thesis. I am grateful for comments and feedbacks from John S. Dryzek, Jonathan Pickering, Peter Bridgewater, Madeleine Egan, Hans Asenbaum and anonymous reviewers. I received continuous support on this research from members of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. This research was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Laureate Fellowship funding scheme (project number FL140100154).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Biodiversity and Habitat indicator is composed of Marine Protected Areas, Terrestrial Biome Protection (Global and National), Species Protection index, Representativeness Index, and Species habitat Index.

2. The private sector and ENGOs are responsible for the other 25%.

3. €96 billion if we consider spending on renewable energy in the package.

4. Typically, a precautionary approach implies, in ascending order of priority, (i) avoiding unnecessary development projects, (ii) mitigating and minimizing their environmental impact and (iii) offsetting their remaining impacts.

5. I have combined the percentage of contributions to the NBS and the frequency of words subscribing to each discourse.

6. Which defend agricultural practices that minimize the use of chemical inputs, privileging agroecology, permaculture, organic, local and small-scale farming, all of which are summed up in French by the word agriculture paysanne.

7. Near Nantes in north-west of France.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [FL140100154].