The Stewardship Mapping Project (STEW-MAP): Paris, France

The CIVIC ACT action research project aims to analyze and develop a map of environmental activism in the Paris / Ile-de-France region and other metropolitan regions in Europe. The project examines how environmental organizations and activists may help optimize, reconfigure, and make concrete contributions to place. Environmental activism encompasses practices and spheres of action that redraw the contours of citizenship and how we inhabit various localities. These projects, many of which are part of the social and solidarity-based economy, seem to show that other systems of sharing and coexistence can develop, particularly at local scales and more and more often thanks to digital technologies. Digital technologies, paradoxically, give us the opportunity to reconsider the project of collaborative societies in order to build communities rooted in collaboration, cooperation, and sharing, well beyond the economic and financial dimensions alone.

Methodological Approach

To investigate these forms of environmentalism, the CIVIC ACT team has developed a mechanism to include as many environmental groups, collectives, and associations as possible, ranging from formal to informal and/or little-known. In order to succeed, the CIVIC ACT team compiled a database of  the environmental associations of the 131 municipalities of Greater Paris and created partnerships with local organizations to collect data on the collectives and associations with which they work. After combining the partner databases to create a survey population, the team cleaned and delimited the database to sample. This approach resulted in a sample of 753 associations surveyed, supplemented by a series of interviews. They selected these associations based upon a sample of 31 municipalities representative of Greater Paris in terms of land use. Within these municipalities, they systematically contacted all the environmental associations of the municipality or district, with whom we conducted a semi-structured interview with an active member.

To date, CIVIC ACT has:

• an online survey of 153 environmental associations in Greater Paris, to provide a typological portrait of civic environmentalism;
• a corpus of ongoing interviews (52 interviews out of 90 planned) conducted with members of associations in Greater Paris in 30 municipalities sampled divided into 3 categories of municipalities to reflect the diversity of the territories of Greater Paris and the role played by environmental citizen collectives;
• an ongoing cartographic work on the territories of action of these associations.

CIVIC ACT’s questions concern the presence of groups in these territories. What are the effects of context on their work? What is the relative influence of environmental and socio-economic factors at the local level at different levels in the development of the results obtained by these groups and networks and in their internal and environmental governance processes? How do socio-spatial differences between territories affect the capacity of civic groups to implement their goals and transform territories?