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ENVIRONMENT: CONCEPTS AND NORMS

TEAM MEMBERS | PROJECTS | SEMINARS |PUBLICATIONS

Team Leader: Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde

          

The ECN-team “environment: concepts and norms” conducts interdisciplinary research on the conceptual structures underlying our spontaneous environmental cognition and on the institutional frameworks and norms (legal and economic) prevailing over our relationship to natural environments.

More particularly, the team focuses on the following themes and set of questions

  • The value of nature : whether, how, and why an assignment of economic value to natural entities can be performed. We study the limits of contingent valuation methodologies ; the scope and relevance of a "natural capital accounting" approach to protect biodiversity (in the influential context of the Dasgupta’s Review) ; whether it is possible to rank endangered species to implement conservation policies ; the theoretical foundations of the notion of ecosystem services, functions ; etc.

  • The status of nature : whether natural entities are objects or subjects, in the law, and in people’s minds. We critically assess the current legal moves towards nature’s juridical personification. We envision this and alternative possibilities in terms of their conceptual coherence, legal signification, and ecological efficiency. Rivers, the ocean, oceanic entities (as diverse as plankton or icebergs), glaciers, snow, atmospheric processes, plants, are considered from this legal-conceptual perspective.

  • Environmental cognition and ontology : Assignments of value and status are anchored in either naive or scientific cognitions and ontologies. Concerning the latter, the conceptual contributions of the team are embedded into high-level scientific projects : e.g. ocean-sciences, hydrology, climate sciences, botanics. Naive environmental ontologies are also indispensable to probe in order to maximize the fit between actual cognitive and behavioral tendencies and innovative institutional environment-driven design.

              

             

TEAM MEMBERS

Statutory Members

Post-doctoral fellows

PhD Students

Masters

           

PROJECTS

  • MITI-CNRS OOSP - (Casati) 2020-2022
  • Range - ANR (Bourgeois-Gironde) 2021-2025
  • EnCoNorm - communautés PSL-EELISA (Casati) 2021-2023

            

SEMINARS

             

PUBLICATIONS

  • Bourgeois-Gironde, S. Etre la Rivière, PUF, 2020.

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