Tools and institutions of international cooperation built up after the 2nd World War seemed to be underperforming when facing global threats on the environment, the importance of which is underlined by many recent scientific reports. International Law must go beyond its traditional purpose of supporting inter-state cooperation since it must now define rules and standards likely to be incorporated into the national legislation to help coordinate, if not harmonise, national environmental legal and policy frameworks. Beyond this remarkable expansion of international Law (some say treaty congestion) these institutions and instruments have been significantly transformed to cope with the above-mentioned threats with some new kinds of expert advice, the development of multilateral treaty making, some new types of norms, the growing role of private actors, and the development of new forms of international control --both public and private. However the global environmental governance remains fragmented. Without a world executive and legislative power, there is a proliferation on the international scene of norm producers and disseminators. The creation of a World Environmental Organisation is still in limbo and it is also disputable whether such an organisation would suffice to integrate the “multiple sites of governance” [Snyder, 2010]. The latter are loosely articulated, among themselves and with the other regulation mechanisms in domains such as trade, investment or human rights and so on, although some research points at the burgeoning architecture mixing or alternating synergy, cooperation and conflict relations between different regimes [Biermann, 2009]. The international governance of the environment was first understood through international regime analysis, where regimes are defined as sets of principles, norms, rules, and procedures, which shape the behaviour of actors in a specific area. In practice this corresponds to international conventions and subordinate treaties. More recently though, it was suggested that these regimes are embedded in some more elaborated settings labelled “regime complexes”. These are made of three or more international regimes addressing some different issues within a common domain, which not only co-exist by also interact on substance or at operational level, without being formally coordinated, and by working alongside with other governance mechanisms involving private corporations and NGOs. On the basis of this conceptualisation that saddles International Law, International Relations, Political Science, Political Economy and Sociology, this research project aims to analyse the enabling conditions, the forms and the impacts of norm circulation within actor networks by focusing on two important regime complexes, biodiversity and climate change. The fragmentation diagnosis being well established, it seems important to analyse these process through actor network analysis and focus on circulation of norms and actors. The core concept here is the “permeability” of the various elements of the regime complex, how circulation takes place and what are the impacts on the complex itself, and beyond on international governance as a whole.

The objective of the TDL project is to explore the little-known issue of high school pupil’s work by quantifying this phenomenon, analyzing the methods of its development and studying its impact on the academic path of "part-employment high school students", particularly during the period of health crisis. Thus, we will centrally explore the hypothesis that students from the most vulnerable families are those who develop the highest work intensity and are thus exposed to the highest risks of dropping out. This research will be based on the theoretical contribution of the sociology of public action and the capability approach. Bringing together an interdisciplinary expert team and two recognized research laboratories (LEST-UMR 7317 and CED-UMR 5116), this project will combine quantitative, qualitative and participatory methods to shed light on the work/study balance of high school students in two regions of Sud-Provence, Alpes, Côte d’Azur and Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Finally, this project will benefit from a comparative look at the situation in Quebec thanks to the partnership with the Quebec Youth Research Network Chair.

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.

In France, Asian migrants and their descendants’ political visibility is an emerging phenomenon. From when Chinese residents first demonstrated in Paris (Belleville district) in 2010, until the rally organised in September 2016 to denounce violence targeting Asians (Chuang 2017), their visibility has increased and this process of politicisation is noteable. The PolAsie project plans to investigate the specificity of French Asians’ political participation through different domains (voting practices, participation in political campaigns, trajectories of Asian elected representatives, political mobilisations and collective action at local level, etc). It also aims at analysing these political practices by evaluating the processes of political socialisation before migration, after migration and within the diasporic groups. PolAsie aims to explore the three-following hypotheses: 1) The Asian population in France, migrants and their descendants, is undergoing a generation turn which is transforming its political participation and its sense of belonging (both as French and Asian). 2) Recent collective actions by Asians in France against violence and discrimination are fostering more classical forms of political participation at local and national levels (participation in local councils, voting practices, party’s membership and participation in political campaigns, etc.) 3) As a material and symbolic resource, the Chinese (and more generally the Asian) growing economic power and its strategy to promote an alternate model to liberal democracies plays a role in the immigrants’ process of political socialisation. However, these experiences do not exclude other forms of learning and adherence to citizens’ practices observed in the country of residence. To explore these hypotheses, the project is organised around three objectives. 1) Voters and elected representatives. The study of voting practices and political careers will document the reality of a“vote communautaire”, of community political adherence. It will also interrogate the role of elected representatives and whether they contribute to provide a substantive representation for this minority group (les élus de la diversité). 2) Local citizenship and dialogue with local authorities. This strand of research will document local and grassroots forms of collective action with a special focus on recent examples of violence targeting Asians. It will explore initiatives of dialogue, cooperation and confrontation with local authorities as well as within the Asian communities (solidarity and competition among organisations, social, generational and gender divisions). It will also pay attention to potential diplomatic interventions from countries of origin and their acceptation by diasporic groups.3) Pre-migration, post-migration, and diasporic political socialisation. The project will study the forms of adherence to political systems (from liberal democracies to authoritarian regimes) taking into account complex process of political socialisation: in the country of origin before migration, in the country of residence after migration, as well as within the diasporic networks. The team is composed of sociologists, demographers and political scientists. It is built on the complementarity between researchers specialised in Asian migrations and mobilisation and researchers specialised in discrimination and political participation in France. The project is based on a multi-site survey and mixed-methods: quantitative and qualitative surveys will be conducted in the same selected sites in the Parisian area. The unity of the sites will fuel cooperation on the field among the researchers and it will allow the crossed analysis of the data.

This project aims to conduct interdisciplinary reflection on the therapeutic use of bacteriophage viruses (or phages) to treat human bacterial infections. Faced with the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the major public health challenges of the 21st century, phage therapy, developed in France 100 years ago and gradually forgotten in Western Europe and the United States, appears very promising. At a time when we are witnessing today a strong desire on the part of certain actors in the clinical, scientific and economic spheres to see it develop once again, the disappearance of phage therapy from healthcare provision for several decades in the West, and the multiple hostilities it is encountering today, confining it to a practice for compassionate use, should lead us to question such a situation. This project therefore aims to understand the history of the development of this therapy and the challenges it faces today, in order to better anticipate the conditions for its deployment. This project is based on a strong hypothesis: phage therapy, the use of dynamic biological entities, involves conceptions of health, disease, care, but also relations between humans and environment that are different from those developed in the framework of 20th century biomedicine, which was mainly based on the use of chemical molecules. This specificity of phages crosses all the disciplinary corpus mobilized on health issues, and has repercussions at different levels of the production, evaluation and circulation of biomedical knowledge, constituting as many obstacles or blocking points to be analysed. The project is organised in four themes, and is based on an interdisciplinary and comparative qualitative analysis. Its objective will thus be to draw up an inventory of phage therapy in Europe, and to deliver case studies mainly in France and Belgium, in order to analyse the interactions between knowledge production, regulation and phage appropriation or commodification logic. The first theme, devoted to the scientific and medical history of phages, will notably make it possible to develop a conceptual analysis of the concept of precision medicine and what it involves in our conceptions of care, disease, human relations with microbes and the environment. The second theme, by focusing on the production of evidence in the field of Public Health, will analyse the links existing between regulation and the production of scientific knowledge on phages. This reflection will be all the richer as these viruses, due to ongoing regulatory changes, belong to two distinct legal categories (phages as drugs / as ingredients of a magistral preparation), which will make it possible to compare the two situations. The third theme will analyse the appropriation or commodification logic allowed by these different regulations, as well as their consequences on knowledge production. The last theme will be devoted to the uses of phages. The potential of phages makes them valuable elements in human health, but also in animal and environmental health. It will therefore be necessary to question the acceptability of their use, but also the possible social, cultural, political and environmental consequences of the generalisation of their uses. This project thus aims to study a biomedical innovation but also to renew the way we look at our relations with microbes, a sine qua non condition to face the public health challenges of the 21st century.