Location choice and environmental quality : Identifying the causalities for just policies – LOCUS

The magnitude of ecological crises and environmental degradation puts public policies in the face of a double requirement of efficiency and justice. In this project, we aim to contribute to this challenge from the angle of environmental justice, a recent issue in both academic literature and public policies in France. The project will contribute in an innovative way - through an approach that is both quantitative and qualitative and by an original compilation of rich statistical data - to the exploration of environmental justice by insisting on its conception, its causes, and the policy tools to deal with it. We defend the relevance of a multidisciplinary approach, mobilizing applied economics, economic philosophy, sociology, and environmental sciences, to significantly advance knowledge on these questions.
This project aims to characterize the production of environmental inequalities in France and identify the economic and social determinants that embed these inequalities, in order to open up new lines of reflection on public policies to mitigate them. These research objectives are structured according to four axes of study:
i) Conceptualization of environmental justice
The main purposes of this axis are to draw up a literature review of scientific and political approaches to environmental justice and to establish a conception of justice that enables us to characterize and assess environmental inequalities in France. This transversal axis will provide guidelines for the different empirical tasks of the project, the results of which could, in turn, enrich the theoretical questions.
ii) Description of environmental inequalities
This axis consists of identifying environmental inequalities in terms of unequal exposure of populations to pollution by estimating the spatial correlations between different environmental risks and socio-economic and demographic characteristics of French households. We propose an original compilation of the best spatialized data available in France, both from the environmental and socio-demographic points of view.
iii) Identification of causal relationships linked to the real estate market and residential mobility
In this axis, we propose three econometric studies to determine the locus of environmental inequalities, focusing on the role of real estate markets and household location choices. We will study the role of housing prices in the disparate distribution of nuisances in relation to the socio-economic characteristics of households; the dynamics between demographic changes (population or income) and changes in environmental quality; and finally, the link between residential mobility and environmental nuisances (real or perceived by households).
iv) Analyses of environmental injustice mitigation policies
This last axis will address the issue of public policies to mitigate environmental injustice. We will conduct a choice experiment study in a deliberative framework in which citizens will be well informed of the policy challenges in dealing with environmental justice issues, and will be invited to think, debate, and express their preferences on various policy scenarios, constructed from different criteria of justice. The objective is to harmonize the policy tools that aim at reducing both the exposure of individuals to nuisances and social inequalities, by integrating the participatory dimension and taking the political power of individuals into account.