Une intervention d'Elisa Vecchione dans le cadre de la session II.3A: "Politics of Evidence I" de la 11e édition des conférences sur les dimensions humaines des changements environnementaux globaux (Conferences on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change), dédiée en 2012 au thème "Evidence for Sustainable Development" et organisée par le Environmental Policy Research Centre (FFU) et la Freie universität Berlin.
Présentation de l'intervention [en anglais] :
"Environmental governance is a privileged field of experiments for new modes of social interactions and sustainable development is recurrently charged as the new framework for a paradigm shift. Shift from which paradigm?
From market-based mechanisms adjusting incentives to act to ethical concerns advocating duties to act, the demand for ever more sophisticated information was meant to trigger change of direction in our ways of living in the name of self-evident necessity. After all, production of evidence serves many purposes: it bolsters policy legitimation, provides elements that help coordinate different actors, offers grounds for justification in case of litigation and guarantees multiple accountability. Reliance on evidence has shaped a dominant cooperative scheme in which rational decision-making has coincided with the capacity to justify policy action under the same logic of legal liability: creating symmetry between the past and the present, namely by restoring a past situation. As much as compensation allows this to the purpose of making individuals indifferent between two states, the production of evidence allows policymakers to escape judgment and responsibility for their decisions.
The paper aims to rehabilitate the concept of responsibility by abandoning the paradigm of ex-post liability to the benefit of one of ex-ante positioning. The first step would be to restore the link between legitimacy and responsibility in policymaking beyond the dominant connection between legitimacy and competency. A new rationality for decision-making would then follow, according to which policy actions should be judged for their capacity to deliberate about ends. This paper contends that current decision tools, such as Integrated Assessment Modelling for climate change policies (IAM), are already adapted to bring forward this challenge, and along with it, a paradigm shift. The discussion of the properties of IAM provides the theoretical framework for addressing such renovation, along with the challenges for democratic functioning."
