Beyond centralisation: Elements of a history of climate-energy initiatives in France

International audienceLocal climate energy initiatives are still emergent in France. The centralism of French energy policy is often invoked in explaining this situation : analyses of local initiatives point to centralism as a barrier to local initiatives. Yet, they also suggest a more ambivalent picture, by which centralism would have triggered, if not incubated, horizontal forms of political structuration on which local initiatives also rely when emerging. This presentation aims at proposing an account of French energy policy (since the sixties), which recognizes the progressive emergence of local energy-climate initiatives, not as a ‘decentralization’, but as a ‘hybridization’ of inherited and new political frames in the fields of energy, climate and environment policies. The goal is to overcome the binary central/local framing and make justice to the history and role of trans-scalar, horizontal forms of actions and political innovation in sustaining the emergence of local climate energy. This also gives rise to a discussion on the contemporary position of renewable communities through their links and their ambiguities with local market initiatives