La solidarité écologique de la science à l’(in)action publique

This article is intended to discuss the conditions of possibility and impossibility of making the legal (and therefore normative) concept of ecological solidarity an a priori effective instrument for reinforcing the entry of public policies into contemporary environmental governance regimes and management modes, with a view to the transformation towards sustainability. To do this, it proposes to decipher in an epistemological and theoretical way the dichotomies socially constructed by modern European societies, such as nature/culture, science/decision or human/non-human, and which still structure today the forms of governability of nature, of our environments and of the natural resources we depend on. We argue that, in the context of global change, the regimes of governance of human/environment relations must be reinvented, adapted to complexity, change and uncertainty, defragmented and de-sectorized in order to better integrate interdependencies as the very substrate of sustainability. The concept of governance of socio-ecosystems, fundamentally based on the recognition of the principle of ecological solidarity with its strong transformative power as highlighted by science (in particular ecology), has, in our opinion, the capacity to make this principle operational for public policies. But to do so, it is necessary to proceed to an anthropological introspection, and to a combined analysis between social sciences and natural sciences, for the only one able to bring to light the conditions of possibility and impossibility of the transfer of this concept from legal science and ecology itself, to environmental public action. The challenge of this article is to make explicit what emerges from this critical analysis: beyond incentives, normative injunctions and scattered initiatives, the institutionalization of the transformation towards sustainability continues to be hampered by three types of asymmetries (gaps), closely intertwined: knowledge, implementation and power.