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ENVIRONMENT: CONCEPTS AND NORMS

Colourised copepod, watercolor, Jade Nijman, Bay of Naples, december 2023

 

Team Leader : Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde

 

The Environment : Concepts and Norms (ECN) team is developing a philosophical and interdisciplinary approach to the conceptual and normative frameworks that structure our relationship with ecosystems and natural processes. By questioning the foundations of environmental cognition, our research aims to transform representations of the natural world in order to rethink their place in contemporary governance regimes. The aim is to devise institutional counter-models capable of responding to the forces of attrition that threaten ecological equilibrium, and pave the way for a rethinking of environmental policies.

At the crossroads of philosophy, law, economics and cognitive science, our work questions the epistemological and normative conditions for the recognition of natural entities as legal and economic agents. We explore the conceptual mutations induced by the emergence of a law of nature, the implications of an expanded ontology of ecological value and the transformations of governance models in the Anthropocene era. Driven by a high-level research dynamic, integrated into international academic and institutional debates, our program aims to renew the normative structures framing the governance of the commons, the valuation of ecosystem services and the protection of natural environments as autonomous entities of law and economics.

 

PROJECTS

 

  • BiOcean5D - 2024. The main objective of BIOcean5D is to generate the data, knowledge, theory, monitoring and modeling tools needed to sustainably measure, understand, assess and predict marine biodiversity in the 5 dimensions (5D) of space, time and human environmental pressure, to enable ecosystem management and long-term conservation.

    Within this project, one crucial work-package (WP6) is entrusted to ECN team. ECN will be directly involved in three main tasks.

1) Modelling the contribution of biological functions to the production of ecosystemic services in order to develop biodiversity value indices that integrate the functional relevance of species in an ecosystem. [Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde, ECN - José Montoya, theoretical ecology, SETE, CNRS]

2) Merging economic valuation and deliberative methodologies in the assessment of marine ecosystems value [Bartosz Bartowski and Julian Massenberg Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, and Eva Wanek and Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde, ECN]

3) Renewing concepts and paradigms in Ocean Governance and maritime legal frameworks [André Abreu, Tara Ocean, and Roberto Casati and Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde, ECN].

  • MEDiverseaty : EU funded Doctoral Network Training and Research Program. This program, involving partners from six European countries (Italy, Malta, France, Spain, Montenegro and Greece), focuses on two pillars essential to contemporary marine sciences, policies, and education : Ocean Literacy and Marine Biodiversity Conservation. Despite ongoing efforts to conserve Mediterranean biodiversity, there remains a pressing need for more effective implementation of existing conservation measures. MEDiverSEAty proposes integrating the human dimension into biodiversity studies and conservation strategies to address this challenge. Recognizing the significant scientific and social relevance of these dimensions, the project emphasizes areas such as marine citizen science, maritime spatial planning, marine heritage, and the economic values of marine biodiversity. Call : HORIZON-MSCA-2022-DN-01 [MSCA Doctoral Networks 2022 - 10001119700] - 2024 - 2027

 

  • MerMéd : The Mediterranean Sea is very polluted and very damaged. With climate change, acidification, rising surface temperatures, loss of biodiversity... the sea is in a bad way. And all the legal texts that have existed for 50 years are not enough to protect it’. With this in mind, the MerMed project, led by Victor David, a researcher and lawyer in law and social sciences at the IRD, is proposing a feasibility study to the United Nations in 2022 on the recognition of the Mediterranean as a legal entity. The ECN team is a stakeholder in the project. [Victor David] - 2023

  • RANGE - ANR [Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde] - 2021-2025

  • EnCoNorm - Climate scientist Peter Kalmus wrote “I feel like the climate scientists have kind of done our job... we’ve laid it out pretty clearly, but nobody’s doing anything. So now it’s kind of up to the social scientists.” Focusing specifically on the oceans, the UNESCO’s "One Planet, One Ocean" initiative indicates that “we need to change the way we think and act”. Change in thought is the focus of our community. If in our current work we target the ocean as one of the major actors, if not the main one, in climate change, and as the one where there is the widest margin for effective intervention, and we locate two main issues in (a) the well-documented difficulty of massive behavioral change and (b) in the insufficient salience and inadequate conceptual representations of the ocean, which hamper the definition of effective measures and policies, these two aspects generalize to other domains that are relevant for addressing the current crisis. We work on the articulation between concepts and norms : conceptualizations of the environment and norms that can support effective change.Communities PSL-EELISA (Bourgeois-Gironde & Casati) - 2021-2023

  • MITI-CNRS OOSP - Microscopic life in seawater (marine plankton) generates around half of the planet’s oxygen, but our knowledge of it is still incomplete. We will be studying and helping to set up a collaborative science project around the Plankton Planet (P2) initiative. The main obstacle to understanding the oceanic plankton microbiome is the cost of oceanographic vessels and instruments, and the very limited coverage and resolution of devices on board commercial vessels. By developing a low-cost plankton measurement/observation kit, P2 can invest in a large community of sailors and yachtsmen who sail in regions that are not covered. The IJN proposes a study of person-artifact interaction from the perspective of the epistemology of distributed knowledge, leading to documents intended for the user community, with the aim of optimising the use of the participatory scientific platform in very different human, skill, motivational and environmental contexts (Roberto Casati and Colomban de Vargas (Roscoff)) - 2020-2022

  • Changing course : Towards a social and ecological transition in fisheries. Supported by the 2050 Foundation. The first assessment of the ecological, economic and social performance of French fisheries, based on the work of a multidisciplinary and partnership-based research group on the social-ecological transition of fisheries, made up of researchers from the Institut Agro (Didier GASCUEL, Florian QUEMPER, Quentin LE BRAS, Romain MOUILLARD), AgroParisTech (Harold LEVREL) and EHESS-CNRS (Roberto CASATI) - 2024

 

EVENTS

  • UNOC 3 : preparation of the third United Nations Ocean Conference, held in Nice, France, from 9 to 13 June 2025. Different projects going on : 

- MEDiverseaty Webinar (27th of march)

- UNESCO Pavillion side-events in Nice (9th-13th june : half-day workshop at the Ocean Literacy & Conservation Pavilion, titled : “Ocean Literacy : Some Paths Less Traveled”.

  • Webinar “MEDiverSEAty : The Human Dimension of Mediterranean Marine biodiversity - A transdisciplinary approach for Conservation, Ocean literacy and Policy” (co-led by MEdiverseaty MSCA Training Network and Institut Jean Nicod). 

 

  • TEDx Versailles - Rethinking our relationship with the Ocean in the service of humanity : the need to set up a ‘plankton union’ to protect ocean ecosystems. Speech by Roberto Casati, 19 April 2025.

 

SEMINARS & COURSES

 

 

INVITATIONS

  • Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde  : Invited Professor, Department of Law, University of Haifa, 2022-2023 : "Emerging Rights of Nature"
  • Roberto Casati : Invited Professor, 2024-2025, IUSS Pavia. Representations of the ocean. 

 

TEAM MEMBERS

Statutory Members

 

Post-docs

 

PhD Students

 

MA Students

Foremembers

  • BEAUVALLET Luna : plankton narratives
  • FLAMME Emilie : icebergs 
  • IAKOVLEVA Ekaterina : ocean in contemporary maps
  • PIERINI Francesco : project on maps and lists 

 

POLICY BRIEFS

The ECN team is committed to overhauling the legal and economic frameworks that structure the recognition of the rights of nature and the governance of the commons. Our work aims to integrate innovative tools (intellectual property, artificial intelligence, ecological indicators, marine protected areas) into a holistic and pragmatic vision of the relationship between human societies and natural environments. We regularly produce policy briefs and policy proposals :

 

PUBLICATIONS

  • Bourgeois-Gironde, S Comment le droit nous rapproche de la nature, PUF, 2024
  • Zaluski, W., Bourgeois-Gironde, S., & Dyrda, A. (Eds.). (2024). Research Handbook on Legal Evolution. Edward Elgar Publishing
  • Bourgeois-Gironde, S., Flamme, E., Gallace, A., Hiernaux, Q., Malatesta, S., Schmidt di Freidberg, M., ... & Wanek, E. (2023). Rethinking the ocean : conceptual engineering for the next 10000 years. In New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering. Springer, Cham.
  • Wanek, E., Bartkowski, B., Bourgeois-Gironde, S., & Schaafsma, M. (2023). Deliberately vague or vaguely deliberative : A review of motivation and design choices in deliberative monetary valuation studies. Ecological Economics, 208, 107820.
  • Wanek, E., Bourgeois-Gironde, S., & Mari, A. (2023). Desire, moral evaluation or sense of duty : The modal framing of stated preference elicitation. Environmental Values, 09632719231212391.
  • Roberto Casati, 2022 ed., The Sailing Mind, vol. 19, Studies in Brain and Mind Cham : Springer International Publishing 
  • Roberto Casati, Oceano : una navigazione filosofica, 2022, Giulio Einaudi editore
  • Bourgeois-Gironde, S. Etre la Rivière, PUF, 2020.

CNRS EHESS ENS ENS