From “Sustainable Development” to a Governmentalization of Change? Translations and Implications of an Institutional Concern in France and the European Union

Sustainable Development as a Problematization of Change

More and more studies (such as Barnes and Hoerber 2013) underscore the relation between the diffusion of sustainable development as an issue, at all institutional levels, and a reorganization in the perception of collective challenges among policy actors. Sustainable development consists of a particular type of problematization. Its central argument points out undesirable effects in development patterns but also justifies their collective treatment in an overall and long-term approach (Lafferty 2004a:especially 12-22). Forums that combine political and administrative actors, but also connect to militant, scientific, and economic networks, have supported proactive interventions justified by the correlative hypothesis that it would be desirable and possible to adapt economic trajectories and reintegrate environmental protection and social equity into them. The reflections and exchanges in these forums have progressively linked numerous series of issues that used to be viewed separately. In so doing, the interested policy milieus have also presented public interventions and politico-administrative functionings with new demands encouraging them to abandon all approaches considered to be too segmented, short term, and/or outdated (Dovers 1996). Even if different interpretations of sustainable development still exist (Connelly 2007; Davidson 2011) and can lead to competing proposals, the reorientations to be carried out seem so large that it leads most of the actors to view the desired outcome as highly unlikely without a sizable number of conscious and active interventions, in particular from already existing institutions (Meadowcroft 2007b).

In addition to the gradual assimilation of the broad principles of sustainable development in the 1990s, groups of interested specialists have paid more attention to their conditions of application and the extent of factors to consider. States and intergovernmental institutions (with pace, degrees of implication, and variable strategies according to the national framework; Lafferty and Meadowcroft 2000) were led to wonder how to meet the commitments they had agreed on, particularly following the “World Summit on Sustainable Development” in Johannesburg (August 26 to September 4, 2002) which reinforced this issue of implementation (Barral 2003). In these processes where the expression of their mobilization ² was also at stake for official institutions, the discussions have advanced in these policy milieus by establishing an implicit intellectual background that considered change as a question in and of itself.

By taking the goal of sustainable development as a reference, these streams of reflection contribute to establishing a second level of problematization, in which the challenge for public authorities is to “organize the process,” as it was said in the first major seminar organized by the French government with all ministers in November 2002 (Service d’information du Gouvernement 2002, author's translation). This second level of problematization has been developed by intervening in and starting from other problematizations already underway. In the European Commission, the strategic reflections initiated in the beginning of the 2000s identified categories of problems, according to their “severity” or their “irreversibility,” by highlighting their incompatibility with a perspective of “sustainability.” Such a framing contributed to the reclassification and inclusion of domains that were already relatively formalized. Consequently, the commission identified seven “unsustainable trends” that require corrective action: poverty and social exclusion, ageing societies, climate change and energy use, threats to public health, management of natural resources, land use and transports, as well as aspects external to the EU which, nonetheless, impact the promotion of sustainable development on a global scale. ³

This qualification of unsustainable trends, which national administrative actors (such as the French Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Development) also use, gives a discursive frame to the redefinition of the objects that are supposed to be part of the domains of government action. Activities such as conferences, committee sessions, and report-writing legitimate recommendations that are specifically aimed at abandoning any previous logics of action deemed faulty. In spaces of discussion that are being structured at all institutional levels, change management is often understood as being a fundamental part of solving problems of sustainability. Reflections of administrative and political officials contribute to formulating new tasks and responsibilities, making a more frequent use of ideas in terms of steering. Such a rationale was developed in France by policy entrepreneurs like Michel Mousel, who took advantage of his official experience in environmental issues (e.g., as President of the French Committee for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002). Making the most of the network of the association he founded (4D/Dossiers et Débats pour le Développement Durable), he advocated an institutional architecture that would be more apt to manage relevant policies (Michel Mousel [2005] notably published an article entitled “The Steering of Sustainable Development”—author’s translation). More generally, these policy actors tend to conceive the awaited change, which is an underlying motive of the proposals, as a manageable aim, and sometimes even with the hope that it might become programmable (most often without abandoning a frame of reference in which economic goals, especially growth or competitiveness, continue to dominate; Baker 2000; Carter et al. 2015).

A Systemic and Transversal Comprehension of Change

By encouraging a general adaptation in all sectors, the policy milieus advocating sustainable development tend to favor a particular conception of the change to carry out. In institutional discourses, the proposed framework is supposed to encompass more issues and be more complete. Such a rationale follows what was decided after the Rio de Janeiro Conference in June 1992, with the adoption of an international program of action for the twenty-first century (Agenda 21), a sort of global blueprint. The framework brings together the objectives that the international community has to set to reconcile environment and development. In this type of perspective, some of the official arguments focus on the need to consider questions in a holistic manner and to adjust modalities of intervention accordingly. In response to visions that tend to lock administrative organizations in approaches judged to be too sectoral (Bäckstrand, Kronsell, and Söderholm 1996), communities of specialists have problematized sustainable development in such a way that any failure in governmental coordination becomes an error to be corrected. In the explanations of the European Commission, major orientations are therefore to be revised because of the plurality of the domains concerned. Consequently, interventions restricted to certain domains or levers for action have become more difficult to defend, and moving on to a “comprehensive, cross-sectoral approach” is identified as a priority (Commission of the European Communities 2001b). According to the arguments put forward in politico-administrative literature and discourse, procedures should be developed so as not to remain focused on specific problems, dealt with by strictly defined interventions. Typically, the vast theme of sustainable development has reinforced the inclusion of environmental challenges in an integrative logic, placing them (at least in terms of intentions) among the fundamental issues to be considered in all the sectors of intervention (Lafferty and Hovden 2003).

Moreover, the ambition of sustainable development derives a large part of its arguments from an ecological problematization that had already penetrated major political views of “nature.” By pushing a systemic and overarching understanding, this conception also tends to justify new rationalities and new needs for expertise (Lafaye and Thévenot 1993:521). Similarly, the approach proposed in reference to sustainable development suggests integrating all the possible fields of activity and all their potential collateral effects (Lafferty 2004a). The most widely advocated idea is as follows: if the elements in a system are interdependent, it is not possible to consider changing one of them without taking the whole into account, and therefore, the chain of changes that are interrelated. This is clearly what the European Commission meant, when stating that “the problems are interlinked and solutions must take this into account.” ⁴ This understanding of interdependence jointly fuels questions about the structuring of public intervention because, as critics have argued, they reflected a frequent tendency to classify problems by sectors. Therefore, the framework of sustainable development is interpreted in such a way in policy milieus that it encourages the integration of decision-making processes into a more encompassing vision. Such was the commitment of the European Commission in 2001, which partook of the preparation of a strategy for the EU (Commission of the European Communities 2001a). This is still the direction the Commission follows—at least formally (Lafferty 2004b).

The arguments in these discussions are often based on a retrospective point of view starting from the questioning of prior experiences, which are suspected of limiting government officials to extremely compartmentalized approaches. Instead, communities of specialists are more and more seduced by the trend toward a “decompartmentalization” of policies. In France, an interministerial delegation for sustainable development was established in June 2004. When this basic principle gained momentum, the first delegate, Christian Brodhag, encouraged it: “sustainable development requires a decompartmentalization of approaches, and problems have to be addressed in a more systemic way” (Brodhag 2004, present author’s translation). This type of problematization has largely circulated in international forums, fueled by expertise-oriented discourses and practices, such as among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member states, where intersectoral approaches are more and more prevalent (see “Sustainable Development in Cross-Sectoral Analysis,” in OECD 2006b:11-23). While considering the interdependence of problems and their scale and linking this challenge with the need for integrated and coordinated adaptations, this reconfigured rationality has encouraged the search for new or at least better suited programmatic frameworks. In the process, the frame of reference is progressively built around a wide-ranging object to be governed and tending to be represented as a system (both natural and social, namely, the Earth system), while conveying the idea that everyone should be involved in its governance.

Initial Development of Strategic Approaches

Despite motivations that appeared weak before the late 1990s, the use of devices called strategies has experienced a relatively rapid diffusion in the field of sustainable development since then, to such an extent that it is now included at all institutional levels: European, national, and local (for a perspective and an evaluation on a European scale, see Steurer and Martinuzzi 2007a). This dynamic is notably the result of commitments made by states at the Rio de Janeiro Conference in June 1992. Among the recommendations put forward in Agenda 21, governments were advised to “adopt a national strategy for sustainable development” (UNCED 1992:chapter 8). These commitments, renewed during the 19th extraordinary session of the UN General Assembly in June 1997 (“Rio+5”) were brought up again in Johannesburg in 2002 in the “Plan of Implementation of the World Summit on Sustainable Development,” which encouraged the implementation of these national strategies by 2005. These renewals of commitments have contributed to accelerating the process in European countries (Steurer and Martinuzzi 2007b), similarly to the diffusion of other innovations in the repertoire of instruments of environmental policy (Busch and Jörgens 2005:particularly 868-72).

After timid beginnings, the French State adhered to this type of dynamic. In 1995, a first strategic study, undertaken by the French Ministry of Environment, resulted in an essentially programmatic document, which provided the French contribution to the work planned by the UN in 1997. After the dissolution of the National Assembly by President Jacques Chirac, the strategic dimension was not developed for several years under the coalition government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. It was not until 2001, when the Johannesburg summit deadline and the need to present a report of the French action loomed, that the process was reactivated. By way of a project of “strategy,” yet another relatively general document was presented in March 2002 (Ministère de l’Écologie et du Développement Durable 2002), just prior to the presidential elections and the inauguration of a new government.

Displaying continuity with the speech given by President Jacques Chirac at the Johannesburg Summit in the form of a warning (“Our house is burning and we look elsewhere”), and after a “Governmental seminar on sustainable development” (November 28, 2002) that was staged as a great gathering of all ministers, the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin launched a new version of the national strategy for sustainable development (NSSD), adopted on June 3, 2003. With this new strategic initiative launched, it was, once more, a question of complying with the international commitments made by French authorities in Rio and Johannesburg. The new strategy also demonstrated that the “European Union strategy for sustainable development,” adopted in June 2001 by the heads of states and governments at the Göteborg European Council, had been taken into account. ⁵ The document released by the Interministerial Committee for Sustainable Development (meant to include all of the members of the French Government [February 21, 2003, decree]) was supposed to illustrate a will to act and stressed more specifically the need to be able to direct action rapidly. All the approaches proposed are illustrative of a desire to move on to a more operational phase. The process led to a programmatic framework by bringing together a series of elements that were supposed to guide the implementation of this strategy: six “strategic axes” were proposed (“information, awareness, education and participation,” “organization and actions of the French territories,” “accountability and action by firms and consumers,” “better risk prevention and environmental protection,” “the state’s commitment,” and “international action”) with 10 “programs of action,” which show objectives, “plans of action,” and in some cases calendars, all of which are subject to “continuous monitoring.”

The EU, meanwhile, had relied on a general “strategic” document since the Lisbon summit in March 2000, but it only concerned a particular field: economic competitiveness. The EU was also involved in a series of multiannual community action programs for the environment, supplemented in June 1998 by the Cardiff Process, which focused on integrating environmental concerns into sectoral policies. However, these actions did not fall within an overall schema akin to sustainable development either. At the Helsinki European Council in December 1999, the European Commission was asked “to prepare a proposal for a long-term strategy dovetailing policies for economically, socially and ecologically sustainable development to be presented to the European Council in June 2001.” In May 2001, the European Commission responded to the request by publishing a document with proposals that covered three areas (Commission of the European Communities 2001b). The courses of action that were endorsed were first of all supposed to guarantee a more efficient management of problems by seeking coherence among policies, the integration of collective costs in market prices, the facilitation of technoscientific advances, the contribution of various members of the civil society, and the expansion of perspectives beyond the border of the EU. Second, long-term objectives were made priorities, in a number of areas seen as highly problematic: climate change, public health, natural resource management, and the improvement of the transport system and land-use management. Third, measures were recommended for the future, in order to implement the strategy, monitor its progress, and possibly adjust it.

A month after the publication of the commission’s document and on the insistence of Sweden, who held the presidency of the EU at that time, the proposed guidelines were examined and broadly adopted by the heads of Member States at the European Council of Göteborg in June 2001. This strategy (which was, in fact, a passage of 14 paragraphs in the “presidency conclusions” section) appears to be, above all, a complement to the Lisbon strategy, more focused on economic and social policy, and adds the environmental dimension to it. This form of strategic appendix in favor of sustainable development aimed at offering a more concerned vision of future conditions and, in a programmatic perspective, encouraged the reconsideration of existing policies, both in their procedures and the solutions they provide. ⁶

Evolutions in Strategic Frameworks and Premises of Reflexive Dynamics

Whatever the level at which they intervene, these strategic approaches were devised to include, in a more or less explicit way, a potential for evolution. In keeping with the program of government that had begun to be implemented, they were often been proposed as a tool to initiate change by focusing on learning and continuous adaptation (Volkery et al. 2006:2048). In addition to the desire for regular evaluation, periodic reviews were planned in these strategic approaches, at least on paper, and with a variable degree of precision. The methodological framework documents, such as those developed by the OECD or the UN Commission for sustainable development, also conceptualize the strategies as being iterative and flexible (Meadowcroft 2007a:153-54). As a politico-administrative technology extending the program of government, this device therefore immediately took on a procedural dimension and singularly resorted to a strong reflexive component.

When it came to operationalizing ambitious ideas, however, the process was far from straightforward. ⁷ The question of how to review the European strategy had already been an issue in the guidelines adopted at the Göteborg Council. The implementation of the strategy was supposed to receive an annual review, but the task suffered from a lack of genuine investment from the European executive bodies, and the agenda at that time was more centered on the relaunching of the Lisbon strategy. Council and commission fell back on the solution of a comprehensive review of the “strategy for sustainable development”—a process that began in 2004 as a “public consultation” and extended into 2005, with the presentation of a “platform of action” by the Commission of the European Communities (2005b). Faced with the gradual weakening of the proposals of the commission, it was on a revised basis, notably under the leadership of the Austrian Presidency, that the European Council held in Brussels on June 15–16, 2006, adopted a “new strategy,” which has given at least a symbolic substance to the process of review.

This “ambitious and comprehensive renewed Sustainable Development Strategy (SDS),” intended in part to address the weaknesses of the previous strategy, displays a clarification of priorities and a strengthening of the monitoring mechanism. In this regard, the improvement put forward consists in asking the commission to “submit every two years (starting in September 2007) a progress report on implementation of the SDS in the EU and the Member States also including future priorities, orientations and actions” (European Council 2006:26, §33). The commission fulfilled its task by publishing an initial “progress report” on October 22, 2007 (Commission of the European Communities 2007) and a second report on July 24, 2009 (Commission of the European Communities 2009), which oscillated, each time, between the staging of a series of examples of “policy progress” and the reiteration of the need to strengthen EU actions. In fact, the process has been maintained because convincing results were lacking, thus motivating continued regular reviews.

In France, when the 2003 NSSD was implemented, its promoters suggested that its development would be based on predefined intervals, in this case, every five years, the first deadline being set for 2008. The translation of the process was however affected by other factors and influences. The Interministerial Committee for Sustainable Development presented an update of the NSSD in November 2006 in order to take into account the adaptations introduced in the “European strategy.” The forum “Grenelle de l’environnement,” held in the fall of 2007, also disrupted the process, by promoting not only new commitments but also a model of cooperation intended to include all stakeholders (divided in the official procedure into five “colleges”: the central state, local authorities, employer organizations, trade unions, and environmental nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]). On November 30, 2009, Prime Minister François Fillon appealed to the Economic, Social, and Environmental Council, and the opinion of this consultative assembly added further recommendations to reinforce the diffusion and effectiveness of the device (Le Clézio 2010), which also contributed to delaying the process. Entitled Towards a green and fair economy and highlighting the double context of economic and ecological crisis in order to encourage the development of a renewed economic model, the National sustainable development strategy 2010–2013 was adopted by the Interministerial Committee for Sustainable Development on July 27, 2010.

All these activities, where administrative technicality merges with more political concerns, contribute to ensuring continuity in the strategic processes. If the latter are sometimes checked in their momentum, mobilized actors of the politico-administrative sphere remain attentive to the process and try their best to maintain the dynamic or relaunch it. The programmatic component of sustainable development is thus regularly confirmed, and the strategic approaches that are supposed to operationalize it are always in a stream of elaboration and reworking, while keeping an inchoate form of reflexivity on the process.

Sustainable Development Strategies as Metainstruments

In institutional discourses, strategies tend to be presented not only as a means of embodying the principles of sustainable development but also as a tool to give these principles a more operational content, in an ideally equally systematic framework. These strategies, which are consequently analyzable as technologies of government, are a way to develop the environmental plans that the states had deployed in the 1990s (Steurer and Martinuzzi 2007b). They express a holistic ambition for all the processes of policy development. Each strategy is an intermediary between discourse and action, but is also, at the same time, discourse and action: each text aims at identifying a direction and organizing the means of getting there.

To the extent that what is globally assembled is a dynamic of governmentalization, these devices strengthen that dynamic by the main logics they convey, notably integration, coordination, and participation. Indeed, the primary goal is a better integration of economic, social, and environmental dimensions in policies. But as Reinhard Steurer has shown, this aim has wider implications, since this integration is sought out jointly in terms of sectors of intervention, spatial scales, governmental procedures, and time frames (Steurer 2008). However, studies on the influence of these strategies (Pallemaerts, Herodes, and Adelle 2007; Steurer and Berger 2011) have shown that this logics of integration has permeated few concrete cases of policy enactment. In a symptomatic way, the European strategy for sustainable development seems not to have played a major role in integrating environmental considerations but has rather been a relative resource of legitimation that can be mobilized for matters that are not necessarily environmental (Pallemaerts et al. 2007).

Sustainable development strategies are also expected to have a role of coordination. Following the arguments advanced by their institutional advocates, the strategies should indeed function as devices for making public policies more coherent. They were defended in this way in France by their promoters at the Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Development (see Brodhag and Talière 2006). The new strategy adopted by the European Council in 2006 reworks this aspect by specifying the role of the council in “improv[ing] internal policy coordination between different sectors” (European Council 2006:29, §44). Moreover, institutional discourses tend to give coordination another advantage that is, facilitating the integration of the different dimensions of sustainable development. The European strategy for sustainable development was undertaken starting from bases akin to the “open method of coordination” supported by the Lisbon strategy (Usui 2007). Indeed, the former is proposed as a framework that enables the convergence of national policies toward common goals. Its iterative function must be based on periodically evaluated objectives and, if necessary, adjusted according to the changes in situations and conditions for implementation.

In their development, these strategies have also more prominently incorporated a participative approach, trying to rely on consultation and dialogue (for a brief presentation, see Volkery et al. 2006:2059-60). As technologies of government attempting to also promote or maintain collective mobilization, they were put in place to construct a form of public or stakeholder engagement in the strategic process. Justified as an additional contribution to strengthen the approach, the participation of citizens and stakeholders (firms, unions, NGOs, etc.) is supposed to serve the reconciliation of interests and the sectoral integration of policies. Therefore, the installation of specific forums tends to be understood as a way to link the strategic initiatives to spaces for discussion. For example, in France, the National Council for Sustainable Development (NCSD) was established on January 14, 2003, in the wake of the proposed “national strategy” project and designed as an official space to represent “civil society” and the local collectivities in the process.

By ensuring the support of a set of principles, by structuring them and proposing the conditions of their articulation and operationalization, these strategies, in short, tend to appear as metainstruments, that is to say, instruments that can be used to activate others (as was the case for the Lisbon strategy; Dehousse 2004). These governmental devices are implemented by trying to arrange and order challenges and procedures, in order to address them. This form of intervention is intended to organize others and can find a specific register of justification in the encompassing reference to sustainable development. All the deployed arguments aim not only to demonstrate the validity of this collective project but also to translate the stated intentions into potential results. Through the almost reassuring display of institutional capacities, these strategies seek to offer both the program and the technology that facilitate the project. In the schema thus offered, an improvement would be possible, provided that adequate efforts are made, and spillover effects can develop. While constructing a representation of sustainable development and of the conditions conducive to its implementation, its institutional promoters install, at the same time, a discourse of legitimation of envisaged actions, intending to guarantee massive participation and support. Moreover, the role of public institutions themselves tends to be reconstructed to give them a renewed legitimacy for this new governmental work.

The Challenge of Defining Objectives

If the formal commitments in favor of sustainable development seem uncertain, it is because of persistent difficulties to support them with operationalizable, even quantified, objectives. However, in this process of reconfiguration of government tasks, spaces of discussion and collective reflections about the formulation of objectives have developed, despite the hesitations and tensions that remain.

Beyond the general ideas and principles, a major difficulty that the advocates of sustainable development have always been faced with is to set out more precise resolutions. Agenda 21, the action plan proposed at the Rio Conference, was a way to set the goals (general though they were) in an international document, especially in the first two sections (“social and economic dimensions” and “conservation and management of resources for development”). These sections provide a sort of summary of the prerequisites to achieve a sustainable form of development.

Since then, the objectives of sustainable development have turned out to be increasingly part of global agendas, especially since the theme has circulated more widely in a multitude of international forums. Major global-oriented conferences, such as those in Rio or Johannesburg, were significant steps. These environmental “megaconferences,” as Gill Seyfang and Andrew Jordan term them, are spaces of discussion that have played an important role in establishing global agendas (Seyfang 2003; Seyfang and Jordan 2002). More broadly, the forums organized by major international institutions (UN, OECD, etc.), or in their circles, have jointly acquired a pivotal role in the definition of official objectives. This circulation may explain how a selective group of objectives can end up coming back repeatedly (Najam et al. [2002] introduced, e.g., the results of a survey that confirm, in their opinion, the emergence of a “global agenda”).

The writing and revision of national and European sustainable development strategies also mark symbolic steps for the countries or organizations engaged in this work. These strategies express a will to bring the objectives together and organize them in a more systematic way, even though they reveal, at the same time, the difficulties to define such steps, a fortiori, with a relatively specific content (Pallemaerts and Gouritin 2007).

If one considers France, completely formalized and articulated objectives were actually missing from the previous strategic approaches to the NSSD published in June 2003. The initiative undertaken under the auspices of the Minister of the Environment Corinne Lepage in 1996 led to the issuing of a series of documents, the most synthetic of which presented “8 themes, 35 propositions” (Commission française du développement durable 1996b) and was associated with another document, “Priorities for Action,” that cited these elements and gave more details (Commission française du développement durable 1996a). The document commissioned by the Minister of Regional Development and Environment Yves Cochet, in preparation for the Johannesburg Summit, remained in a relatively general register and was not centrally concerned with the formal definition of objectives. These productions were, above all, meant to display ministerial and official positions and push elements of debate into the public sphere.

The logic of fixing objectives is more visible in the approach adopted in the wake of the governmental seminar held on November 28, 2002, and which led to the publication of a document the following year concerning all actors and stakeholders in the country. Indeed, proponents of the “NSSD” offered a set of national objectives (each with a five-yearlong horizon), which were intended as guidelines for a series of action plans. Seven strategic objectives were presented, in a formulation that was not necessarily conducive to a clear understanding of their articulation and coherence as a whole. The reflections already developed were included in the following sections: “the citizen, actor in sustainable development;” “territories;” “economic activities, businesses, and consumers;” “strengthening the consideration for sustainable development in the energy, transport, and agricultural sectors;” “risk prevention, pollution, and other dangers for health and the environment;” “toward an exemplary state;” and “international action” (present author’s translation).

In the third part of the text published by the European Commission with a view to the Göteborg Council in June 2001, “setting long-term objectives and targets: identifying priorities for action” was also proposed. This series of medium-term “priorities” for the various member countries was supposed to complete two objectives put forward and seen as “major problems” at the Lisbon, Nice, and Stockholm European Council meetings (“combating poverty and social exclusion” and “dealing with the economic and social implications of an ageing society”). This set of objectives, that were added and adopted, was positioned to address four other challenges: “limit climate change and increase the use of clean energy,” “address threats to public health,” “manage natural resources more responsibly,” and “improve the transport system and land-use management.” However, they remained rather general and only lent themselves to announcements for the future. With respect to the Commission’s proposal, there were even setbacks that environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the European Environmental Bureau could only point out.

These objectives, as well as the strategies they are a part of, have themselves been viewed as evolutive. In the case of the European strategy, adjustments were, in fact, desired during the review processes, in particular from the Commission that announced “new headline objectives.” The latter now had to be clearly expressed and were supposed to be accompanied by “intermediate milestones” (Commission of the European Communities 2005a:21). The process underwent a lowering of ambitions, which, in this case, were redirected toward the relaunching of the Lisbon strategy (Pallemaerts and Gouritin 2007:37). While the “platform for action” proposed by the Commission in December 2005 did present objectives, there was no real innovation. In two separate annexes that are not included in the body of the text, the publication makes a distinction between “key objectives” and “operational objectives and targets” (Commission of the European Communities 2005b). To a certain extent, the four key objectives tackled in the first annex (“environmental protection,” “social equity and cohesion,” “economic prosperity,” and “meeting our international responsibilities”) refer back to the three pillars that are traditionally considered in the problematic of sustainable development, with the addition of an international dimension. The following annex merely reproduces “a selection of key EU strategies, action plans and other initiatives in support of sustainable development,” essentially making a thematic compilation of existing objectives from other official texts.

Yet, in France, the NSSD followed this framework when it underwent a first update in 2006, justified by “the government’s desire to fully get involved in the European project.” As part of what is presented as a necessary coherence, the objectives are given their own place in the first of three documents proposed to update the French strategy (Ministère de l’Ecologie et du Développement Durable 2006, present author’s translation). The rationale displayed in this “reformulation” is mainly that of an alignment with “policy guiding principles” and key objectives of the European strategy.

The production of quantified, or at least operationalized, objectives often appears as an additional step that is difficult to take. Moreover, in the first strategic reflections, the European Commission had, in connection with work done on progress assessment, dismissed the idea of systematizing such a step: “This does not mean that everything must be quantified. Quantified and measurable targets are important, but must not become the exclusive focus of policy. Indeed, some elements of sustainable development are intrinsically difficult to quantify. Not everything can be turned into numerical data” (Commission of the European Communities 2001a:62). Yet, the challenge remains present in spaces of discussion, through the reactions of actors that are seemingly more peripheral. NGOs working in the field of sustainable development, both at the national and European or international level, have regularly criticized the shortcomings of official texts regarding the specification of concrete and quantifiable objectives and deadlines. In fact, the Austrian Presidency of the EU in the first semester of 2006 had gone back to this issue by considering these criticisms to revise the European strategy, but the results were limited (thus raising skepticism in both NGOs, such as the European Bureau for the Environment [Hontelez and Buitenkamp 2006:9], and by academic observers [Pallemaerts and Gouritin 2007:40-41]).

Other institutional actors also regularly point out the importance of more defined objectives and encourage this through other intermediaries. The need for clear and attainable objectives is notably emphasized in the methodological documents of the UN and the OECD about the elaboration of sustainable development strategies (OECD 2006a; UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2002). In the opinions expressed by the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) regarding the European strategy, similar entreaties were made, once more, to develop clear, and if possible, quantifiable objectives (see, e.g., EESC 2004, 2007b). The repetition of this type of criticism does not prevent this sort of argument from being used by the European Commission to criticize certain states. ⁸

As Marc Pallemaerts and Armelle Gouritin explain, concerning Europe, “the most precise objectives are those that relate to areas in which there is an international normative activity binding the European community” (2007:41, present author’s translation). But if there is still a lack of precision in many areas, one should not only consider the content and the unclear limits of these objectives, as more or less formal exchanges are taking place in institutional settings while tending to strengthen and structure a space of discussion about the substantial challenges of change. They, at least, make objectives one of the pivotal points in sustainable development strategies and the governmental work stemming from them.

The Challenge of Accompanying Change

By being developed and considered as objects of government, sustainable development and the change that should lead to it play another role as an incentive for reflections, discussions, and proposals to address a main issue: How to accompany this process? This other side of the dynamics of governmentalization has also contributed to the development of a range of procedural activities.

These activities are firstly justified by the search for coordination, or at least, a harmonization of interests. One part of the procedural and organizational solution is developed because interested policy actors perceive a need to find forms of coordination not only between policy sectors but also between the different levels of government. This concern is reflected in the process that led to the revision of the “European strategy for sustainable development” in June 2006. Member States are then asked to report on “progress at national level” every two years in order to guarantee coherence between the different levels of the strategy’s implementation. To facilitate exchanges with the general secretary of the commission, responsible for coordinating the strategy, the new guidelines also stipulate that Member States appoint national coordinators, who are called to work in the “SDS Coordinators Group” set up by the commission (in concrete terms, this interface was reduced in 2007 to two meetings that were essentially held to prepare the national progress reports).

In France, since 2002 and the preparation of the national strategy, a “senior official responsible for sustainable development” (“haut fonctionnaire chargé du développement durable”) is present in each ministry to carry out the similar missions of mobilization, evaluation, and coordination, especially that between domains of intervention. Another procedural space was left to the consultation of interests through the NCSD set up by the decree of January 13, 2003. Even if its influence is not necessarily central, such a consultative body, notably by its relatively regular opinions (see, e.g., Conseil National du Développement Durable 2007), also accompanies the institutional concern for a managed change process. The EU has also promoted the formula of the NCSD, to be implemented by each country, and a growing number of states have made room for this form of representation of civil society.

The procedural background of institutional actions has also developed in conjunction with the search for monitoring capacities for ongoing processes. Most of the national strategies for sustainable development require periodic reports, most often annually. The “progress report on implementation of the SDS” that the commission has had to submit (in this case, every two years) since the new European strategy of 2006 is expressive of a similar logic that consists in displaying provisions for controlling and monitoring (which is, indeed, more precise than the 2001 version; European Council 2006). To accompany this new strategy, the European Council also invited the EESC to contribute to this biennial report, and, in the same vein, the EESC created a “Sustainable Development Observatory” that has, since then, contributed to the review of policies in this area, thanks to its opinions (see, e.g., EESC 2007a, 2009).

“Peer reviews,” through which a country receives the assessments of other countries about its initiatives and what could and could not be accomplished, were perceived as another form of possible accompaniment and were consequently encouraged more systematically at various levels. The OECD had already promoted this mechanism and shown a great deal of experience in the field of environment (Lehtonen 2007). The European Commission considered that its widespread use could have a positive impact and the new European strategy has helped revive the idea by providing a process of “voluntary peer reviews.” The identification of “best practices” is used as an argument, while a dynamic of mutual learning is anticipated at the same time (which is similar to what is expected from the Open Method of Coordination). The commission proposed to support peer reviews through a cofinancing program that the Netherlands was the first to benefit from in 2007. France had already tried this approach by participating in this type of exercise at the end of 2004, following a proposal by President Jacques Chirac at the Johannesburg Summit, and the following year, the country presented a series of recommendations to various UN bodies. ⁹

The development of these measures has also led to the search for methodological guarantees, which themselves have generated a field of expertise, especially in large international organizations. The UN is one of these spaces of elaboration. On the one hand, these various spaces have sought to encourage approaches such as national strategies, and on the other hand, they have produced a stream of recommendations and guidelines, especially in the form of documents that are more or less didactic and combine administrative and academic registers. Part of the work done by the OECD has developed in a similar way, in studies, annual reports, “best practices” guides, and so on, which frequently claim to bring expertise to interested organizations (see, e.g., OECD/Development Assistance Committee 2001 [designed specifically for “developing countries”]; OECD 2006a). Reflections on the importance of peer reviews circulate in the same type of international networks and have also begun to receive methodological attention, particularly in published guides (a case in point is the European Commission [DG Environment] 2006) and research funding (Spangenberg 2010:123-24).

These reflections join a mass of administrative, scientific, and expert works on other devices, which can themselves be connected to the objective of sustainable development and designed to support governmental work, such as impact assessments (George and Kirkpatrick 2007) or series of indicators (Garnåsjordet et al. 2012). These devices and underlying logics, again favored by an extensive rationality of government, can be resorted to, because they benefit from a strengthening of professional contacts and places for discussion, similar to the European sustainable development network (ESDN). Indeed, the policy specialists of the ESDN aim to act as an “informal network of public administrators and other experts” and are especially interested in various aspects likely to reinforce sustainable development strategies. In this diffuse process of search for support instruments, sets of indicators are developing as another technology of government, in this case intended to help measure and monitor progress toward sustainable development (Steurer and Hametner 2013), namely, by transforming change into a domain to be known and recorded.