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This article discusses the rhetoric deployed by two professional orders, the Ordre des ergothérapeutes du Québec and the Ordre des orthophonistes et des audiologistes du Québec, when they are called upon to contribute to public debates on various social issues. What rationalities do they promote and how are these rationalities are in tension with those articulated by the government? To answer this question, we analyzed 10 recent briefs tabled at the National Assembly of Quebec. Our analyses reveal four rationalities: political, economic, scientific and ethical. By revealing these rationalities, we highlight the tensions between bureaucratic and professional logic. This article thus helps to demystify a little-known political communication exercise.

Environmental stakes are partially tackled in European Agricultural Policy by promoting changes in farmers' practices through agri-environmental measures (AEM). In France, these measures are implemented in various types of contracts between farmers and government agriculture offices. The rationale of these contracts has shifted from a farm multifunctionality-grant paradigm to a new paradigm of compensating the extracosts of specific environmental practices developed in farm plots. In this paper, we analyzed how this paradigm shift was put into practice. We studied the implementation of AEM in the Guadeloupe and Reunion Island, which are small islands and UE outermost regions. In these two islands, the agricultural productivist model is dominant, export-oriented, and actively supported by public policies. Although these islands face environmental stakes and are subject to the UE environmental standards, we showed that the agricultural stakeholders have adapted the various agri-environmental schemes in order to maintain the productivity of agriculture and the support to the dominant farming industry. In a first stage, farmers entered in the hybrid multifunctionality agreements and have subscribed the integrated measures. But in a second stage, farmers did not subscribe the latest generation of AEM. We observed that the operationalization of agri-environment policy schemes is utterly unchanged and that agricultural institutions still formulate and manage these schemes. But the lack of coordination between farming and environmental stakeholders prevents the appropriation of environmental issues by the farmers. Accordingly, this lack of coordination does not allow for the convergence of the agricultural production and the provision of environmental services in order to foster rural areas' spatial planning and governance.

Keywords: Outre-Mer, multifonctionnalité, mesure agrienvironnementale, service environnemental, politiques publiques, UE uttermost regions, multifunctionality, agroenvironmental measure, environmental services, public policies

This article presents the theoretical and practical evolution of a study (1994-1999) on long-term unemployment for older workers. Considering as standing point the problematic of exclusion, the authors have progressively matured towards a problematic of reflexivity. Today, they submit the different analysis approaches structuring the relationship between work and ageing, and then situate the evolution of their conceptual approach, which shifts from system to actor subject, and the notions of social experience and reflexivity. A few case study results illustrate the evolution of this process.

Keywords: chômage de longue durée, travailleurs âgés, expérience sociale, exclusion, réflexivité, long-term unemployment, older workers, social experience, exclusion, reflexivity, desempleo prolongado, trabajadores de edad, experiencia social, exclusion, reflexividad

AbstractMost research about China's energy policy rely on a rational conception of political actors thus portraying China either under the guise of a rational unitary actor on the scene of energy geopolitics or as a battleground among administrative units protecting their bureaucratic turf. This article wants to shed a different light on China's energy policy. It postulates that three different political frames — strategic, market, and “scientific development” — can be found within China's energy policy community. These frames provide the cognitive foundations for problem definition and policy formulation. The measures forming the country's energy policy are thus the result of debates between advocates of each frame and synthesis between them. Yet, some structural factors (economic culture, political institutions, and administrative procedures to name a few) impose a selection among those frames or limit their conversion into concrete policies.

The stability of a democracy should depend on the regime's adaptability and on democratic societies' ability to respond to certain linguistic aspirations which are aimed at distinction, without falling into the trap of division. This is one of the challenges that pluralist societies generally face and in particular, societies that are plurilingual. This article demonstrates how the Canadian political context goes beyond the recognition of cultural differences in a multicultural Canadian society, by allowing for the invention of distinction and the development of linguistic protection, thanks to, among other things, a policy of official bilingualism. However, such a protection policy has a counterpart: although it allows for and makes possible, legislation of official languages also frames and constrains the political action of community leaders as well as their ideas about identity. This article begins with an initial statement of fact: fears related to the risk of linguistic assimilation and resulting political conflicts have progressively fueled a policy of official bilingualism as a way of reassuring people that these risks are limited, and also to guarantee that Canada has a satisfactory “linguistic peace”. Based on these premises, we show that the context of official bilingualism has marked the notion of francophonie and the political aspects of francophonie in Canada. Finally, we determine if the main actors of ideas about identity, and their work of recognition, protest and representation, constitute the pathway to a different regime of citizenship for Canada's Francophone minority.

The notion of empowerment has become widespread, and is frequently used when participation is considered. However, little research has explored the properties, scope, and borders of empowerment in sociological terms. This paper goes beyond a one-dimensional approach of empowerment, which treats it as a democratic solution or as regression due to its managerial use. By adopting a broadly comparative approach, we consider several space-times, that which enables us to account for two different ways of thinking about the power and the power to act on capacities. This article examines two concepts of empowerment using two philosophies of power: one managerial and the other civic. In analyzing managerial concepts of empowerment, our paper looks at cases ranging from the World Bank (Empowerment Team) to various players in health care politics in relation to European institutions. Concerning the civic concepts of empowerment, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the Black power in the sixties are tested, while the contemporary legacy is questioned.

This article focuses on the differentiated impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Canadian destinations in terms of vulnerability and resilience. We explore how public policies can better address local disparities in tourism recovery in the future through a place-based approach. Using the Canadian National Travel Survey (2019-2021), we compare, using descriptive statistics, three divisions commonly used to design place-based policies: 1) provincial; 2) typological (urban-rural); and 3) demographic based on different categories of tourism activities. The results show that the gaps in vulnerability and resilience are more typological (urban/rural) and linked to the types of dominant activities than to a provincial distinction. Urban areas were the most vulnerable, with falls of up to total cancellation (100%) of events and shows and a reduction of almost three quarters (72.62%) in leisure and entertainment in the third quarter of 2020 compared to 2019, followed by a weak recovery in 2021. Conversely, rural areas demonstrated greater resilience, benefiting from outdoor activities that more than doubled (+157.9%) in 2020 and continued to increase substantially (+48.3%) in 2021, although this led to an increased risk of overcrowding in some newly popular sparsely populated peripheral areas. These findings highlight the importance of adopting flexible territorialized public policies, modulated according to the vulnerability and rebound capacity of destinations, rather than based on a predetermined framework. For Canada, since vulnerability and resilience vary little from one province to another, the opposition between urban and rural environments proves to be the most relevant for differentiating interventions.

Keywords: tourisme domestique, vulnérabilité, résilience, politique touristique, politique territorialisée, COVID-19, domestic tourism, vulnerability, resilience, tourism policy, territorialized policy, COVID-19

This paper analyses the issue of Democracy from two of its strongly related weaknesses, that are also part of the original ambitions underlying the democratic project: political equality and reduction of social inequalities. We propose an alternative political framework of a Participatory Democracy, emerging from the experience of numerous cities and municipal governments around the world. We also discuss how this form of Democracy may be reducing political and social inequality problems. We use the Participatory Budget (PB) in Porto Alegre (Brazil) as the reference case for this paper.