nature, agriculture and biodiversity in territorial socio-ecosystems transition – ANBioT

For a few years, the ecological transition processes called in the various socio-economic sectors of our society are generating institutional as well as spatial transformations and contributing to the creation of new landscapes’ materialities and representations. With a team of researcher colleagues from the geography, political sciences and ecology fields and with practioners partners, the ANR JC ANBioT project aims to question these ecological transitions in view of the hypothesis of a strong convergence between “natural” and “agricultural” projects in public action. Biodiversity’s concept is becoming a central issue in discourses on nature and agriculture, and the territorial interventions they legitimize. The occurrence of socio-ecological transitions, which has been conceptualized by the society and by the environmental sciences fields, would transform the operation of the regime that dominates the relations between a society and its environment. These transformations can be radical (deterioration or brutal resource shortage) or marginal, descending (laws, regulations, etc.) or ascending (local initiatives), they can be isolated, or they can combine. In order to analyze the birth of an ecological transition, as such or as the State aspires it, the ANBioT project is hence based on the analysis of the weak signals, which represent a potential threat on the hegemony of the regime that manages these relations. The project is thus based on the identification and categorization of these weak signals through the permeabilization of the “nature” and “agriculture” categories, on the clarification of crossed expertise (institutions’ and civil society’s) on these categories, and on the material translations of this expertise and the transformations they cause on the territories. Given the diversity of the territories involved in ecological transition involving nature and agriculture, we choose to develop these hypotheses through the prism of urban and rural contexts and with institutional, socio-economic and civil society stakeholders. We identify three intercommunalities that are a priori emblematic. We do not envisage comparing term-by-terms of the results obtained on each field but a cross-sectional analysis of these three territories. Strasbourg Eurométropole, the pioneering French city in terms of urban agriculture and ecology, has been the French capital of biodiversity in 2015 and is maintaining an ancient tradition of intra-urban food production, either recreational of with nourishing purposes. Furthermore, we are going to work with the Luberon Regional Natural Park. Having been experimenting fields for 50 years, in 2017, PNR committed to “a new humanism of Nature” (PNR Federation, 2017) in order to implement “unprecedented transitions to favor healthy and natural life”. Combining the diversity of rural territories and urban polarities, the Luberon PNR will be analyzed in view to start a reflection dedicated to these mixed spaces, and within which nature and agriculture categories have been intertwining, almost since their creation. Finally, the ANBioT project is interested in more ordinary territories such as « le Pays du Mans ». This intercommunality, a composite space from a geographical and institutional point of view, is also responsible for the SCOT that applies to it and carries a territorial project based on "complementarity City-Countryside". The goal of this additional field is to analyze the potential resonance of the results of the other studiedand the national policy on ecological transition on the scale of more ordinary inter-municipalities. The results of this research program will thus reveal strategic keys in the political accompaniment of integrated approaches to ecological transition, at a time when transition is emerging as a national issue.