Ce que révèle le discours des acteurs officiels sur un « au-delà du PIB »

The idea of going « beyond GDP » attracts more and more actors, whose status, objectives and visions are very different. The diversity of institutional scales, theoretical approaches, and normative positions regarding the opportunity and motives of going "beyond GDP" makes hard to clearly identify the stances of the actors and the power balances dominating the debates. We therefore ask: What do the current debates mean to their actors? Are they a new rhetoric liable to elude a confrontation with the structural problems resulting from the crisis? Are they an opportunity window for launching again societal debates that are hardly raised elsewhere? Or are they a real trigger toward a paradigmatic change, deeply questioning productivism? We try to answer that question by analysing the discourses of official actors (politics, administration, technicians) involved and not involved in "beyond-GDP" initiatives. We show that, at the official level, beyond GDP debates, while they raise new societal issues, do not contribute to erode the central role of economic growth. The debates are dominated by pragmatism, in that dominant interests are focused on short-term constraints and objectives, where GDP growth remains pivotal. The involvement of actors in beyond-GDP debates reveals more a need and/or the willingness to adapt public management and policies to new constraints rather than a critical reflexion on the productivist model on which our economies have been built for more than sixty years.