Typologie du développement durable en Normandie : une évaluation à l’échelle des Établissements Publics de Coopération Intercommunale (EPCI)

Since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations (2008), sustainability has been a key priority for European governments. While previous studies have investigated the associations between indicators of sustainable development, few have directly considered a multidimensional approach to assess and compare the performance of territories in terms of sustainable development. As such, a comprehensive assessment of territorial sustainable performance is thus still needed. In this paper, the concept of sustainability relies on the construction of six composite indices (environment and natural resources, energy transition, sustainable mobility, economic dynamism, social cohesion and solidarity, and governance and citizenship) with the aim to provide an evaluation framework for empirically comparing the performance of the 77 Norman inter-communities structures (EPCIs). Hypotheses of the paper rely on the fact that sustainable development is consubstantially multidimensional and should be looked at on a spatial level, because it is at this level that solutions can arise. Accordingly, preserving or containing the degradation of the natural biosphere requires considering the multiple dimensions of sustainable development as well as considering local specificities. Each dimension is examined by applying a spatial exploratory analyses and Hierarchical Ascending Classification (HAC) to classify Norman EPCIs providing six different EPCIs profiles of sustainable development. The findings make it possible to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the Norman EPCIs in the implementation of public policies for sustainable development. Better performances in the different indexes capturing regional sustainable development are generally associated to most densely populated EPCIs but for the environment and natural resources. Given that almost 30 % out of the 75 Norman EPCIs (the Peri-Urban class) present a low performance, both in sustainable mobility and energy transition, policy makers should put all their efforts to gradually adopt a new productive system based on new modes of production and consumption.