The Ecological Transition: A Social and Political Sciences Critical Approach

In the face of the climate crisis, the call to act urgently has never been stronger, but this contrasts with the inertia of ecological policies. This issue of Politix adopts an approach based on general sociology and on social and political sciences, which consists in recognizing the particularly agonistic dimension of the making of ecological policies both in the social arena in general and in the political, bureaucratic and economic fields, as well as in the arena of social and environmental movements. The inertia of ecological policies is thus seen both as the product of social structures of domination and as the vector of their reproduction. The groups and social actors who occupy dominant positions within these structures have managed not to reject environmental injunctions, but to make them compatible with the safeguarding of their dominant positions. Participating in various ways in the (re)definition and implementation of ecological policies, these actors are helping to outline an environmental issue which is establishing itself without fundamentally altering the state of social relations.