Territorialization of energy policies in the Franco-Vaud-Geneva conurbation: energy planning as an opportunity to redevelop border areas?

Summary In France as in Switzerland, local authorities are becoming major players in the energy transition, a transition whose implementation requires a major renewal of public intervention instruments. The present work aims to examine the challenges and conditions of such a renewal, based on the territorial energy planning experiments conducted in the Franco-Vaud-Geneva conurbation. Conceived as approaches to the relocation of energy sectors - sectors whose components, along with fossil fuels, were external to the consumer territories - these energy planning approaches are examined here from an institutionalist and pragmatic perspective.Consisting in apprehending these approaches as surveys with a vocation, through a collective work of cognitive (re)equipment of the field of territorial intervention FVG, to initiate and accompany the reconstruction of the modes of coordination of the men about their territory - territory understood in its triple material, organizational and political dimension -, this grid opens towards a double reading of the experiments of energy planning. The first focuses on the organizational dimension of these investigations in the making, i.e. on the cultures of action present and the modalities of interaction between them, while the second focuses on the cognitive substance that supports these interactions, i.e. on the logics of reflection that preside over the mobilization and the production of territorial representations linked to these approaches.This double reading allows us to draw lessons at different levels. The first concerns the (cognitive) field of territorial intervention that these energy planning approaches help to define. This field, although better understood in its technical dimensions, remains both limited and "deformed" in such a way that it gives greater value to fossil fuels, which we would like to get rid of, than to renewable energy sources, which we would like to replace. The second level of teaching concerns the processes of production of territorial knowledge (PPCT) that preside over the delimitation and "equipment" of this field of intervention. Understood through the institutional norms that frame them, and the cultures of action whose interactions can initiate processes of destabilization-reconstruction of these norms, these PPCTs turn out to give rise to socio-cognitive "border zones", zones that are favorable to such reconfigurations, but which require, in the case of FVG, prior "planning" work.The third category of lessons focuses on the factors that are most decisive for the quality of this "planning" - a planning that is no longer merely cognitive but refers, more globally, to the conditions of implementation of investigations whose ultimate goal remains collective territorial action. These elements open up the challenges and avenues of renewal opened up by these energy planning processes in terms of public action, and they also allow us to take a new look at the conurbation project under construction in this cross-border territory.