Sciences Po’s Laboratoire interdisciplinaire d’évaluation des politiques publiques (LIEPP)

Ecological planning in France remains ill-defined. Conceptually, it often serves as a canvas upon which we project different meanings — at times evoking a nostalgia for an earlier period, in other moments a vague placeholder for progressive politics. As Mathilde Viennot has written, “La planification écologique reste donc à inventer.”1 It hints at a new political project, but without clear definition or parameters.

With the support of LIEPP as well as the International Network for Democratic Economic Planning, I convened a workshop on March 19th, 2026 to illuminate this still-fuzzy concept. The proceedings were both descriptive and normative, with the aim of foregrounding concrete institutional contexts where we might locate and evaluate ecological planning.

The following debate compiles the interventions made by these participants in an abridged form. They mirror the two core themes of the event. First, we turn to scholars of France’s previous planning experience. Namely, postwar France and its dirigiste approach to industrial development has been the subject of a broad and wide-ranging literature. In the context of today’s debates on ecological transitions, it is increasingly held up as a model by social scientists.

Yet this model remains subject to caricature and misconception. Against this, the first two contributions offer clarification as to how this planning apparatus functioned in practice. Antoine Jourdan reminds us that steering investment required state officials form alliances with specific industrialists. Here it was the ability to manufacture the consent of the private sector that would provide the basis for effective planning. Meanwhile, Alex Amiotte Suchet provides insight into the role of public guarantees in the postwar landscape, foregrounding the importance of financial intermediaries in the planning process.

Second, we turn to ecological planning as a set of existing policy experiments and near-future scenarios. To anchor discussion in the current landscape, Clara Leonard describes key challenges facing contemporary policymaking. Here France’s turn toward ecological planning is characterized by ongoing struggles over distribution, geography, and sufficiency in ways that may undermine existing efforts. On a more technological note, Hannah Bensussan and Hugo Pompougnac direct our attention to the promises and perils of demand forecasting. As a tool for algorithmic resource governance, it is now the instrument of choice for multinationals — yet, under the right epistemic and institutional conditions, might also be appropriated for planning. Finally, Éric Monnet offers a reflection on ecological planning as a political project. If it is to succeed, planners will need to account for multiple forms of uncertainty and institutionalize democratic decision-making at numerous scales.

Together, these contributions shed light on how ecological planning currently manifests as well as point to new political horizons. They mark an attempt to formalize ecological planning as a discourse that, at present, lacks a clearly demarcated empirical scope and coherent theoretical agenda. In compiling them, it is my hope that this discussion may be extended and deepened.