Ludovic Halbert, Félix Adisson, Francesca Artioli and Nicolas Maisetti will present their book *The Green City with its Back to the Wall: When Austerity Dictates Environmental Policy* at the GRETS Seminar on Energy and Social Change.
📅 Monday 16 November 2026 (9.30 am–12.30 pm)
📍 Maison Suger, 16 rue Suger, 75006 Paris
Cities are recognised as key players in the ecological transition and are stepping up their efforts in areas such as building renovation and transport… However, since the 2010s, budgets have been subject to increasing pressure to ‘balance the books’. How is greening (or even electrification) being planned and implemented under such constraints? What impact does austerity have on local authorities and on the very substance of urban environmental policies? This book is based on a research programme conducted since 2016, a study across six inter-municipal bodies, and more than 160 interviews with elected representatives and civil servants. Budgetary guidelines, financial ratios, control of the ‘wage bill’: budgetary instruments and practices help to determine the priorities of public policies, the characteristics of projects, their timelines and the conditions under which they are implemented. Local authorities are becoming ‘fund hunters’ and are encouraged to step up their efforts to secure external funding, whether through participation in competitive calls for proposals or via partnerships with better-capitalised private sector actors.
This phenomenon gives rise, on the one hand, to ‘green productivism’, which prioritises demonstration projects or experiments that struggle to be scaled up, and, on the other hand, to a piecemeal approach to greening, characterised by the discontinuity of policies underpinned by shifting funding streams. Building on these findings, the authors identify a new ‘territorial regime of fiscal consolidation’, linking an analysis of the fiscal state, environmental policies and multi-level relations.