Dossier “ Économie de la proximité ” Les apports de l'économie de la proximité aux approches environnementales : inventaire et perspectives

The contributions of proximity economics to environmental issues: Assessment and prospects

André Torre¹ et Bertrand Zuindeau²

¹ Économiste, INRA, AgroParisTech, UMR SAD-APT, PROXIMITES, 16 rue Claude Bernard, 75005 Paris, France
² Économiste, Université Lille 1, UMR8019 CNRS/CLERSE, Bâtiment SH2, Cité scientifique, 59655 Villeneuve d'Ascq cedex, France

Auteur de correspondance : torre@agroparistech.fr

Résumé

Parmi les nouvelles approches économiques de l'environnement, l'économie de la proximité suscite un intérêt grandissant. Ce n'est que depuis le début des années 2000 que cette conception, jusqu'alors dédiée à l'analyse des relations économiques territoriales, s'est tournée vers la problématique environnementale. À l'aide d'une grille d'analyse novatrice, fondée notamment sur le diptyque “ proximité géographique / proximité organisée ”, elle a investi plusieurs questions du domaine de l'environnement et des politiques environnementales. L'article se propose, en premier lieu, d'établir un inventaire des contributions réalisées à partir de ce cadre analytique. Apparaissent dominer la question des conflits d'usage et le rôle des proximités organisées dans la régulation des problèmes environnementaux. Dans un second temps, l'article dessine des perspectives heuristiques de développements futurs.

Abstract

Among the new economic approaches to environmental issues, proximity economics is generating growing interest. It was only in the early 2000s that this approach, which until then had mostly served as a tool for analyzing territorial economic relationships, was first used to address environmental issues. Using an innovative analytical framework based on the two-fold concept of geographical proximity/organized proximity, recent work in proximity economics have examined several issues related to the environment and environmental policies. In this article we propose to draw an inventory of the contributions based on this analytical framework and to identify a number of heuristic prospects. By crossing the two types of proximity and the two stages of environmental problems (i.e. the production and regulation phases), four themes emerge. Examining the existing contributions with regards to these themes reveals that the majority of these contributions deal with the effect of geographical proximity on the production of a problem (including the question of land use conflicts) and with the role of organized proximity in the management of the problem. The other two themes are discussed far less frequently: the possible contribution of geographical proximity in the management of the problem and the negative role of certain types of organized proximity in the creation of problems. For this reason, we believe that these two under-explored themes are research directions that should be pursued in future, possibly by using work from other fields of research.