Governing Economic Conducts. the Case of Sustainable Consumption Policy in France

In an increasing number of public policy fields, contemporary states intend to target the conduct of the individuals as an object of governing. For example, this is the case in fields such as public health, and more specifically obesity; climate change, and more specifically sustainable consumption; prevention of over-indebtedness. These public policies aim at reorienting individual behaviors of consumers, citizens, and patients, in the name of the public good, because of their potential negative externalities on the collectivity. Some of these public policies may seek to address consumption patterns or modes of life that can have high costs on the public health system, like the consumption of junk food that cause diabetes, obesity or cardiovascular diseases. Climate change policies may address consumers and recommend them to prefer goods and services that have low impact on the environment. In the case of policies of prevention of over-indebtedness, bank operators and regulators may try to increase the financial literacy of consumers in order to help them to avoid excessive debt and at the same time offer a better use of banking services. Despite, their intention to orient individual conducts, these public policies do not deny any autonomy of individuals, and instead they rely on it to govern conducts. This raises specific question about statehood. What does this government of economic conducts has to say about contemporary state regulation and about its capacity to “moralize markets”? How does this focus on economic lives inform about the states’ relationship to individuals and to the economy? Should it be interpreted as a way for the state to transfer its responsibility related to various public issues to the individual? As such is it the expression of the decline of the state?  What is the legitimacy of the state to delve into our economic decisions and our private life: to tell us what to eat, how to consume and even how to live? How can the state can orient economic life and at the same time claim for more autonomy for the individual? And finally, how do/will economic actors react to this government of their conduct? The analysis will rely on the specific example of sustainable consumption policy in France.

How individual conducts are governed? This contribution will draw on the seminal works in sociology which addressed the issue of the shaping of economic conducts. Economic conducts have been interpreted as the outcome of historical and social processes (Weber, 1978), as well as the result of the social trajectory of both individuals and societies (Bourdieu, 1977). However, the role of the state in the shaping of economic conducts remains overlooked in these perspectives. Michel Foucault has identified governmentality, a process which goes through the optimization of individual conducts, as a form of expression of states’ power additional to other forms of power, such as sovereignty on territories and discipline on bodies (Foucault, 2004a, 2004b). But he gave little insights about how such governmentality is equipped and how it does concretely operate to shape people’s conduct. Drawing on the program in sociology that focus on public policy instruments (Hood, 1986, 2007; Halpern et al., 2014; Bergeron et al., 2013), we identified a diversity of instruments that aim at governing economic conducts, such as public campaign, taxes and bonuses, nudges, labeling, auto-diagnostic, prices. The contribution will highlight the processes through which these different instruments contribute to govern economic conducts: the legitimization of the intrusion of the state in individual decisions, the responsibilization of individuals, the rationalization of economic decision and finally the economicization of conducts. 

But why does the state want to govern individual conducts? To answer this question we need to understand more broadly the role of this government of conduct within the more general public policy from which it takes part. For example, the sustainable consumption policy aims at governing individual conducts but relies also on other instruments, such as hard-law or contracts between market actors and public administration. The laws Grenelle 1 and 2 which have been voted in 2009 and 2010 introduced the right for consumers to have access to an information of the environmental impacts of their products. These law constraints firms to label their products with such information and build an instrument, the environmental labeling, to governing conducts. Several voluntary agreements have been signed between the Ministry of the Environment and some business associations, in order to commit the latter to encourage firms to make efforts toward the environment. The government of conducts is another public instruments, in complement with the law and contracts, devoted to encourage companies to change their practices and decrease their impacts on the environment. The government of conducts aims at transforming consumers’ preferences, choices and norms, to convince companies about the great business opportunities environmental friendliness may offer, and about the fact that environmental performance may be transformed into a market value. It is a way of playing the demand side to change the supply side. As such, the contribution states that the government of conducts should not be interpret as a withdrawal of the state within economy (Miller and Rose, 2008) but, instead consists of a public policy for regulating markets (Baldwin and Cave, 1999).

What are the effects of the government of conducts on markets? Obviously, the government of conducts does not reorient dramatically individual choices and modes of life, mostly because of the strong inertia that characterizes individual conducts. But symmetrically, companies cannot ignore the attempts of the state to orient individual economic conducts, because it may directly compete with their own aspirations to govern consumers’ conducts. As such, public policy interfere within market mechanisms and the functioning of competition, and firm may want to keep a better control on the construction of norms, values and preferences which may operate on markets. As a result, even if they deny any capacity of either the state or themselves to govern consumers’ conducts, most of them may involve deeply in the integration of environmental considerations in their practices to stay engaged in the competition on markets.