The links between parties and policies are key to democracy. Yet, since decades, representatives seem and claim to be increasingly constrained by other actors, international competition, European integration, aging populations, limited energy resources, and path dependence. How much room is there left for policy representation? Are policies (increasingly) made beyond politics? Are political jousts only about “acting out” antagonisms? PARTIPOL will scrutinize this apparent gap between normative theories and discourses of the legitimation of democracy, and practices of representation, in the case of France. The question of parties’ imprint on public policy is an old one, but, despite numerous publications, it continues to be difficult to answer empirically. The project departs from the observation that the long- and short-term political context in France, marked by regular and recent political alternations, offers an intriguing case of study to overcome the mitigated conclusions of the Anglo-Saxon “Do Parties Matter” debate. For this sake, we will draw on four innovative strategies: 1) A consideration of representatives’ and party elites’ conception of parties in democracy – against the background of their conception of the role of citizens, experts or interest groups – in order to put their practices into a normative perspective. 2) A refinement of the research question, with a focus on the conditions under which the partisan composition of government and parliament matters. 3) The adoption of a “soft” conception of causality, which implies devoting considerable attention both to the process of interest aggregation in party organizations, and to how parties’ involvement in office possibly feeds back on this process. Do policies matter? 4) The implementation of a fine-grained operationalization of both party preferences and public policies. This enrichment and refinement of the “Do Parties Matter” research requires an ambitious empirical study. In order to account for how parties’ imprint on policies varies depending on the issue, we will focus on distributive, regulatory and redistributive issues with differing degrees of media visibility (nuclear energy; illegal immigration; generalized social contribution; wealth taxation; industrial patents; genetically modified organisms). For the sake of feasibility, the policymaking and the generated policies will be approached through the lens of the process of legislation. The four strategies listed above have guided the definition of a comparative, mixed-methods design, combining an analysis, issue by issue, of partisan discourses, adopted laws and of the media coverage, and interviews with members of parliaments and parties regarding the process of legislation, the role of parties, party preferences and identities, as well as how the involvement of party elites in the legislation process feeds back into parties. This comprehensive study, anchored in the growing but under-explored research agenda at the juncture between studies of parties and policies, should provide valuable input into the current structuration of legislative studies in France. PARTIPOL seeks to shed light on ideal representations and practices of policy representation, “constraints” as a parameter and as a resource in the legislative process, parties’ and policymakers’ use of the media. We will also question the common diagnosis of a crisis of political representation with respect to low electoral turnout, the rise of anti-system parties and the fading trust in political elites, much of which is attributed to a lack of responsiveness on the part of government parties.

The method of correspondence studies testing for discrimination has not yet been applied in France to measure discrimination in access to housing. Several experiments have been conducted on this theme but only with small samples. The contrast is impressive with the literature that has been developed in other countries, particularly in the US where audit or correspondence studies are applied to access to housing since the 1970s and where the experimental evidence of discrimination are multiple, especially for ethno-racial discrimination which are the most studied. The objective of the DALTON project is to produce a reference measurement on the extent of discrimination in access to housing in the private park with a correspondence study of national coverage, statistically representative at a detailed space level, while covering a wide range of sources of discrimination: age, origin, place of residence and combinations thereof. The protocol of the project, based on a collaborative research in economics, sociology and socio-demographics, plans to send five fictitious applications in response to a selection of 5000 rental ads in the private sector spread over the whole territory metropolitan. This is to perform advanced statistical analysis of 25,000 responses combining lexical processing, econometrics of correspondance studies data and spatial econometrics, combining this approach with a qualitative post-survey on a sub-sample of respondents. This protocol will not only measure the different forms of discrimination in access to housing and their combinations but also to analyze the determinants of such discrimination. We will be able to know whether discrimination in access to housing depend on the characteristics of the candidate (adding to their profile a signal of financial stability with civil servant status) from those of the ad (posted directly by an owner or by a real estate agency, amount of rent, housing characteristics, etc.), and those of the local context (structure of the housing stock, socio-demographic composition of the territories, etc.). Several advances are expected in relation to the existing literature. This is ... 1) To conduct the first scientific correspondence study in access to housing in France to produce a statistical measure compliance with international standards; 2) Simultaneously covering several relevant grounds of discrimination in access to housing: age (discrimination against young people), origin (distinguishing Maghreb and West Africa), place of residence (live in a district registered in the priority geography of urban policy); 3) To perform the measurement of discrimination throughout the metropolitan area in order to be able to map discrimination at a detailed space level; 4) Providing the means to compare the relative importance of different grounds of discrimination studied and the possible combination of these grounds; 5) Identify the part of statistical discrimination adding financial stability signals (civil servant status); 6) To identify discrimination related to any preferences neighborhood distinguishing in the same neighborhoods, the situation of independent houses and those of apartments; 7) To treat the corpus of answers using content analysis to enrich the testing database; 8) To complete the database by socio-economic variables and local policies in order to study the effects of the local context on the production of discrimination; 9) Using both the econometrics of correspondence study and spatial econometrics in the statistical treatment of the databases; 10) To complete the teachings of a statistical approach by interviews with housing providers through a qualitative post-survey.

The ServINNOV project (Sustainable Innovation in Industry through Servitization) is a fundamental research project, which relies on the multidisciplinarity of the academic partners and on the complementarity with the industrial ones. The project is in line with the third topic on the ANR call “Innovation and business models”. The ServINNOV project aims at studying one of the current changeovers of industrial companies from a production and innovation process essentially based on material goods to the integration of multiple service activities. What is at stake is the study of the processes behind this strategic and organizational innovation through services, this innovation being understood in a sustainable performance perspective. That is, is it possible to connect strategic evolutions of firms towards competitiveness and growth with sustainable development at stake on a firm and on a territorial level? Thus, this research project aims at studying two complementary issues. The first is the analysis of the evolution of an industrial company from a material goods production to an integrated offer of goods and immaterial services, and possibly to a full servitization where the product is only available through a service offer (functional economy model). This organizational evolution can provide all the stakeholders (producers, customers, institutional and territorial ones) with new value creation opportunities along the product life-cycle. The second issue concerns the way the added value created through servitization can contribute to sustainable development requirements (economical, environmental, and social ones). The sustainable development stakes will be analyzed first on a firm level, where the product/service combination can lead firms, in a strategic way, to adopt an eco-design approach, and to take into account the overall life-cycle of the product system. On a second level, the transition to a functional economy model changes the relations between firms and their external stakeholders. Thus, the analysis should consider the role of the multiple territorial relations of firms in the servitization process. The ServINNOV project aims at providing real advances in the field of servitization, functional economy, and models designed to manage this strategic and organizational transition. Thus, the project will set out to understand and model the dynamic evolution of firm’s business models, and the consequences of this evolution on the overall performance of the firms and of the territories in which they are embedded. The project will both rely on a clear and structured modeling approach, and on the analysis of real industrial companies, that will be used as an experience field and then as an experimentation field. That is why industrial companies are part of the project consortium. On a scientific level, the project organization aims at ensuring the consistency between the multi-disciplinary points of view, and at enabling the real integration of the models obtained in a unified diagnosis and management approach of this economic and organizational transition process. This integrated diagnosis/management approach also aims at transforming the theoretical models built into practical tools, intended to support decision-making within companies and territorial authorities.

An important element in sustainability concerns the material and energy flows implicated in societal functioning. It is widely recognized that there is now a need to increase as much as possible the level of sobriety in the consumption of energy and natural resources and in the production of waste products and pollution of all forms. The notion of local autonomy at different scales (building, plot, block, neighbourhood, town, agglomeration, urban region…) is often strongly associated with the challenge of sobriety, reflecting an implicit or explicit idea that consumption and waste can be better controlled and reduced through a more or less self-sufficient organization at the local level. Urban services (water, energy, waste) are strongly implicated in this increasing concern for urban sobriety. These services occupy effectively a function of organizing an important part of the urban metabolism. They are also placed within the competence of public authorities, which can make them an instrument of local public policy. These sectors are however undergoing major changes which broadly take two forms: forms of decentralization with the creation of local, more or less autonomous, nets; the development and use of physical and economic relations between services. In this way, there emerges the idea that symbioses between urban services, based on emerging forms of sociotechnical organization of these services which are susceptible to lead to alternative configurations to the inherited large centralized networks of the 20th century, may allow important progress to be made towards a more sober urban metabolism. The project aims to study the action systems guiding the emergence of urban symbioses and the physical (energy, materials) and economic (costs, financing) flows implicated in their functioning. We explore the exchanges and interactions between sectoral systems for water, energy and waste, between these systems and the buildings which are connected to them, and between urban symbioses and their environments at different spatial scales, with a focus on defining as clearly as possible the ‘limiting conditions’ of the systems under investigation. Our perspective combines a functional (physical material and energy flows) and a techno-economic (financial flows) study of urban symbioses and a sociopolitical exploration of action systems and actor relations. The proposed methodology closely articulates a number of in-depth case studies and modeling work leading to the progressive development of a physical and economic model of urban symbioses. This is a basic research project over 48 months, conducted by an interdisciplinary consortium of social science researchers (from two CNRS units: LATTS in Marne la Vallée and PACTE in Grenoble) and engineering and environmental sciences (from Cirsee, the main research centre of the Suez Environnement group, the engineering consulting company Safege and Explicit consultants). The project concerns primarily axe 1 of the call for projects, and sub-axe 1.4 in particular. It will also shed light on axe 2 (sub-axe 2.2 in particular). The project is distinctive in its willingness to analyse together the sociopolitical and physical dimensions of transformations in urban services, which are usually studied separately. Reconciling urban and environmental policies and the challenges of sobriety effectively demands such a detailed understanding of the interdependencies between technical, urban and financial choices and the ‘metabolic’ properties of the systems developed.

The MOBI'KIDS project aims to understand daily mobilities and activities of families in urban areas in a context of changes in urban lifestyles and within the consolidation of travel modes alternative developed within the "city demotorization” paradigm. More specifically the project concerns daily mobilities and spatial experiences of children in their step of independence learning. It contributes to identify the constraints and the shift levers of mobilities. Children mobilities are apprehended within their large environmental context, by taking into account the family context aiming to define a typology of “urban educative cultures” (UEC). Understood as a set of attitudes, values and daily spatial practices and experiences, UEC will be observed in a diversity of urban contexts in order: 1/ to show how they vary according to living contexts, families’ social situations and to urban lifestyles; 2/ to explain how they fluctuate and structure themselves from a spatiotemporal gradient defining between routines vs informal experiences. This objective will allow to explain the learning conditions of the city and to clarify the emergence of daily travels changes (including the alternatives to car mobility) and of use of the city by the children. The research field of the project will be focused on Rennes metropolis. It will aim at a first series of statistical analyses based on data of different surveys produced by the Local Organizing Authorities of Transport (Origin-Destination survey; Households / Travels surveys ) to release the main trends of children’s and their family mobilities according to the social and spatial dimensions. These first trends will allow to constitute the spatial and social sample. A sample of 140 families living in two urban contrasted sites (center versus urban periphery) of Rennes Metropolis will be surveyed in a first time. The methodology will be based on an original conceptual and technical protocol designed for the collection and analysis of multidimensional data: travels geo-localization, post-track recall interview and guided commented tours with individuals. A corpus describing the daily travel, its associated urban atmosphere, mobility and educational attitudes, will be constituted. The analysis of these quantitative and qualitative data will lead to three articulating readings: 1/ an informatics/geomatic reading will allow to release usual and unusual behavior (spatio-temporal pattern) from the recorded GPS tracks; 2/a semantic reading of data (post-track recall interview) will contribute to the analysis of lifestyles and characterization of the social and family contexts, habits, mobility and spaces preferences, environmental contexts of the travels and personal sense of the mobility; 3/a sensitive reading will lean on in-situ travel observation data collected with children to apprehend the material, sensory, practical and temporal contexts. This corpus of enriched tracks will contribute to define the profiles of CEU explaining learning conditions. Then, a monitoring-workshop supported by the local actor of Rennes Metropolis will be set up with a sub-sample of children interviewed in the first time (T1). This experiment based on changes of urban travel modes will consist in keeping up observations of children’s mobility over a more spread period to understand children’s mobility evolution and their spatial and social conditions and their spatial relations during a step of transition between the primary school and the middle school. This project conducted in an interdisciplinary approach is built on previous collaborations between stemming teams Social and Human Sciences and informatics and engineering sciences and two SME partners. It contributes to the development of hybrid tools for collection associating different kinds of data (GPS, accelerometer-data, discursive and in-situ-observations data) with the aim to improve the collection protocols of national survey about daily travels.