Dossier « Économie de la proximité » – Les apports de l'économie de la proximité aux approches environnementales : inventaire et perspectives

Abstract

The contributions of proximity economics to environmental issues: Assessment and prospects. Among the new economic approaches to environmental issues, proximity economics is generating growing interest. It was only in the early 2000s that this approach, which until then had mostly served as a tool for analyzing territorial economic relationships, was first used to address environmental issues. Using an innovative analytical framework based on the two-fold concept of geographical proximity/organized proximity, recent work in proximity economics have examined several issues related to the environment and environmental policies. In this article we propose to draw an inventory of the contributions based on this analytical framework and to identify a number of heuristic prospects. By crossing the two types of proximity and the two stages of environmental problems (i.e. the production and regulation phases), four themes emerge. Examining the existing contributions with regards to these themes reveals that the majority of these contributions deal with the e ect of geographical proximity on the production of a problem (including the question of land use conflicts) and with the role of organized proximity in the management of the problem. The other two themes are discussed far less frequently: the possible contribution of geographical proximity in the management of the problem and the negative role of certain types of organized proximity in the creation of problems. For this reason, we believe that these two under-explored themes are research directions that should be pursued in future, possibly by using work from other fields of research.