“In the area of ​​public consultation, we are still at the experimental stage”

2023-11-10 12:00:15

Involving populations more closely in the definition of measures that will affect their environment implies breaking with the old software of public action which has long been content to combine the legitimacy of the elected official, the competence of the technocrat, and sometimes the support of a few organized “living forces”, to teach society a lesson and teach it the ways and means of its “modernization”. A new democratic age calls for new interactions between public decision-makers, citizens and territories, but the doctrine of action that would meet these requirements is not yet clearly identified.

The public consultation obligations put in place over the past forty years have allowed us to progress, but they have frequently led to formal exercises which have often slowed down, and more rarely enriched or modified, public decision-making. In this area, we are still at the experimental stage. The citizens’ climate convention was one of them. What assessment can we make of this, almost two years after the adoption of the resulting Climate and Resilience law?

At the time, the majority of media considered that the mountain had given birth to a mouse. Since then, the view on the main objects of this law has radically changed. Low Emission Zones (ZFE)? A “social bomb”! Zero net artificialization? A “ruralicidal measure”! The thermal renovation obligation imposed on landlords? A “collapse of rental supply”! How did the “three times nothing” of yesterday become the “far too much” of today?

The price of success

First lesson: this law was therefore not a mouse. The innovative instrument of the citizens’ convention led the executive to go further than it had imagined. This “further” is certainly still insufficient given the demands of climate change, but it is also perceived as “too far” by many players who must now adapt to the new rules of the game.

Second lesson: there is a long way from the adoption of a law to its execution. This requires “small seam” political work which must be carried out with care. In this area, we have often fallen asleep since the adoption of the law. The ZFEs offer a good example: few urban areas have done, with the support of the State, the work of preparation and careful inventory of the difficulties raised by this measure.

Read the decryption: Article reserved for our subscribers What happened to the proposals of the climate convention, which Emmanuel Macron committed to taking up “without filter”?

Third lesson: the more the ecological transition enters into our material life, the more we measure its complexity. Faced with the chorus of ecologists for whom public policies never go far enough or fast enough, there now stands a chorus of refractories, even resisters, who perceive change as too costly, too rapid or insufficiently compensated – resistance that the movements populists will now exploit, as in the Netherlands or Germany. They come less and less from an assumed climate denial, and more and more from a simple refusal to act in the name of protecting ways of life. This is the price of success: concern for the climate and the environment has become one of the main concerns of the French. But it is also a new challenge: public policies will have to activate new levers to overcome the contradictions of a population which acclaims the general principle of decarbonization but large sections of which are reluctant to apply the practical instructions.

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