Économie de la transition écologique et gouvernance des entreprises

Economic growth is based on productivity gains, the corollary of which is an exponential consumption of natural resources. The challenge is not to escape this contradiction but to survive it. For if economic value is derived from the intrinsic value of the natural environment, it cannot be reduced to it. Two equally illusory solutions consist in relying either on public action to initiate degrowth centrally, or on the price system accompanied by a taxation system that would make ?green? growth possible within the framework of a market economy. Both approaches run the risk of rapid and excessive destruction of production capacity, depriving society from the financial and human resources necessary for the ecological transition. They ignore the effects of the uncertainty that affects future technologies and preferences, which neither the cult of the state nor that of the market can compensate for. Because of this uncertainty, the viability of the transition requires slow and gradual adaptations of the productive system, even though it is a question of coping with the rapidity of climate change. It is mainly up to companies to lead this transition, but on the condition that they are part of a procedural rationality and forms of collective action that make them political coalitions between their various constituents, including managers, financiers, employees and representatives of the community?s interests. This rationality is not the result of strict individual choices, nor of a social choice, but of the play of multiple collective intelligences dictated by institutions that structure relations between firms, financing relations and labor relations, supporting individual decision-making. In these relations, the capital holders play a decisive role. Their patience is crucial to the possibility of learning, including learning through permanent employment contracts. The social question is linked to the environmental question insofar as both are matters of co-determination. The relations between the different legal orders oscillate between hierarchy, conflict and cooperation. The aim is not to subordinate legal systems to a social optimum defined by a central authority, even if it is an ecological optimum, or to the presumed optimal rules of the market that would be guaranteed by supposedly independent authorities. It is to create the conditions for promoting decentralized and polycentric governance, facilitated and not controlled by public power. Public decisions must interact with the multiplicity of private decisions, contributing together to the constitution of a legal order with multiple components. Nevertheless, the question of hierarchies that have become complex remains, and the place and role of judges become decisive.