[2019] Governing biodiversity through the market. The State, consulting firms and ecological compensation

The changes in public action over the last forty years, grouped under the heading of New Public Management (Hood, 1995), have led private consulting actors to play an increasingly important role in the implementation of public policies (Dreyfus, 2010). These actors, professional experts (Boussard, Demazière, et al., 2011), participate in the definition of the public problem and the ways to respond to it by proposing a cognitive and normative framework.

The latter disseminates a particular vision, stemming from the cognitive and theoretical elements, values and interests of these different consultants and their consulting firms. The proposed framing is the result of the encounter between these professional consultants and a context that is revealed both in the expectations of public action and in the regulatory texts (Smith, 2007) or, more concretely, in the public order (Nonjon, 2006).

Thus, through the market, the State services will delegate part of the ecological assessments, the dimensioning and the implementation of compensation to consulting firms, while exercising control over their activities. The latter will be achieved through the monitoring of the conditions of execution of the services as detailed in the contractually established specifications. The State therefore legitimizes the activity of consulting firms by entrusting them with an activity that falls within its initial competencies (Jullien, Smith, 2012). Subjected to the pressure of results in their market, these consultants participate in defining the instruments relating to the implementation of ecological compensation, but they must also respond to the order issued by the project owners who finance them. The thesis therefore proposes to analyze the commercial offers and operating methods of consulting firms in order to study their impact on public action. The consultants appear as translators, i.e. experts able to participate in the instrumental definition of compensation from initial theoretical sources. Finally, this research questions the establishment of compensatory measures and their instrumentations within public action as the result of a commercial relationship between consulting firms and their public and private developer clients. It is intended to be a contribution to political economy and the sociology of markets in that it questions the political aspect of market institutions and their effects on the government of human and non-human life.

The thesis is based on a four-year immersion survey in a consulting firm specialized in environmental issues, as well as interviews with private developers and competent government departments. It deals with qualitative data (immersion research, interviews, event observations, bibliographic and grey literature analysis).