Human and Social Sciences & Energy: report of the Athena alliance's Energy group.

Summary This report presents the state of the art of social sciences and humanities research on the environment (strengths, multidisciplinary research areas covered, etc.), identifies strategic research directions on which significant human and financial resources should be mobilized, and formulates a certain number of recommendations to improve research mechanisms on this theme. The participation of the human and social sciences is necessary for reflections on fundamental and urgent questions related to the global environment, the development of new energy resources and geopolitical reconfigurations. The potential contributions of the social sciences and humanities on these issues are numerous and wide-ranging: they rely on their capacity to question the social in its different dimensions in order to better understand the processes and their determinants, to evaluate their effects and to propose, if necessary, corrective measures or innovations in public policies. Thus, the aim here is not to set out a roadmap for the energy transition, but to question this notion beyond the current national debate, which is a way of enriching it and putting it into perspective. The challenge of this report is that the technical nature of the issues should not discourage or disqualify other approaches: sociological, political, geographical, ethical. The field of energy is marked by the deployment of technologies, old and new, which range from production to consumption, including modes of marketing, governance and representation of phenomena. These social innovations cannot be appreciated and valued without the active participation of SHS, as technical solutions only make sense when deployed in specific times and places. The question of energy arises because it is first and foremost a social question: that of uses, organizations, and actors, as well as that of inequalities in access, precariousness, consumption, and geopolitical conflicts. A modest but crucial step, this report demonstrates the mobilization of the various SHS communities on energy-related issues. Researchers and teacher-researchers can provide skills to study the new forms of decentralization, territorialization, participation. specific to this field. The research directions presented here are innovative for the humanities and social sciences and beyond. They are essential to current political debates, well beyond the questions of acceptability or "impact" where the SHS are too often identified. Compared to an inherited model, organized by States and large companies around a reduced technological bouquet, the existence of a multitude of technological options and the rise of other actors, notably territorial ones, also makes SHS approaches indispensable. Territorialization completely changes the deal. SHS are central to the evaluation of the deployment of renewable energies, in their various aspects: new areas of implementation, controversies, insertion into existing systems, etc. The challenge of the energy transition can be summed up as follows: to simultaneously consider ways to significantly reduce GHG emissions and to reflect in depth and independently on the nuclear option. This challenge cannot be met without giving high priority to energy research in the human and social sciences. Contributors to this report: Pierre Charbonnier, Patrick Criqui, Alain Dollet, Patrick-Paul Duval, Pierre Fournier, Claude Gilbert, Bernd Grambow, Olivier Labussière, Joseph Fourier, Sandra Laugier, Elisabeth Le Net, Catherine Locatelli, Alain Nadaï, Sébastien Velut.