Gestão do ambiente e metamorfoses do Estado: a experiência francesa

This article examines the evolution of the State’s role in management of the environment. The French experience, characterised by a highly-centralised State, presents researchers with a situation where any permanence, like any change, tends to be extreme. Therefore it acts as a starting point for our analysis of changes in the State’s role in the management of nature, which was formerly considered as a resource to be exploited, and is now redefined as an environment to be protected. In particular, diachronic analysis enables us to grasp the dynamics of these social changes. On the basis of an interdisciplinary exchange between a historian and a sociologist, this article suggests that we should qualify theories of the disappearance of the State by giving ourselves the means to differentiate, in management of the environment, what is new and what is not, by highlighting the capacity for “integration of criticism” (BOLTANSKI; CHIAPELLO, 1999) by institutions. The environment is an instrument of hybridisation that questions old dichotomies: between nature and culture, between local and national, between the particular and the general, between vernacular knowledge and scientific knowledge. This questioning tends to deprive science and politics of their respective monopolies as representatives of nature and of society 1 . Against this background, the central State becomes a manager of socio-natural diversity, the technocratic State gives a voice to local know-how, and the State concedes a certain plurality to the general public interest of which it no longer has quite a complete monopoly. The State is no longer quite what it was, in its role and its functioning, but the State endures. Thus, the society is changing, but the categories of the XX° century are not totally obsolete yet.