Speaker
Description
For decades, emphatic calls for adaptation to climate impacts due to human-caused global warming have been rarely heeded in practice. A daily read of any reliable news source demonstrates that adaptation measures to confront climate impacts are inadequate, if existent. In parallel, climate change adaptation in the planning literature has mainly focused on policy reforms and infrastructure revisions to implement adaptation practices and resilience. On the one hand, since Rittel and Webber (1973) introduced the concept of a ‘wicked problem,’ planning scholarship has excelled at dissecting and understanding the complicated context of built environments and intersecting processes at play. On the other hand, because planning tends to remain ‘future-focused’ and normative, planning scholarship may miss the broader temporal settings critical to understanding the fabric of forces in motion that resist change.
To better understand the temporal dynamics of territorial transitions, we present a framework to identify inertial forces as a way to investigate the interplay between resisting and transforming forces within a territorial context. We adopt the Franco-concept of a territoire as multi-scalar in the material, institutional, and ideal dimensions (Pachoud et al., 2022). The material dimension encompasses the spatial extent of the biophysical matter and the built environment, including infrastructure. Concepts such as ‘path dependency’ (Haasnoot et al., 2020) allow us to consider how planning decisions and long-term infrastructure investments reshape the surrounding territory while remaining ‘fixed’ (Brochet et al., 2025). The institutional dimension includes the territorial actors and the rules and norms that guide their practices. New institutional economics theory offers a way to analyze the role of ‘transaction costs’ in shaping these governance and institutional arrangements (Shahab, 2022). Finally, the ideal dimension refers to all that contributes to the territorial actors’ imaginaries, including their identities, cultural values, and attachments to the territory. Though completely immaterial, imaginaries have a consequential role in shaping territories (Hommes et al., 2022); the ways in which they persist or evolve plays a critical part in the capacity of actors to envisage territorial futures.
We mobilize this framework in the context of a medium-sized, mid-mountain ski resort community in the French Alps, Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse. Located north of Grenoble, tourism for this community started to develop in the early 20th century, becoming a ski resort village in the 1950s with major re-investments in the 1980-90s. Today, the local community has embraced a collective planning effort to confront their climate realities and economic pressures linked to the uncertainty of ski operations. This case study highlights the coexistence, and at times, strong opposition between forces of resistance and transformation; it also demonstrates the importance of collective planning to evolve actors’ imaginaries about transitions before conflict-minimizing adaptive actions can be implemented.
References
Brochet, A., Creutin, J.-D., Arik, A., Renou, Y., 2025. Towards hydrosocial autonomy within modernity. A long-term analysis (1850–1980) of socio-material fracturing of flood protection infrastructures in an Alpine valley. Polit. Geogr. 116, 103249. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103249
Haasnoot, M., van Aalst, M., Rozenberg, J., Dominique, K., Matthews, J., Bouwer, L.M., Kind, J., Poff, N.L.R., 2020. Investments under non-stationarity: economic evaluation of adaptation pathways. Clim. Change 161, 451–463. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02409-6
Hommes, L., Hoogesteger, J., Boelens, R., 2022. (Re)making hydrosocial territories: Materializing and contesting imaginaries and subjectivities through hydraulic infrastructure. Polit. Geogr. 97, 102698. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102698
Pachoud, C., Koop, K., George, E., 2022. Societal transformation through the prism of the concept of territoire: A French contribution. Environ. Innov. Soc. Transit. 45, 101–113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2022.10.001
Rittel, H.W.J., Webber, M.M., 1973. Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sci. 4, 155–169.
Shahab, S., 2022. Transaction Costs in Planning Literature: A Systematic Review. J. Plan. Lit. 37, 403–414. https://doi.org/10.1177/08854122211062085
| Keywords | Territorial Transitions; Social Inertia; Pathway Dependency; Imaginaries; Ski Resorts |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
