Managing the ‘energy transition’ in France

Project overview

The concept of the ‘energy transition’ has now become firmly established in the everyday vocabulary of our Western societies. It does not simply reflect, as is commonly claimed, a transformation – contested by some historians – of the ‘technical’ and ‘physical’ characteristics of the energy sector, in terms of its modes of production and consumption. It also reflects a reshaping of the way in which the sector is governed, in light of the changes that have affected it since the 1990s (market liberalisation, European integration, the emergence of new issues, geopolitical challenges, decentralisation and the growing influence of ‘regions’ and local actors, citizen activism, etc.).

Drawing on a personal research programme undertaken over several years, as well as the extensive academic literature on the subject, this project aims to examine, using France as a case study, the ‘energy transition’ as a government activity and, through this, to analyse the transformation of governance in a sector which, in that country, has long been organised and regulated centrally. To this end, it develops the concept of ‘governance infrastructure’, based on a framework combining an infrastructure-based approach (in line with infrastructure studies and Michael Mann’s work on the infrastructural power of the state), multi-level analysis (to account for the plurality of actors involved in processes of restructuring) and neo-institutionalism (an incremental school of thought developed notably by James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen).