PhD position or post-doctoral fellow in Grenoble : Fight against global warming and renewal of industrial policy

The fight against climate change concerns industry, which is a major emitter of greenhouse gases through its equipment, logistics activities and of course its products. Various economic instruments help to create "demand" for technological change: the market for greenhouse gas emission allowances has been relaunched with the aim of increasing the economic incentives for emission reduction actions (Neyland, Ehrenstein, and Milyaeva 2019). Similarly, the introduction of "green" certifications of energy carriers (electricity, gas,
hydrogen, fuel) is also creating new incentives for decarbonization, accompanied by
demand from consumers, or the inclusion of carbon neutrality in the evaluation
carbon neutrality...

In parallel to these market instruments, many countries have started to implement interventionist policies, through financial support for industrial and technological investments in the context of post-covid recovery plans, part of which is devoted to the fight against greenhouse gas emissions.

Within the framework of an interdisciplinary project led by the IDEX of the University of Grenoble-Alpes called
DéfiCO2 (https://defico2.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/fr), the objective of the thesis or post-doc project will be
contribute to the study of these decarbonation policies, their definition, their overlap and their articulation
and their articulation, to examine how different stakeholders anticipate their evolution and participate in
their definition.

This project could eventually contribute to several contemporary debates in economic sociology
and in the sociology of techniques.

The first debate concerns the definition of public policies and the respective place of market instruments (certification, quotas, etc.) and public intervention through industrial policy. For a long time contained by the European framework for the control of state aid (Davies 2013), French industrial policy is currently being revived by the challenges of decarbonization. An analysis of national and European policies would allow us to better understand the nature and conditions of this revival and the shift in the balance between the use of market mechanisms and the construction of "protected spaces" (Raven et al. 2016) through more direct interventions (Lauber and Jacobsson 2016; Lauber and Schenner 2011).

The second debate concerns controversies about the evaluation of technical alternatives with respect to their CO2 emissions. Indeed, these controversies increase the uncertainty of public policies, market mechanisms as well as targeted support policies (Boucher 2012). Some policies, such as biofuels, have been severely curtailed as a result of changes in the methods used to calculate their impact (Laurent 2015). However, a large number of initiatives underway (such as hydrogen certification or biofuel valorization) present similar weaknesses.

The third debate focuses on economic expectations (Beckert 2016) and technological
technology (Sovacool and Ramana 2015; Bakker 2011). Industrial companies are beginning to
establish a trajectory for reducing their GHG emissions and invest in the development of
new technical solutions. The strategic anticipation of companies must therefore take into
public policy uncertainties (Sovacool, Baum, and Low 2023), whether the interventions are generic or
interventions are generic or dedicated to certain technologies. Thus, the challenge of this project will be to
understand how companies manage to anticipate public action and its economic effects, and how they
economic effects, and how they contribute through their influence to the evolution of public action (Konrad
2010).

The thesis (or post-doc) project will aim to contribute to one or more of these debates
and will be declined around some industrial activities emitting GHG or about technologies
such as CO2 capture for landfill or reuse, production of
fuels...

Funding category: Contrat doctoral

PHD Country: France