Location
Avenue du Doyen Poplawski
TREE Research Unit (UPPA/CNRS)
Key Facts
Key dates
Kick-off: April 4, 2024
Duration: 4 years
Leader
Full-time team
- 2 PhD students
- 2 post-docs over 4 years
- 1 post-doc over 1 year
Advisory board
- Louis de Fontenelle, a legal expert, is a lecturer at the University of Pau. He specializes in law and justice issues relating to energy and environmental transitions, natural resources and sustainable mobility.
- Laurent Jammes holds an engineering degree from the Ecole Centrale de Paris and a doctorate in nuclear physics. He is director of industrial relations at the Institut nationale des sciences de l'univers, and a member of several evaluation committees for research programs on “clean, safe and efficient energy” and geological storage of CO2.
- Raphael Heffron is Professor of Global Energy Law and Sustainability at the University of Pau. The most cited scientist in his field (Scopus), he works on ways to achieve a just and sustainable transition to a low-carbon economy, combining approaches from law, politics and economics.
REASONS ChairRenewable Energy Age : Social Notices
Supported by UPPA, CNRS and TotalEnergies OneTech R&D Social Performance, the REASONS Chair is the first industrial chair in the social sciences to be awarded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). It has a total budget of 1 million euros over 4 years.
The REASONS industrial chair, which stands for Renewable Energy Age: Social Notices, aims to analyze the debates surrounding the energy transition. It explores the factors likely to encourage social acceptance, as well as rejection, of different types of renewable energy.
REASONS studies specific projects, as well as the industries and countries in which these renewable energies are being developed, with the aim of identifying and understanding, through their analysis, the implicit norms that the debates bring to light.
A scientific study focuses on the way in which social organizations have positioned themselves in relation to transition technologies, with an in-depth analysis of two dimensions: on the one hand, how these organizations attack companies that make false promises, thus renewing accusations of greenwashing, and, on the other, how debates are structured, particularly on social networks.
This study, together with analyses of the literature on social opposition to transitions, will provide elements for eight case studies on transition technologies, in order to establish a comparison of debates around energy transitions from a sustainable development perspective.
These elements will help to achieve the scientific objectives (analysis of the rules of civic epistemology currently being developed) and operational objectives (recommendations to the company for the deployment of its technologies) of the industrial chair.
Finally, part of the Chair will be devoted to scientific communication and popularization, including the creation of a comic strip on the deployment of renewable energies, in line with the “Science with and for Society” (SAPS) label obtained by the Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour.
REASONS Chair holder
Xavier Arnauld de Sartre is a geographer (political ecologist), Director of Research at CNRS national reasearch center (Bronze Medal 2008), Doctor (Toulouse University) and HDR (EHESS) in geography.
A specialist in the role of populations in projects to combat global change, both in terms of the logics of populations and their inclusion in the policies and governance mechanisms of sustainable development projects, he first worked on biodiversity management, notably on the role of farmers in agricultural projects to combat deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, on agroecology in Europe, on the dissemination of transgenic seeds in the Argentine Pampas and on national parks in Central Africa.
Since 2015, he has made a thematic conversion to energy transition issues, with a particular focus on Europe. This thematic reconversion has been accompanied by a change in working methods, as he now works preferentially in partnership research.
Xavier Arnauld has led two National Research Agency projects (one on ecosystem services, a multi-partner project on agroecology), several national projects (PUCA, ADEME) and participated in a large number of other projects (notably the GEFISS project, on subsoil consultation).
Since 2018, he has held a partnership chair at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour with TotalEnergies, two local authorities (Pau Béarn Pyrénées and Lacq Orthez) and a developer (Compagnie d'aménagement des Coteaux de Gascogne).
Currently director of UMR TREE and co-leader of the PEPR SousSol project, he is regularly called upon by CNRS to contribute to its cross-disciplinary Energy mission.
