Research

Key Public Transition Initiatives (KIPT) 2024-2026

Contemporary societies face numerous, complex, and cross-cutting challenges that call into question the longevity of our development model, its sustainability, and our ability to function as a society. Whether these challenges relate to environmental and climate change, demographics, politics, or technology (particularly digital technology), they call into question our lifestyles and our models of development, production, consumption, work organization, education, healthcare, spatial planning, mobility, and more. These changes bring opportunities, but they also generate risks, particularly for the most vulnerable populations. They are therefore sources of social, political, and economic disruption that directly challenge the governance of our societies. Supporting the transition to new, more sustainable and equitable development models has become a challenge for public actors.

To meet this challenge, the Montpellier campus offers high-level social science research in a variety of disciplines, including economics, law, political science, geography, education and training sciences, management, and sociology.

The objective of the Key Initiative on Public Transition Policies (KIPPT) is to enhance visibility and promote local, national, and international interactions among scientists at the Montpellier site whose work in the social sciences is related to public transition policies. On the one hand, the aim is to bring researchers together and establish a sustainable network. The KIPPT will thus help to stimulate and encourage exchanges and synergies and raise the profile of the collective expertise of the Montpellier site on public transition policies. On this basis, the KIPPT also aims to structure a "science/society" relationship by acting as a bridge between researchers working on transition policies and public and civil society actors. To this end, various partners such as local authorities—notably the Occitanie Region and Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole—as well as companies and associations are involved in the project.

A broad, multidisciplinary definition of public transition policies

KIPPT supports a broad definition of public transition policies, based on the three pillars of the I-site – nourishing, protecting, caring – and beyond. It approaches public policies, public action, and governance from a multidisciplinary perspective.

It brings together numerous laboratories from the I-Site's Social Sciences cluster around three main areas:

Axis 1: Stimulate exchanges between laboratories and disciplines around key sectoral themes on the site, such as climate/energy transition, ecology, digital technology, agriculture and food, mobility/transport, health, etc.

Axis 2: promoting reflection on the coherence and articulation between public transition policies and integration issues. Particular attention is paid to the cross-cutting issue of inequalities on the one hand, and to territorial projects as vectors of integration to address tensions between sectoral and territorial logics on the other.

Axis 3: address cross-cutting issues related to the governance of transitions.

  • Issues related to the design of public transition policies (PTPs), their public debate, and their evaluation
  • Issues related to the implementation of PPTs: cooperation between actors, sectors, levels of government, financing, citizen/civil society participation, etc.
  • Issues of conflict/acceptability of transition policies
  • Issues related to the methods and instruments used: cost-benefit approaches, multi-criteria approaches, incentive instruments, regulatory instruments, pricing, planning, trajectories, etc.
  • Issues related to changes in stakeholders' perceptions, opinions, and behaviors in response to transitions

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