Infrastructural expertise for sustainable mobility: evolutions of road management in French local governments

Abstract

For about a decade, the management of roads in small French local governments has been facing numerous challenges, including specific institutional issues, but also global processes such as ageing roads or climate change. Its study is thus particularly relevant to question possible forms of asset management for sustainable infrastructures. Drawing on a two-year ethnographic inquiry into practices of local road managers, this article investigates two important aspects of this broad issue. First, the roles of diagnoses within changing institutional frameworks question the distribution of attention to infrastructural fragilities. Second, an analysis of the pivotal role of municipalities in inter-municipal frameworks re-problematizes technical expertise in local policy-making. Altogether, these elements frame the problem of rearranging infrastructural responsibility in public institutions.