2024-04-08 15:02:43
The United Nations meteorological agency recently issued a Red alert following the record temperatures of 2023. Despite this new warning, one among many others, the ecological planning announced by Emmanuel Macron, in May 2022 then institutionalized in the form of the General Secretariat for Ecological Planning (SGPE) attached to Matignon now makes headlines in the press only to be described as relegated to the background, struggling to find substance and political support. The SGPE would not succeed in finding its place and imposing its course, caught in ministerial trade-offs between budgetary imperatives, an inflationary context, and other pressures linked for example to the agricultural crisis. This seems to give more and more reason to those who saw it above all as a green cloth hiding the flaws in the government’s ecological action.
These are even setbacks that we have been able to observe in recent weeks: cut of 2.2 billion euros on the ecological transition budget which will therefore increase less than expected, “simplification” of environmental standards (on hedges and wetlands in particular), accommodation of the Ecophyto plan, leasing social on electric vehicles stoppedenergy and climate programming law constantly postponed… The open conflict fronts on the modalities of the ecological transition are moreover more vivid than ever: the farmers’ movement of course, but also the protests of the lithium mine in Allieropposition to EPZs, new nuclear power…
Under what conditions is ecological planning therefore feasible? What are the prerequisites for the transition to be “governable”? These are the questions that we explore in our work thesis. We particularly emphasize the interdependence between planning, structural transformations of the economy and the democratic idea.
Review macroeconomic models
The context of « polycrise » described by the historian Adam Tooze condemns political action to navigation by sight, from one shock to another, in pure reactivity? If ecological policy seems to have reached an impasse today, this is partly linked to the macroeconomic model that is now dominant. The ecological transformation of our societies involves deep socio-technical, (re)distributive and cultural choices, drawing nothing less than a renewal of the social contract. It cannot take place without political and democratic support for the inevitably antagonistic dimension of this transformation.
It is above all the imperative of budgetary rigor which has been invoked to justify the setbacks and postponements in ecological matters: the obligation to make savings has thus largely dented the budget, leaving stunted room for maneuver, very meager in view of the recommendations made by the rapport Pisani-Mahfouz. This pointed out the need to put on the table 34 billion euros of additional public investment per year in 2030 thanks to a hybrid of public debt and taxation accentuated on the highest incomes.
This austerity turn was accompanied by a narrative identifying public spending as an “addiction”, inefficient and irresponsible waste. The situation was predictable. As soon as the 2024 Finance Bill was announced, Thomas Cazenave, Minister for Public Accounts, set the objectives:
“Invest massively in the ecological transition, invest in public services, guarantors of social cohesion, and reduce the public deficit to gain budgetary room for maneuver and make priority investments. »
We undoubtedly find here a incompatibility trilemma from which we only escape by changing the macroeconomic perspective.
The “order of debt”, analyzed in particular by the sociologist Benjamin Lemoineand which is the subject of a recent book of the economist Nicolas Dufrêne, director of the Rousseau Institute, is however neither natural nor obvious. There remains a neoliberal political construct which makes the State a real market actor and which mixes public and private finances. In a context of climate emergency requiring massive public investments, this order is more than ever the subject of contestation, on a theoretical level, with currents such as Modern Monetary Theory, and with concrete proposals relating to therepeal of debtsnotably so-called developing countriesand on reforms to democratize central banks like that proposed by the economist Eric Monnetdirector of studies at EHESS.
Behind this permanence of the order of debt emerges a central dimension of the impasse of current ecological planning: its frenzied attachment to the perspective of growth, with the paradigm disputed of green growth supported by Emmanuel Macron. However, growth is found worldwide a berne.
Furthermore, ecological planning is not just greening the existing environment but making and supporting decisive choices for construction and dismantling, openings but also closures of activities which nevertheless generate a profit. Neoliberal rationality here comes into contradiction with planning.
The compass of ecological planning can therefore only be linked to GDP alone and to the risk of leading to the wall: what must be introduced is a complex, qualitative dashboard, which Cédric Durand, associate professor at the University of Geneva, appoints a “inventory macroeconomics”. What this basically means is a decompartmentalization of the economy: ecological economy and the economics of well-being underline the embedded nature of the economy, its inevitable inscription in the natural and social environment, and its metabolic and material dimension sometimes forgotten in orthodox models.
Rethinking public value
Alongside macroeconomics, another unthought seems to be the place of public power and the redefinition of “public value”.
In the numerous works on the meaning and implications of neoliberalism, emphasis has been placed on two facts which may at first sight appear contradictory: on the one hand, the growing impotence of the stateon the other hand are described the multiple ways in which the state intervenes in the economy, supports it, deploys investments. The two assertions, far from being incompatible, are complementary once we take seriously the theoretical and practical distinction between public and private: what is lost in the hyperactivity of the neoliberal State is the truly “public” power. , assuming action linked to objectives and values of a nature distinct from that of the capitalist economy.
This distinct nature is less obvious to discern in a context where the growth objective was consensual, since the gains allowed a form of redistribution within the framework of the Fordist compromise: then we can associate public interest and private interests of large national companies:
« What’s good for General Motors is good for America ! »
In the current context, marked by the simultaneity of the ecological crisis and theincreasing inequalities, this distinction must be rediscovered and more clearly marked. Public power must be able to assert itself through distinction or even antagonism with certain private interests. We can think, for example, of fossil industries whose investment plans in maintaining and opening new gas and oil sites directly thwart efforts to reduce carbon emissions and therefore come into direct conflict with any form of ecological planning.
This seems to be the condition sine qua non regulation and even more so ecological planning. Many works emerge to describe the conditions for a reaffirmation of “public value”. How to define it? What do we need ? What do we care about and what should we prioritize? What should we open, what should we close, what should we invest in or divest in? These are the immense and complex questions that determine the possibility of ecological planning ahead of budget discussions. On this level, research in the human and social sciences, and certain economic schools, thus opens up possibilities for rethinking our public policies.
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