Will we ever “learn from our mistakes”? Framing environmental problems in times of COVID-19 lockdown (France)

Abstract

International audienceTo contain the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak, the French government ordered a national lockdown from March 17th to May 10th 2020. At the beginning of the spring, French people thus experienced a strict limitation of their movement in public places, with very limited access to nature. Between April 22nd and May, 11rst, we realized an online survey to question the effects of this unprecedented situation on both the people’s relationship with the nearby nature and their representations of environmental issues. Indeed, crisis and environmental sociologies question how environmental issues are requalified by individuals (Chateauraynaud, 2017) in relation with unevenly distributed resources and experiences. The inquiry focused on the sociodemographic characteristics of participants; their lockdown experience ; their environmental behaviours and daily relationship with nature before and during lockdown; and “opinion about how this crisis could transform how environment issues would be collectively engaged in the short and long terms. This study gathered in three weeks 1,200 responses, nationally, with various sociodemographic characteristics. This contribution will explore how, in times of a global pandemic, people build different and competing framings (Gusfield, 1981) of the environmental issues, with various understandings of the causal relationships between the environmental crisis and the COVID-19 outbreak. It will then examine how this is related to individual socioeconomic characteristics and material conditions of lockdown experience. Also, it will question the capacity of questionnaire-based surveys to capture how the cognitive categories used to frame environmental issues are transformed in times of crisis