Simon PERSICO

Political Ecology Study Group (AFSP)

FORESEE

The FORESEE project, led by the University of Grenoble Alpes and its partners (CNRS, INRAE, the Universities of Lille, Bordeaux, Lyon 3, and Montpellier 3), aims to understand and anticipate the social consequences of climate change. It explores individual reactions, the adaptive capacities of regions, and the impacts on the social contract. This interdisciplinary program brings together more than 300 researchers in the humanities and social sciences. It includes the creation of an Observatory on Climate Inequalities and tools to support public policy.

EcoCleavage

The Ecologism/Productivism Cleavage Project emerged over the past eighteen months as an informal collaboration among political scientists from various research groups, united by a shared focus on the growing divide between ecologism and productivism in European politics. This project builds on a theoretical article just published in West European Politics (Gougou and Persico, 2026), which argues that environmental issues are not merely “valence issues” universally supported by the public, but rather represent a deep and structuring political cleavage. The project’s core objective is to quantitatively assess how this cleavage is reshaping political conflict in Western Europe, particularly in the face of mounting ecological crises. The research puzzle is rooted in five key observations: (1) The scientific consensus on ecological risks has never been stronger, with warnings of imminent breakdowns in climate, biodiversity, and other critical systems. (2) The environmental movement, which has long advocated for a just transition away from productivism and consumerism, remains politically marginalized despite its growing diversity and the rise of climate justice movements. (3) Green parties, the primary political representatives of environmentalism, have made limited progress compared to other political forces, such as the far right, and have rarely attained top executive positions. (4) Social groups across Western Europe are unevenly affected by ecological crises and hold divergent interests regarding socio-ecological policies, with educated elites supporting environmental values while maintaining high ecological footprints, and marginalized groups exhibiting lower environmental engagement with lower footprints. (5) Policy solutions that challenge productivism and consumerism have been largely sidelined in favor of capitalist ecological modernization and scaled back. The project’s central question is: Why does party competition in Europe still leave so little room for environmental issues, and why are policymakers implementing solutions that fall far short of sustainability goals? To address this, the project adopts a cleavage perspective, which allows for an analysis of how conflicts become politicized through ideological differentiation, social group Education, and policy-making. This approach will help assess how environmental conflicts structure Western European societies, interact with other cleavages, and influence political systems.