The paper bears witness to the emergence of a French energy policy localism. It presents a sample of significant local rural experiences in the climate energy domain in rural France. These experiences are risky, trial-and-error transcalar processes. They amount to a different way of doing energy policy. French localism surfs on these innovative territories while remaining ambiguous about the status that it confers on them. a b s t r a c tThis paper is interested in sustainable energy initiatives in French rural areas. It follows up the UK debate about 'localism'. UK policy localism has been cast as neoliberal, framing communities as competent and competitive actors, morally responsible and accountable for their destiny.In France, the emerging policy localism is surfing on an ongoing political structuration of innovative rural territories -'Positive Energie Territories' (TEPOS). The paper presents and discusses the results of a rough census (undertaken in 2012) of significant experiences in this domain. It points to a few experiences and depicts them as risky, trial-and-error transcalar processes that endow locally emergent energy issues with a political dimension. To this extent, they amount to a different way of doing energy policy.The analysis points to an ambiguity in French policy localism. This localism may pave the way for an upscaling of the ongoing TEPOS political structuration, or tend to make TEPOS into demonstration territories within a neoliberal RTD policy approach. In the latter case, it may not necessarily fit territories to pursue their political structuration with a view to the energy transition.

International audienceIn France as in many European countries, grid-connected photovoltaics (PV) took off between 2008 and 2010, driven by an overly attractive feed-in tariff scheme that failed to take into account the rapid evolutions of PV technologies and markets. This unexpected expansion of a policy-dependent market led to a moratorium on feed-in tariffs followed by a consultation with stakeholders in 2010-2011. This article analyses the build-up, explosion and resolution of this crisis by focusing on the market and political effects of feed-in tariffs in the years 2008 to 2011. The consultation is analysed as an attempt at the political organisation and representation of the emerging PV sector. The paper shows that it failed to constitute a reliable representation of it, and that the government addressed the difficulty to control the sector by closing down both the market and the political space. It concludes that the good functioning of feed-in tariffs requires work of market organisation as much as of political construction, since their regulation relies on market data and on political compromises. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Greenhouse gas emission scenarios are key in analyses of human interference with the climate system. They are mainly produced by one category of computer models: Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). We analyse how IAM research organised into a community around the production of socio-economic scenarios during the preparation of the IPCC AR5 (2005-2014). We seek to describe the co-emergence of a research community, its instruments, and its domain of applicability. We highlight the role of the IPCC process in the making of the IAM community, showing how IAMs worked their way to an influent position. We then survey three elements of the repertoire that served to organise collective work on scenarios in interaction with the IPCC and the European Union, and which now frames the community and its epistemic practices. This repertoire needs to articulate epistemic practices with the pursuit of policy relevance, which shows how epistemic communities and patterns of co-production materialise in practical arrangements.

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