"Getting re-elected to continue taking action on climate change? The ambivalent timeframes of the mandates of metropolitan green elected representatives and the ecological crisis"

Abstract

Speaker: Noe Duprat-Lassus Climate change policies suffer from a ‘backlash’ (Stokes, 2016) prevalent among elected representatives. While this resistance can be explained by a desire among some of the political class to unravel environmental policies, we argue, as sociologists, that the explanation is far more complex and requires in-depth work to objectify the logics specific to the political field (Bourdieu, 1981). This seminar draws on an ongoing PhD in political science that seeks to understand the logics of ecological inertia within the profession of elected representative. We aim to shed light on the political work (Smith, 2019) underpinning environmental public action by elected representatives. We particularly focus on the daily consequences of the temporal constraints of political mandates for elected representatives and the administration. Our method consists of non-participatory ethnographic observations, during which we follow the elected representative throughout the day. The last municipal elections in 2020 saw ecologist coalitions come to power in numerous major cities in France. Our work focuses on the elected members of the executive of the Metropole of Lyon. Lyon is potentially a ‘limit case’ (Hamidi, 2012) where usual barriers to an ‘ecological transition’ (competences, budgets, political will, etc.) may be less structuring. We first analyse the administrative and political institution of Grand Lyon from a Bourdieusian perspective, understood as a politico-administrative social field traversed by power relations and tensions (Bourdieu, 2013). We illustrate how path dependency (Pierson, 1993) takes shape in the daily fabric of environmental public action in this field. This immersion reveals a ‘logic of practice’ (Bourdieu, 1976) incorporated by ecologist elected representatives. Far from being neutral agents, administrative directors shape elected representatives on a daily basis. This work of socialisation to the metropolitan institution is carried out by these dominant agents within their social fields. The administration deploys framing strategies (Chong and Druckman, 2007) that make it difficult to legitimise any policy that does not align with the administrative departments’ vision of the public problem. Secondly, we demonstrate that the restrictive timeframe of the political mandate also manifests itself in how elected representatives set the pace of public action. We observed that, while in the early years of its term the green executive tended to accelerate public policies on cycling mobility, as elections approached, elected officials abruptly but discreetly suspended all ‘non-essential’ work visible in the public sphere. Analysed as a strategy of blame avoidance (Weaver, 1986), this acceleration followed by an emergency brake is a source of conflict between the administration and elected officials. Above all, it shows how electoral rhythms become incorporated by elected representatives into the fabric of public environmental action. It sheds light on how inertia in public environmental policies by elected officials (even ‘green’ ones) can unfold within a given territory.