Environments

To define the team’s project we compared approaches and concepts to identify common ground for exchange between members. We then designed a ‘compass’, reconciling environmental learning and appropriation regimes for environmental entities and resources.

The question of ‘learning’ brings into play a plural approach to the environment, as a system of interactions, described and analysed by historically formed scientific learning, in the light of relations. Such relations, formed through connections and disconnections between groups and environmental resources or entities, add situated intelligence to learning, coupled with qualification and sharing of underlying issues. The two polarities are in tension: the scientific reference, before laying claim to universality, is indebted to the emergence of groups and instruments that are clearly ‘connected’ to places where knowledge is produced; similarly the way we ‘reconnect’ with environmental issues, in order to grasp their singular expression where we live, works increasingly through citizen groups using miniaturized, mobile instruments that renew our capacity for observing and producing data. [...]

The issue of appropriation regimes questions the concrete processes by which society, at different periods and in different geographical, cultural and social contexts, has reassessed the environmental question in response to its own needs, to prevent risks and consolidate sovereignty. These processes are characterized, in particular, by their attempt to convert environmental entities into goods, taking many routes which may turn them into common or private goods. These processes are uncertain, due to the materiality of environmental entities and their resilience or resistance, but also due to the categories we use to understand and act on these issues. We aim to explore this basic tension between entities and disputed, negotiated environmental resources to make them common goods, at various scales, and entities and/or resources involved in privatization processes, in order to control them as substitutable, tradable goods.

These two polarities connect to many appropriation regimes which are central to our analysis. With regard to our project they mark a collective horizon, hinging on debate of environmental policies, their past management and increasingly frequent attempts to allow market forces to take charge of transitions, impacts and risks. These appropriation regimes afford opportunities for collective re-definition of what constitutes value, giving rise to innovative experiments, but also greater social and environmental inequality.

Our project is rooted in effective methodology, fed by the team’s ability to carry out surveys and interviews, thus keeping track of emerging socio-technical collectives while processing long data sets using statistics. We also use geographic information systems, archives in some cases, spatialization and spatio-temporal representation of phenomena. [...]

These research priorities open up a space for rich debate, spilling over into two team workshops: a reading group for group work on texts about building learning and environmental appropriation; a video group to give participants a practical grasp of directing and editing video documentaries.