Has Ecocentrism Already Won in France?

Jean-Paul Bozonnet (1)

1 PACTE - Pacte, Laboratoire de sciences sociales

For forty years, environmental values have increasingly gain ground everywhere in the world, starting with the post-industrial countries. In 1978, R.E. Dunlap and K.E. Van Liere proposed a “new environmental paradigm” (NEP), as a measuring instrument to evaluate the importance of the shift from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism in the USA. In this country, many surveys were systematically carried out, but until 2008, nothing like this has been done in European countries. It was not until last year that the fourth European Values Survey (EVS), included for the first time the NEP in its questionnaire. In this paper, we propose to present the initial results of this EVS survey carried out in 45 European countries, at least for those that will be available. Here are some basic questions we propose to answer: what is the magnitude of ecocentrism in each European country? Is it comparable to the USA? How this environmental shift is linked to political culture? Is religion a determining factor? What is the role of economics in this change? Is the ecocentrism's expansion depending on environmental public policies conducted in each country?

Mots clés: environmental values; France; ecocentrism; European Values Survey; anthropocentrism; postmodern ideology

Domaines: Sociologie

Jean-Paul Bozonnet. Has Ecocentrism Already Won in France?: Soft Consensus on the Environmentalist Grand Narrative. 9th European Sociological Association Conference, Sep 2009, Lisbonne, Portugal. ⟨halshs-00479514⟩