Managing the environment and metamorphoses of the State: the French experience

Abstract

This article examines the evolution of the State’s role in management of the environment. The French
experience, characterised by a highly-centralised State, presents researchers with a situation where any
permanence, like any change, tends to be extreme. Therefore it acts as a starting point for our analysis of
changes in the State’s role in the management of nature, which was formerly considered as a resource to
be exploited, and is now redefined as an environment to be protected. In particular, diachronic analysis
enables us to grasp the dynamics of these social changes. On the basis of an interdisciplinary exchange
between a historian and a sociologist, this article suggests that we should qualify theories of the
disappearance of the State by giving ourselves the means to differentiate, in management of the
environment, what is new and what is not, by highlighting the capacity for “integration of criticism”
(BOLTANSKI; CHIAPELLO, 1999) by institutions. The environment is an instrument of hybridisation
that questions old dichotomies: between nature and culture, between local and national, between the
particular and the general, between vernacular knowledge and scientific knowledge. This questioning
tends to deprive science and politics of their respective monopolies as representatives of nature and of
society1. Against this background, the central State becomes a manager of socio-natural diversity, the
technocratic State gives a voice to local know-how, and the State concedes a certain plurality to the
general public interest of which it no longer has quite a complete monopoly. The State is no longer quite
what it was, in its role and its functioning, but the State endures. Thus, the society is changing, but the
categories of the XX° century are not totally obsolete yet.