Since the 70’s the rise of environmental concerns has resulted in many attempts to produce “green” knowledge and indicators, aimed at monitoring the status of environment and reorientating public policies and individual behaviours. In the 90’s, numerous projects of sustainability indicators came in the wake of the 1985 Bruntland Report and the 1992 Rio Declaration, some strongly promoted by international organizations or NGOs (as UN, OECD, WWF). Prompted by the visibility of the issue, research on environmental and sustainability indicators (ESIs) proliferated as well over the last decade. The bulk of it focuses however on the crafting of more accurate or robust indicators, the description and characterisation of those existing (through typologies or listings) or the evaluation of their impacts. This paper takes another direction and aims to explore the political dimension of the use of indicators as a technology of government : which policy actors use (or not) “green” knowledge in public decision-making and how they handle it ; how systems of indicators are integrated into policy making, under what conditions and to what extent, with what consequences ? By investigating the reception of ESIs in the policy realm, the objective is to shed light on the discrepancy between the large diffusion of these tools and their limited impacts. Based on insights from the policy instruments literature, the paper shows that ESIs face numerous forms of resistances and succeed only by gaining support among policy actors in specific sectors. In its first section, the paper offers a literature review which synthetises the main research perspectives and findings on the interaction between indicators and public policies. The second section presents and compares the empirical results from five case studies of french ESIs.
