Conference (in French) by Sophie L. Van Neste, Tuesday, February 25, 2025, 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., online. Online registration
In the face of the climate crisis, the socio-ecological transition is unfolding in the form of citizen initiatives that seek to transform living environments and build local structures to support changes in practices. These initiatives are rooted in people’s everyday lives and touch on ways of living, eating, heating, reducing waste and adapting to a changing climate, in principle by and for local residents. These experiments are also marked by trials and tribulations, and their durability is often precarious. The aim of this intervention is to examine their relationship with politics. In many of these initiatives, the initiators seek to avoid antagonistic approaches, and politicization takes place in the doing, in the construction of local alternatives to extractive global flows, as well as in the tactical struggles to enable their emergence and deployment. Hybrid partnerships and collectives between the state (often local government) and citizen-communities are not uncommon. While some of these may be considered fragile successes, the trials they go through and the negotiations that take place within them can be conceived as more radical moments of politicization of the socio-ecological transition, which benefit from being made more visible.
Discussant: Marguerite Mendell, Professor Emeritus, Concordia University and Emeritus Member of CRISES
Moderator: Éliane Brisebois, CRISES Scientific Coordinator