Decentralized Cooperation as a Tool for Rethinking Sustainable Development and the Triple global Environmental Crisis

Abstract

The social sciences have contributed to rethinking the question of Development after the Second World War and the creation of the United Nations, but especially after the wars of national liberation and Decolonization of the former colonies. The credit for this questioning of the developmental approaches of the post-independence decades is given to researchers in anthropology and sociology such as Pierre Bouvier (1997) or Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (1996). The intersection of anthropological and sociological disciplines is part of the socio-anthropological project, in which contemporary social facts are now analysed through the prism of interdisciplinarity. The distance previously marked between ethnologists and the "Others" was deconstructed, revisited and recomposed where "the other" and "the same" intersect. It is through a detailed knowledge of this "Other" that the ethnologist rediscovers his "Self". What had being called Otherness and the identical are one-dimensional, and the area of public action within which this one-dimensionality is manifesting is "Decentralized Cooperation". Decentralized cooperation allows us to move away from the developmental paradigm of developed people or countries on one side, and developed people or countries on the other side. This approach to social change results from the desire of external actors to implement development projects for the benefit of internal actors in an interventionist and humanitarian perspective, without always taking into account local singularities and dynamics. 

On the other hand, the current sustainable development issue is inseparable from the phenomenon of globalization or "glocalization" (Schuerkens, 2015), one might say. This is even truer when we talk about societal issues that concern all countries in the world, such as the triple planetary environmental crisis including “pollution, climate change and loss of biodiversity". In France, the international cooperation actions of local authorities and networks of international solidarity actors make it possible to respond concretely to environmental issues and, more generally, to sustainability. The objective of this presentation is to present concrete case studies in the French context where the Diplomacy of cities, departments and regions makes it possible to respond to environmental issues, in addition to State Diplomacy.