[copie] ÉVEIL

The erosion of biodiversity and the identification of its many causes and consequences have been well documented scientifically for several decades. The development of linear transportation infrastructures and their rights-of-way (LTI) is one of the main factors in this decline. Because of their considerable spatial footprint and dense network across the country, LTI have major environmental impacts on biodiversity and landscapes. The social and economic impacts of LTI, both direct and indirect, are also highlighted in the literature. These mainly concern issues of social inequality, environmental injustice and impacts on way of life and territories. Against this backdrop, questions of social acceptability and the legitimacy of public action surround the development of LTI are playing an increasingly important role in France at local, national and international levels. Faced with this, citizens' movements for the environment, often referred to as "ecological struggles", have multiplied in recent years in France, and more widely on an international scale. Spatial planning must therefore respond to the environmental challenges posed by the erosion of biodiversity and climate change, and the social challenges posed by the need to develop LTI and limit their environmental and social impact. However, the social demand generated by ecological struggles and its socio-economic and ecological implications remain little studied in France. The ÉVEIL project aims to fill these gaps by proposing a study of the values and modes of organisation of public protest movements against linear transport infrastructures in France. In the current context, it seems essential to examine these citizen protest movements on a French scale in order to better understand and characterise the societal expectations and demands that exist today in relation to the development of LTI.

The aim of ÉVEIL is to provide knowledge about what these movements can teach us about how to plan territories in a way that is accepted, just and sustainable. The three axes of this project are (1) the characterisation of the territories where these struggles take place, (2) the characterisation of the collectives involved and their foundations and values, and (3) the study of the ways in which they are organised, and their impact on environmental and social action. The originality of this research lies both in the subject studied, its national scale and the original approach developed by the interdisciplinary and international consortium set up and made up of scientific and operational partners. Thanks to the consortium's wide range of disciplines and skills, we are adopting a methodological approach in this project that combines survey methods developed in sociology (field survey) and economics (online survey) with tools and techniques from geography and ecology (database analyses). Based on the analysis of 221 struggles, the results of ÉVEIL will directly inform public decision-makers about the new needs and expectations of citizens with regard to the development of LTI in France.