Territorial scientific councils: the exchanges devices between actors, places and objects of environmental public action

This PhD thesis is dedicated to the study of scientific councils in the fields of environmental public action and management of protected areas. These organizations, which appear as numerous in France unlike other European countries, have not been much studied. Little information exists on this subject, and we found only few references in the scientific litterature, even if scientific councils are an old concern for environmental institutions. Thus, the first step of this PhD thesis consists in describing these scientific councils at different scales: alpine, national, regional and territorial. Three research fields (which are at the same time geographical entities and organizations) were selected in the alpine region: Vercors, Ecrins and Haute-Savoie. Ethnographical work regarding the core and peripheral activities of the scientific councils is carried out in each research field.

A scientific council periodically gathers together its members, according to varied modalities, to support an environmental institution and their employees in the conception, realization and evaluation of the protected area activities in the field of knowledge and in the orientation of their management operations and decisions.

A scientific council promotes the interactions between different people and produces an interface between different ways of knowledge and sciences, between several visions of the environment and between different professional spheres. The understanding of these interactions within and in the margins of the scientific councils will be studied and put in perspective with the other existing collectives which also promote this meeting between scientists and professionals of the study and management of the environment (such as the Alps LTSER site - “la zone atelier alpes” - or collaborative research projects).

Finally, this work on the scientific councils falls within a general reflection on the mechanisms of production, transfer, sharing and mediation of environmental knowledge