Abstract
The SPA (“Savoir, Pouvoir, Avoir”) project (CNRS, 2017-2019) presented in this article focuses on the ways French society deals with the issue of environmental impact – from the vast question of impact in the context of global change and the issue of the measurement of impact in science, to the specific case of the public policy instrument known as “environmental impact assessment”. Impact is considered as a boundary object at the intersection of several fields of inquiry which captures both the architecture and the dynamics of relationships between “savoir” (scientific and lay knowledge), “pouvoir” (power and decision) and “avoir” (economy/appropriation), that aggregate different interests around the sustainable management of coastal socio-ecological systems. Three sites were selected along a north-south gradient of Long-Term Ecological Research sites: the Bay of Brest and the Iroise Sea, the National Nature Reserve of the French islands in the Southern Ocean and the overseas collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon. The approach of the SPA project is to link concretely social sciences, natural sciences and engineering sciences on these study sites, in an interdisciplinary, multi-site and multi-scale methodology that makes it possible to reveal the conditions for the possible – or impossible – implementation of sustainable management of coastal socio-ecological systems.
Highlights
Multi-site and multi-level methodology that aims to integrate perspectives from natural and social scientists at a critical decision-making nexus for all disciplines involved in sustainability science: Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) policy (Box 2) at the land-sea interface
SPA is using this scientific work to observe and analyse how researchers, engineers and local stakeholders understand and move forward with the newly produced body of scientific information. These three sites have been selected because: (i) they are all subject to tensions between conservation and exploitation, leading to well-identified public problems; (ii) they refer to different situations in terms of socio-economic, political and environmental development policy; (iii) they display diverse strategies for managing SES being deployed by interested parties; and (iv) their communities have different symbolic modes of interaction with nature and have dissimilar environmental management values and practices at the knowledge/policy/ economy interface
The field-based approaches developed by the ApoliMer research group, within the SPA project presented in this article, make it possible to open the black box of decision-making processes relating to the sustainable – or unsustainable – management of marine and coastal socio-ecosystems, by coupling social sciences, natural sciences and engineering sciences to investigate in the field questions about the measurement and/or mitigation of impact
Summary
The origin, objectives and main conceptual hypotheses of ApoliMer have been described elsewhere (Mazé et al, 2015a, 2017; Mazé and Ragueneau, 2017), especially in terms of what the social sciences of politics (SSP) can contribute to the field of sustainability science and why studies need to be undertaken in close connection with the natural and engineering sciences, in particular ecology. In this contribution, we focus on a theoretical cooling-off of the conceptual approach (Hassenteufel, 2008). Multi-site and multi-level methodology that aims to integrate perspectives from natural and social scientists at a critical decision-making nexus for all disciplines involved in sustainability science: Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) policy (Box 2) at the land-sea interface
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