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AbstractReform of the French health care system in the 1990s gave rise to the notion of “democratic health care,” an idea recently given further substance by the Law of 4 March 2002, a law about “patients' rights and the quality of health care.” This initiative is characterised both by the goal of asserting the involvement of patients in their own health care and by representation of consumers in decision making. The project to democratise health care — albeit just launched — seems to rest on ambiguous if not contradictory foundations, and to have major limits because of lack of attention to political accountability.

Countless studies have been done in Western countries on landscape, be they about its materiality, social representations, or the public policies to which it is the object. In contrast, other than their material dimensions, the social representations of the landscape, have been much less studied in the Southern countries, while landscape policies are virtually non-existent, and thus so are studies about them. Nevertheless, the western concept of “landscape” is infiltrating the countries in different ways, with the current development of an International Convention of the Landscape, modeled on the European Convention of Landscape (Florence, 2000), process that has not been studied yet. That is what leads us to question about the ways landscape can exist in the Southern countries as an object of public policies. In this article, we ask what landscape means through the prism of its institutionalization in the Southern countries, where cultures are often very different from those of Western countries. To address this question, we use an approach that considers landscape as a complex of interrelated dimensions, including material, ideal (representations) and Political (the dimension of the action). This reflection will lead us to propose research paths dealing with the implications of transferring this model.

Keywords: paysage, pays du Sud, représentations sociales, politiques publiques, approche langagière du paysage, landscape, Southern countries, social representations, public policies, landscape approach through language

This longitudinal study illustrates the evolution of the Montreal Economic Institute's behaviour about global warming since its foundation in 1999. Supported by a three-pronged approach, the results obtained show that this organization is integrated into the Canadian hydrocarbon industry coalition and that it has changed its public behaviour from the negation of the anthropogenic global warming to a posture of systematic resistance to climate policies over two decades.

Keywords: réchauffement climatique, lobbying, think tank, contre-mouvement environnemental, groupes d'intérêts, global warming, lobbying, think tank, environmental countermovement, interest groups

AbstractIn this paper, we analyze the impact of public transfers on poverty in Canada and the US using the Luxemburg Income Study data base. The main difficulty is the fact that the impact of any one given transfer on poverty depends on whether one considers the other transfers as part of the income aggregate or not. In order to deal with this issue, we rely on the Shapley method in order to allocate a proper share of the overall impact on poverty of the transfers as a whole to each of the transfers taken individually. The results suggest that poverty is higher in the US than in Canada, in large part because public transfers are more generous in Canada. The results also suggest that transfers to the elderly have the largest total impact on poverty in both countries.

Since the early 1990s, environmental justice movements have demonstrated that the environment is a source of injustice, adding to existing inequalities. Repair tools and regulatory and participatory procedures have been developed to provide responses to the victims of environmental inequalities. While these theoretical and practical approaches have contributed to recognizing this new form of injustice and putting the challenges of environmental justice on the political agenda. They nevertheless seem to be insufficient to deal with environmental irreversibilities. We will present the theoretical and practical limits of distributive justice in a finite world as presented by green political theory and ecocentric ethics. We will then be able to question the ontological and epistemic stakes that an ecological justice offers in a political thought. We will underline the contribution of the sensible and material relation to the nature to apprehend a justice in a finite world.

Keywords: théorie politique verte, justice environnementale, justice écologique, écocentrisme, politiques environnementales, expérience vécue, green political theory, environmental justice, ecological justice, ecocentrism, environmental policy, lived experience

Green industrial policy has recently emerged as a key strategy in tackling climate change. This type of climate policy is not entirely new. It has been used implicitly in the past to develop green technologies. But today, governments are using this strategy more explicitly and visibly to achieve economic, environmental and geopolitical objectives. This short article aims to introduce some elements of this new generation of green industrial policies. It presents the new rationale for this type of climate policy, explores some of the challenges posed by past experiences, and outlines some guidelines to advance robust green industrial policy.

Keywords: Politique industrielle verte, politique climatique, décarbonation, géopolitique, Green industrial policy, climate policy, decarbonization, geopolitics