The interdisciplinary workshop on environmental research (AIRE)

Next events [2024-2025]

Fall 2024

19 September, 12.30-16.45 : AIRE opening event

10 October, 14.45-18.00

• 14.45-16.45 : Seminar organized by the stream « TREES », with Tom Dedeurwaerdere (UC Louvain).

The conference will address the collaborative governance of knowledge co‐production in transformational sustainability research. First, we will present an innovative theoretical framework for successfully navigating collective action challenges in boundary‐crossing research collaborations, based on insights from the literature on the governance of knowledge commons. This framework aims to address various types of collective action failures encountered in building partnerships between scientific researchers and societal actors involved in value‐laden and multifaceted sustainability transformations. Second, the framework will be illustrated through various mechanisms for organizing research co‐design and social learning on sustainability values in transdisciplinary research collaborations

• 17.00-18.00: AIRE Award for Environmental Student Research ceremony

14 November, 14.45-16.45

• Seminar organized by the stream « In transition », with Chris Shaw (University of Sussex) : "Liberalism and the end of climate change"

We are probably all familiar with the saying that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. But the coordinator class of liberal democracies is unable to imagine either the end of the world, or the end of capitalism. Instead, liberalism's defenders promote a vision of the net zero 2050 world which is the same as today, just minus the greenhouse gas emissions, and untouched by the impacts of climate change.
Dr. Christopher Shaw will explain how the liberal symbolism embedded in the net-zero discourse functions as an act of control, effectively closing off the possibility of imagining a different political future for humanity. This impasse poses serious threats to democracy, the climate justice agenda, and human well-being. Dr. Shaw will explore the potential contributions of a class-conscious transformative adaptation agenda to address the climate failings of liberal democracy.

[DATE MODIFICATION] Friday 13 December, 14.45-16.45 :  

• Seminar organized by the stream « Unboxing the Environment », with Bathsheba Demuth (Brown University) 

Spring 2025

• 29 January, 14.00-17.00 : PhD / Postdocs workshop (TBA)
• 13 February, 14.45-16.45 : Seminar (Stream 1)
• 28 Février, 12.30-14.00 : AIRE lunch conversation
• 13 March, 14.45-16.45 : Seminar (Stream 2)
• 10 April, 14.45-16.45 : Seminar (Stream 3)
• 24 April, 12.30-14.00 : AIRE lunch conversation
• 15 Mai, 14.45-16.45 : General seminar
• June (full day event) : Annual AIRE day

Events in collaboration with AIRE

• 25-26 September : Workshop "Critical Ethnography of Mining" (Campus Condorcet, Aubervilliers)

Organised by Pia Bailleul (CERI, Fonds Latour), Inès Calvo Valenzuela (CERI, Fonds Latour), Martin Cavero Castillo (IRIS, EHESS) and Kyra Grieco (Mondes Américains) in partnership with AIRE

• 11-12 December : Event “Nature-Based Strategies for Urban Climate Adaptation: Insights from Cities in the Global South and North”

An annual event organised by the Urban School as part of the “Nature in the City” project, in collaboration with AIRE and the Institut pour les arts et la création (contact : Francesca Ferlicca, Rachel L. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow)

Aligned with its mission to strengthen the connection between research and education in environmental studies, AIRE held the second edition of the Environmental Student Research Award for 2023-2024. This initiative recognized and promoted the most outstanding Master’s research across all schools, encouraging students to pursue environmental inquiry throughout their studies. The award also aimed to foster innovation and interdisciplinary approaches to environmental and ecological research. The recipient(s) received a prize and will have the opportunity to publish their work on the Institute for Environmental Transformations’ website

The interdisciplinary jury awarding the prizes is made up of researchers from Sciences Po's permanent faculty:

• Presidence of jury : Richard BALME, CEE
• Sarah GENSBURGER, CSO
• Charlotte HALPERN, CEE
• Carola KLOECK, CERI
• Paul MALLIET, OFCE
• Alain POTTAGE, Research center of the Law School
• Bernard REBER, CEVIPOF

At the jury meeting on 08 July, chaired by Richard Balme (CEE), 5 candidates were shortlisted and were invited to present their work at the AIRE back-to-school event on 19 September :

• Justine BANEGAS, "Réclamer justice, réparer le péyi. Mobilisations antillaises et usages militants du droit face au scandale du chlordécone de la Martinique à l’Île-de-France" (Research school)
• Fiona HURREY, "Dichotomies of Human-Wildlife Conflict: Drivers of Policy Choice and Barriers to Coexistence in the Context of Wolves in France" (PSIA)
• Sophia NOËL, "The Effect of Heat on Fertility Rates in France" (Research school)
• Loris PETRINI, "Dancing for an Ecological Revolution: Artivism in the Paris and London Environmental Scenes" (Research school)
• Chloé TEN BRINK, "A question of protection: justice considerations in planned relocation" (PSIA)

Following these presentations, the committee awarded three prizes to the most outstanding contributions at the seminar session held on October 10, 2024. The committee paid particular attention to the relevance of the research question, the rigor of the methodology and quality of data and sources, as well as the clarity of the argumentation and the presentation quality.

Congratulations to this year's three winners of the Student Environmental Research Award!

1st prize

Justine Banegas (Research school, Master in political science), for her memoir entitled "Réclamer justice, réparer le péyi. Mobilisations antillaises et usages militants du droit face au scandale du chlordécone de la Martinique à l’Île-de-France".

"This research, conducted over almost two years, focused on the forms of mobilization and demands for justice expressed by victims' collectives in the aftermath of the chlordecone scandal in the West Indies. Officially used from 1972 to 1993, chlordecone, an organochlorine pesticide used to control banana weevils, has been known to the French government since the early 1970s and declared toxic by the WHO since 1979. Today, it is responsible for the contamination of 92% of the population of Martinique and 95% of the population of Guadeloupe. Its links with the development of prostate cancer, neurodevelopmental disorders and fertility problems are the subject of several ongoing epidemiological and toxicological studies. Starting from the vocabulary of crime that saturates the slogans and discourses of the so-called anti-chlordecone mobilizations, this study seeks to understand the ways in which the seizure of the law reconfigures the space of West Indian mobilizations and, through the demands for justice it brings into play, the relationship with the French institutions that are supposed to respond to the scandal.

Because the chlordecone scandal touches on a variety of environmental, health, economic, and social issues, its study requires an interdisciplinary approach, which has been highlighted in a number of works in epidemiology, toxicology, and agronomy. One of the aims of this research was to complement the still underdeveloped social science literature on this issue, which has never been studied from a legal perspective, by combining an approach based on comparative politics, sociology of law, and the emerging literature on victim mobilization. By choosing a double fieldwork in Martinique and Île-de-France, a qualitative method was developed based on participant observation in French or Creole at internal meetings, demonstrations and press conferences, as well as semi-directive interviews with members of various collectives on the one hand, and the lawyers of these collectives on the other."

2nd prize

Sophia Noël (Research school, Master in sociology), for her memoir entitled "The Effect of Heat on Fertility Rates in France" (under the supervision of Charlotte Halpern).

"This mémoire is interdisciplinary in its ambition, resting at the intersection between demography and climate science. Each of these fields has benefited from the cultivation of long-run, high-quality datasets on meteorological and fertility data, respectively. Yet, there remains an opportunity for the development of new research streams by bringing these rich data sources together in order to better understand how complex changes in the planet’s climate are affecting populations across the world. The burgeoning literature on the effect of heat on fertility suggests that the interdependence of these two dynamics is both relevant and, at this point, under-researched relative to its importance across a diverse array of policy and academic debates involving population aging and the diversity of health risks posed by climate change.

There is only one study that measures the effect of heat on fertility rates in France. Régnier-Loilier (2010) uses an epidemiological approach, comparing fertility in the years surrounding heat shocks to the fertility rate following heat waves. More recent work on this subject on other country cases (Barreca et al. 2018; Conte Keivabu et al. 2023; Cho, 2020; Hajdu and Hajdu 2022; Marteleto et al. 2023; Hajdu, 2024) has converged upon the use of fixed-effects modeling to estimate the effects of heat on fertility rates. This approach more comprehensively isolates the effects of heat on fertility from other spatial and temporal confounders. This mémoire adopts such a fixed-effects approach, thereby building upon the findings of Régnier-Loilier and filling an empirical gap in the literature by measuring the effects of heat on fertility in France according to a state-of-the-art approach. This technique is applied to a dataset consisting of high-quality demographic and meteorological data compiled specifically for this mémoire, covering the years from 1975 to 2020.

The findings indicate that days with a mean daily temperature above 25 °C have an estimated effect of 0.260 and 0.256 percent on Total Fertility Rates nine and ten months later, respectively. Additionally, there is no statistically significant, positive rebound in births following heat shocks, suggesting that at least a portion of the loss of births due to heat exposure is permanent and therefore relevant to the long-run age structure of France. The effect has become smaller over the window of analysis and is heterogeneous at the sub-national level, with fertility rates in colder regions being affected at lower temperatures than in hot regions. Incorporating valuable insights from existing sociological literature on heat wave risks (Klinenberg 2002; Keller, 2015), the potential roles of policy and air conditioning in mediating the relationship between heat and fertility over space and time are discussed. Finally, a methodological contribution to the existing heat and fertility literature is aimed at by testing results across alternate methodologies, such as a polynomial spline and historical threshold, with consistent findings across these methodological approaches."

3rd prize

Chloé Ten Brink (PSIA, Master in Environmental Policy), for her memoir entitled "A question of protection: justice considerations in planned relocation".

"At the intersection of necessity and opportunity lies the complexities of planned relocation, a policy that profoundly shapes landscapes, communities, and futures. Planned relocation can be understood as organized community displacement that responds to or anticipates a given risk, which in the case of this study is the risk of river flooding, the most common natural disaster since 1990 and one of the most significant natural risks in Europe. While these policies are thought to be of growing relevance and necessity, literature indicates that planned relocation is exceptionally hard to do successfully and can lead to unjust outcomes.

An approach to tackle this issue involves examining the ethical dimensions of relocation, particularly emphasizing the lens of justice. With this aim, this thesis employed the six dimensions of justice outlined by Siders and Ajibade (2021): distributive, procedural, ecological, recognition, restoration, and intergenerational justice. Through a deductive analysis, this justice framework was applied to two cases of compensation-based relocation: relocation in the Eferding Basin in Austria, following the 2013 flooding of the Danube, and relocation in the depoldering of the Noordwaard in the Netherlands, part of the Dutch Room for the River programme. This analysis was achieved through document analysis and 20 semi-structured interviews with key informants to assess how each case study addressed chosen criteria for each dimension of justice.

Overall, while efforts were made, the pursuit of justice was only partially realized in both the Eferding Basin and the Noordwaard, leaving certain critical aspects unattended. Beyond this first analysis, this justice-based approach allowed for an operationalized use of intuitive notions—those of fairness, of right and wrong—rather than an explicit evaluation or measurement of the success of case studies. The inclusion of justice in policy allows us to center ethical discussions and represents an ideal to work towards. As such, this research drew the following recommendations: that compensation must go beyond financial loss, attempting where possible to rectify any intangible loss caused through relocation. There is moreover a crucial need for transparent and comprehensive communication with impacted communities, without which the entirety of the policy process may be undermined. Relocation is also an opportunity to think critically about land use and management with an emphasis on ecological flourishing, and finally, this thesis underlined the necessity to dedicate significant time and capacity on behalf of the policy-maker to understand, acknowledge, and integrate local history and culture"

Contacts 

• Richard Balme, President of the jury
• Marie Le Carrer, AIRE project manager