(Re)politicization of climate change mitigating projects: environmental forms and motives of the Seine Nord Europe canal

Abstract

Climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies are gaining visibility and support. Decision-makers are defending the extension of large infrastructures that are low greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters, as a way to act quickly and massively without calling into question existing economic models. This situation depoliticizes these projects, masking their other ecological consequences such as their impacts on biodiversity. This article examines how promoters of these projects depoliticized its socio-technical futures while other actors re-politicized them. Using the example of the Seine Nord Europe Canal project, we show a politicization of the territorial future and a depoliticization of the environmental future. This depoliticization is based on the techno-optimist discourse promoting large-scale infrastructures as the only possible solution to the global ecological and climate crisis. It uses a selective framing of the environment that makes some elements visible and others invisible. We conducted semi-structured interviews with biodiversity stakeholders in the territories that would be impacted by the canal. Based on the concepts of environmental forms and motives, we reconstructed the environmental ontologies ignored by the dominant discourse and assembled them into three alternative scenarios. We present the method of investigation and identification of these motives and discuss the likelihood of the constructed scenarios participating in a re-politicization based on the reactions of various actors.

Water Reservoirs in Plans to Improve Navigability of the Lower Section of the Vistula

“…The results were compared with another project implemented in the field of waterways in Europe, i.e., the construction of the Seine-North Europe Canal. The purpose of this investment is to connect Paris with the Benelux countries (the catchment area of the Seine and the Rhine), enabling the relief of road and railroads by inland waterway transport [42]. The construction of the 107 km canal costs EUR 5.1 billion, and its dimensions are 54 m wide and 4.5 m deep.…”

Making Urban Water Management Tangible for the Public by Means of Digital Solutions

“…An infrastructure is a technical system expanding further than a single site [6]. Its effective functioning for the user tends to mask all the work necessary to maintain it [15]. Technical water infrastructure, in particular, is hidden underground and provides services to end-users without their involvement at any stage of the provision process.…”

Rhine low water crisis: From individual adaptation possibilities to strategical pathways

“…Temporisation of a "complicated" solution enables the guarantee of a certain social opacity, because the decision is linked to a specific expertise, to very precise environmental processes, which take time and that are not really visible by an organization over the long term (Blanck, 2016). The infrastructural solution is both a temporary arrangement between viewpoints, the current situation (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2000) and the stakeholder's expectations, and a way to dismiss environmental issues raised by a human-driven intervention on the Rhine (Petitimbert et al, 2022).…”

“…They create new ways of considering the initial issue and the solutions to take, to push or to dismiss some ways of acting (Kingdon, 2003;Rudolf, 2007;Birkmann et al, 2010). But at the same time this impulse given by a crisis can reinforce some pre-existing ideas of adaptation solutions (Petitimbert et al, 2022). It can enlighten an alreadyexisting solution, enabling "business as usual, " which dissolves individual responsibility into the expected consequences of a project managed by national or international authorities.…”