Research fields
Monetary theory and the macroeconomics of sustainability
How does the way in which we create and circulate money economy-wide assist or, on the contrary, undermine our efforts towards sustainability?
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Sustainable lifestyles and existential economics
How does our quest for a meaning in life make our ways of spending, consuming, saving, and investing more or less sustainable?
How does our anxiety about our finitude and our fragility, or even our mortality, as well as our quest for a meaning in life, influence our ways of spending, consuming, saving, and investing? Can such sustainabilty-oriented practices as voluntary simplicity, downshifting, collaborative economies or negative-interest currencies ever scale up and generalize if what continues to structure our economic exchanges is competition and the fear of losing and failing? Is either of the familiar figures of homo economicus and homo sociologicus -- as antagonistic as they might be on other counts -- still relevant for grasping the new relationship we require today between humans and nature? Shouldn't economic anthropology, if it wants to remain relevant in the face of today's environmental challenges, urgently come into contact with existential philosophy and psychology? Couldn't economic and social policies that are more sensitive to the existential experiences of social actors improve the efficiency of technical measures such as ecological taxation, green stock-market investment or the capture and exploitation of atmospheric carbon -- and couldn't human beings who are better reconciled with their existential finitude move beyond green capitalism and build more strongly sustainable economic alternatives?
Convivialism and permacircularity: Towards a genuinely sustainable society
What new cultural practices and what institutional reforms do we need to introduce in order to hasten the emergence of a society that is genuinely sustainable, i.e. convivial and permacircular?
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Sustainable culture and indigenous knowledge
In our quest for a culture that is both convivial and permacircular, what can and should we learn from the ecological, metaphysical, and anthropological knowledge of indigenous cultures?
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The cultural roots of unsustainability in the United States
Making the planet sustainable will require us to understand the U.S.A.'s unsustainability. How did it emerge from the British culture of the 17th and 18th centuries?
The United States remain, today, the least sustainable nation on the planet, in particular as to what regards per-capita energy consumption, but in terms of the ecological footprint more generally. At the same time, the North-American culture of consumption, mobility, housing, and urbanization still appears as the role model to be emulated by the rest of the world, and especially by the better-to-do social segments in emerging and developing economies. Making the planet sustainable will therefore require us to understand the deep roots of the U.S.A.'s unsustainability. How did these cultural traits emerge -- whether through continuation or through breaking away -- from the relationship to nature and to material goods that characterized the British culture of the 17th and 18th centuries? In what way did the Industrial Revolution in 19th-century Great Britain precipitate the unsustainabilty of the American way of life? Did an ingrained "frontier mentality" and a specifically North-American relationship to geographical space contribute to a model of unsustainability unique to the United States? Do the alternative economic movements that are currently developing there, at the very heart of capitalism and its dysfunctionings, make it possible to glimpse the lineaments of a new American culture of sustainability -- one that would, like its current predecessor, have the potential to spread across the globe?
