Introduction

For several years now, with a few colleagues involved, especially the participants in the Aussois adventure1, we have typically presented territorial ecology as an emerging interdisciplinary field. We do not know until when the "emerging" qualifier will continue to make sense. It is certain that, despite some important research and wonderful achievements, territorial ecology is still a niche approach, whose methodology needs to be consolidated and must convince a large number of colleagues of its relevance, and even of its necessity. In France in particular, interdisciplinary work is complicated. Recruitment and evaluation procedures in the academic world are still marked by clearly defined disciplines. Interdisciplinarity transcends traditional boundaries, but it is here, we believe, that novelties are found, that well-established habits are shaken up and that certainties are questioned. In this sense, territorial ecology participates in this movement of questioning the compartmentalization of disciplines in order to elaborate innovative approaches and methods in the face of the socio-ecological problems.

This book has several objectives. The first is to situate territorial ecology, a niche interdisciplinary field, within a broader disciplinary family, that of Ecological Economics. In particular, it is important to establish proximities with other fields, be it Viennese social ecology, urban ecology or industrial ecology. 10 years ago, I published a book entitled Industrial and Territorial Ecology. Why this shift toward just territorial ecology with the abandonment of the industrial reference? The purpose of Chapter 1 is to educate the reader about these different aspects, as well as the relationship of territorial ecology with the concepts established by national and international institutions. The nascent territorial ecology was quite easily situated in the field of sustainable development. Things became more complicated, due to a certain dynamism from the institutions. What about territorial ecology in the face of the circular economy, the sustainable bioeconomy or the ecological transition? In this chapter, we would like to pay particular attention to an issue: that it is today the national and international institutions that are setting the conceptual agenda on which a large number of researchers are working. As legitimate as it seems to us that these institutions should share their political agenda and their priorities with the academic world, it is distressing to us that many researchers traipse around the concepts put forward by the institutions. This observation is not reassuring with regard to the state of a part of the research world, burdened by the need to respond to orders and obtain funding, rather than to think independently. To give an example, if the circular economy was initially a concept forged by researchers, it is clear that the meaning given to it today is not at all the same. This would in no way be a problem if it were not for the fact that researchers take up this new meaning and make it their field of research without questioning the consequences of this new meaning. This is why, in this chapter, even though we aim, with territorial ecology, to produce a way of thinking that can be useful to stakeholders, we wish to position ourselves in relation to what sometimes appears to us as a succession of new semantic arrangements that do not necessarily guarantee a renewal of thought and action.

The second objective of this book is to establish, especially for non-specialists as specialists might be disappointed by this too general overview, an inventory of the methods mobilizing the notion of metabolism. Metabolism, whether urban, industrial or territorial, is in fact the backbone from which to think about the analyzed system. The methods are diverse and depend largely on both the objectives sought and the disciplines mobilized, from biogeochemists to historians, urban planners and engineers. This inventory allows us to analyze what can be expected from each of the methods developed and the limits of these methods. More specifically, this allows me to distance myself from these works, most of which are remarkable, and open up a complementary path marked both by my own educational path as an urban planner and, earlier, as an economist, and by more operational goals.

The third objective, which forms the heart of our intentions, consists of proposing a method that will help to carry out an analysis of territorial ecology. This proposal is likely to form the backbone of territorial ecology, while being complementary to the other methods introduced in Chapter 2. It is based on the idea of giving more space to a qualitative analysis of the circulation of flows, in order to understand not only what circulates, but also why and how it circulates. In other words, in addition to a formal presentation of a territory's metabolism, broken down into subsystems that represent the various wealth-creating activities, we detail the different ways of analyzing the intentions behind the flows. As we shall see, this implies that we are interested not only in the circulation of flows of materials, water and energy, but also in the circulation of know-how, the influences that certain actors have on others, and the mobilization of intangible resources, such as heritage.

Thus, Chapter 3 of this book is based on the third chapter of the collective essay on territorial ecology applied to the municipality of Aussois in Savoie (Buclet 2015a). It details the method and removes certain inaccuracies and vagueness that still remained in the previous book. In Aussois, we sketched out a new method based on the analysis of the wealth-creating activities of a territory. Here, we present some of the advances obtained with this method, based on the questions that have arisen in recent years, in the context of various research projects to which I have contributed. As much as possible, this chapter guides the reader who may be considering using this method to analyze a territory. It presents how to produce a representation of the territory by wealth-creating subsystems, and the complementary analysis tools that make it possible to analyze the relationships between stakeholders that underlie these circulating flows, whether it be an analysis of the power games between them, the disparity that may emerge within the territory as to the orientations to be given to a project, or the motivations of one or the other.

Once the foundations of the method set, we wanted to go further and deal, in particular, with the question of co-evolution between human societies and their environment. Indeed, the main criticism that can be made about the method is that undoubtedly, it does not sufficiently take into account the interactions between nature and society. If we consider that a territory is also a socio-ecosystem, that it is not only the preferred scale for analyzing relations to our environment, but also the preferred scale for action at the interface between society and nature, then it is important to develop a grid for analyzing these interrelationships. In order to do this, we rely on the concept of capabilities, which we owe to the Indian economist Amartya Sen, as well as on the notion of territorial resources. Chapter 4 starts from these notions and concepts and revisits them in order to better articulate them with the issues of territorial ecology. We thus move from capability to territorial capability, which consists of a collective capability located at the scale of a territory and whose sustainability depends on socio-ecological balances. We also move from the notion of territorial resources to that of socio-ecological resources, in order to better highlight the fact that it is a co-production between nature and society. On the strength of these revisited notions, we present the stakes of a territory subjected to the socio-ecological constraints that it faces in this chapter. Indeed, we cannot ignore the need to confront our work with the climatic emergency, as well as with all of the ecological imbalances we are facing. Our proposal in this chapter is to articulate the metabolic approach with the notion of territorial capability. We believe that this articulation is likely to help territories to project themselves in the years to come with the aim of reconciling territorial development and environmental issues.

Elaborating a territorial project using territorial ecology, as with any other method, may however be insufficient, given the systemic complexity of sustainability issues. In particular, we cannot overlook the fact that the risk of collapse is the product of the dominant economic system. Thus, in Chapter 5, we will rely on the economics of conventions, and in particular, the notion of conventional regimes, in order to situate sustainability issues. In this chapter, we argue that it is misleading to think about sustainability without radically questioning the reference points that are at the origin of the very problems we intend to solve. This chapter, therefore, aims to present a certain number of principles on which to base an alternative to the dominant conventional regime. I will show that many local initiatives are proving to be bearers of these principles that transform the benchmarks and values that form the basis of a society. In conclusion, I invite the institutions to take into account this transformative, potential source of societal innovation and to use it as a basis for action at the territorial level, and to generate dynamics favorable to the emergence of a sustainable society. In doing so, I hope that this book will convince territorial stakeholders, and even national...