Claire Le Renard

Claire Le Renard is a research fellow in sustainable development (ENPC) at LATTS, the Laboratory for Techniques, Territories and Societies (CNRS – École des Ponts – Université Gustave Eiffel). Her research focuses on analysing processes that enable us to undo, do less, and make do with less: what work do stakeholders undertake when a project is discontinued? How can we move away from modern technologies that have become problematic in light of our understanding of environmental limits?

Until October 2023, she was a research engineer in sociology at EDF R&D, SEQUOIA department, GRETS (Energy, Technology and Society Research Group), Palaiseau, and an associate researcher at LISIS (UMR CNRS, ESIEE, INRAE, Université Gustave-Eiffel, Champs-sur-Marne), where she defended her sociology thesis on 6 December 2021. This thesis, entitled ‘The Defeated Prototype. Superphénix: from shifts in the technoscientific promise to the trials of ‘technical democracy’”, is a joint winner of the 2022 Université Paris-Est Thesis Prize, awarded by the OMI (Organisations, Markets, Institutions) doctoral school.

Through the various projects she has worked on at EDF R&D (nuclear power, renewable energies, SmartGrids, and subsequently the tensions between the energy transition and biodiversity challenges), the central theme of her research analyses and questions how socio-technical change is taking place in the energy sector, under environmental constraints. She has been a research engineer at EDF R&D since 1999, initially in the environment, then in environmental economics and energy foresight. Since 2009, her research, situated at the intersection of the sociology of science and technology and the sociology of public action, has focused on energy sector technologies—whether established or innovative (nuclear power, SmartGrid demonstrators, renewable energy)—in relation to policies on the environment, biodiversity and the ‘democratisation’ of these technologies. Claire Le Renard initially trained as an environmental engineer (École Polytechnique, followed by the École Nationale du Génie Rural, des Eaux et des Forêts).