Since the mid-2000s, peak oil (growing energy prices) and climate change (carbon emissions reduction) have been contributing to the agenda-setting of energy demand reduction as a priority for public action, from local to international levels. In this context, in France, the multifaceted notion of “sobriété énergétique” has met with growing, cross-party success. In contrast to energy sufficiency, which is based on technological innovation substituting technical capital for natural capital, the notion of sobriété rather insists on the need for a collective renegotiation of norms of consumption that generate energy demand. On the basis of a regional case (Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France), we will study how the local institutionalisation logics of this sobriety objective contribute to highlight the limits of a territorial project implicitly based on the ideas of growth and development. This contribution aims to explain how this institutional appropriation is part of an adaptation to a situation of an energy, economic and political contraction. The classical distinction between “chosen” and “suffered” sobriété diminishes, allowing an analysis of the evolution of decision-making processes in a context of growing material constraint. Using a green political theory approach, we will question the contribution of sobriété as a territorial political objective to the emergence of a post-growth public policty frame. This way, we will confront contemporary democratic theories with the imperative of energy sobriety, in order to identify both the conditions of, and the limits to, the renegotiation of local deliberative practices in a post-growth perspective.
