Introduction

The environment is a favorable field for studying the difference between perceptions and representations, because environmental realities regularly surprise our senses and interpretations. Yet political science has long made the environment an issue "like any other". Classically, it has approached environmental issues by studying how they were framed and supported by political actors, such as the debate on the future of natural sites, pollution, the living environment, etc. The issues were considered "environmental" when actors, especially ecological movements, defined them in this way. Nature was only seen as a social construction. From this perspective, environmental struggles and policies could be studied in the same way as other political conflicts, such as those on education, pensions, crime, housing assistance, etc. Recognizing the environment as having any political specificity was tantamount to taking sides in favor of environmentalism.

However, environmental realities are intrinsically different from other social realities in their spatial dimension and their interactions with living things. Taking these characteristics seriously leads us to study the environment as an unstable and complex material context that political actors seek to circumscribe. In this undertaking, the spatiality and interdependence of environmental elements constitute particular resources to justify this or that framing of reality. Indeed, the contours of environmental categories include or exclude territories, which allows for particular modes of politicization. The environment's reactivity with living organisms is manifested by singular processes that fall outside the established categories and create opportunities for repoliticization. The environment thus offers specific politicizing modalities. This book proposes a new approach to the environment to understand both what is political in the environment and how political activity transforms the environment.

To do this, we rely on the notions of environmental forms and motives. Environmental forms are spatialized realities which we perceive as shapes in the environment. Environmental motives, on the contrary, are reasons to act in this area. However, the perception of shapes is not independent of motives. The word "motive" has the same etymology as "motif ", such as the motif of a frieze or a fabric, which means a recurrent shape or a pattern. Recognizing both shapes and motives requires learning. Sociology has shown that legitimate motivations in a social context are limited in number. They are specific to each culture and each time. Love or interest are not necessarily recognized as credible drivers of individual action in all social groups. In Henry James' short story "The Figure in the Carpet" (1896), a character desperately seeks the hidden meaning of a novel. He hopes to discover a known shape. He expects this hidden meaning to suddenly jump out at him, like "a figure in a carpet", i.e. an immediately recognizable shape. Both environmental shapes and motivational patterns are based on categorization conventions that lead to the inclusion of some things and the exclusion of others. Both motives and shapes are subject to moral and political interpretations. Shapes also have a social history and their symbolic significance depends on the normative investment they have undergone. It is common in environmental matters for the perception of a shape or the observation of its absence to become a cause of action. Finally, shapes and motives are useful to understand how actors categorize and interpret environmental realities whose contours are often contested.

This book revisits the analysis of public environmental policies with these two notions of environmental shapes and motives by studying how actors struggle to impose legitimate motives based on shapes. We adopt a constructivist ontology by focusing our attention on the social processes of constructing reality, but without denying that the materiality of reality also influences perceptions. While there are situations where perception corresponds perfectly to a recognized shape, there are also cases where perceived reality is not coded in the individual's representations. This mismatch allows the discovery or learning of any new shapes present. However, the relative autonomy of individuals' sensory faculties from socially constructed categories is not enough to build a universally objectifiable reality that would lead us back to a premise of limited rationality. Our sensory faculties are used in social situations framed by norms that influence the relevant scale, legitimate references and appropriate meaning. Indeed, since environmental shapes are inscribed in time and space, the perception of their contours is sensitive to the scale of observation and that of their temporal evolution depends on the reference situation considered. It is also sensitive to the different senses mobilized in perception (touch, smell, etc.) and to environmental investigation protocols. The political struggles whose stakes are the legitimate representation of the environment can thus be understood on the basis of the forms that each party tries to impose by setting the practical modalities of observation and their interpretation in terms of reasons for action. For example, in the French language, there is a term that exists: environmental motif. It captures both the motive for action on the environment and the forms on which it is based, which the English language distinguishes through the terms motives and patterns or shapes.

The first chapter of this book situates the ontological positioning chosen here in the academic field of political sociology and demonstrates its methodological relevance for the analysis of public policies. We will thus specify what a perception-based approach can bring in addition to the mainstream approach based on policy instruments. We recall the origin of the notion of the motif (motive/pattern) in comprehensive sociology and discuss its links with the notion of affordance in pragmatic sociology.

Our approach is also based on Virginie Tournay's book Penser le changement institutionnel (Considering Institutional Change) (2014). The author considers that there are also focal point, observation scale and depth-of-field effects in the ways we approach institutions, and that this influences how we characterize their changes. She suggests that individuals perceive material clues of the presence of an institution (a flag, an alliance, a hymn, etc.), and that they infer logical links that depend on the relationship they have with that institution. If they adopt a distant relationship with the institution, they will be able to question its origin, forms and effects, just as a naturalist studies a living species, with observations that may vary according to the point of view. However, if they feel bound by this institution, questioning its origin and form will seem incongruous to them. What they will perceive, above all, is a bond of belonging as a totem (for a territorial institution, for example), an obligation towards a benevolent spirit (for a convention based on reciprocity, for example) or a proliferation of new links (like everything that is established in relation to a form of modernity). We will show that environmental motives can also be studied in a naturalistic way or experienced as totems, spirits or proliferation.

The second chapter deals with politicization of environmental motives in a generic way, i.e. all motives (forms and motivations) perceptible in the space surrounding the actors, whether these motives relate to society or nature. It seems fruitful to us not to postulate an objective difference between the social and the natural environment but to observe how actors attribute biophysical causes or effects to deemed social motives in order to make them ecological motives. This leads us to approach greening as one of the forms of political work that can be done on a motive. We are mobilizing research in political ecology to identify other ways of politicizing the contours of environmental forms according to what they include or exclude and what their categorization puts in equivalence. We thus identify a typology of how political actors can use environmental forms and motives for their political work.

In the rest of the book, we test the typology proposed in these first chapters to study changes of environmental policies in the long term. It is about paying attention to the environmental forms and motives that have been stabilized by their incorporation into public policies, their future over time and what they have changed for the actors. This approach is used in chapter three to study the evolution of fish and water quality control in Europe. This is a policy that has been very well documented by environmental historians. This longitudinal empirical study relates the institutionalization of six environmental forms that became motives for environmental action, from the 19th Century to the present day: the sacrificed river, self-purification, fish mortality, trout, migratory fish and eutrophication. Each case is both a shape and a source of motivation. Self-purification is a visible phenomenon downstream of a polluting discharge, and it is also an idealized vision of a nature that purifies. Migratory fish are forms that are well known to fishermen and are also a reason to oppose sectoral appropriation of rivers in the name of a European vision of rivers. As institutionalized environmental forms, they shaped the landscape. The material effects of...