Résumé

The study of social conflicts about spatial uses is subject to an increasing number of researches. There are two main methodological approaches. The first focuses on the analysis of individual paths based on sociology of activist commitment and mobilization. The second measures quantitatively conflicts through media databases. Both methods face the difficulty of reconstructing certain key actions that are missing in institutional or media sources. Our aim is to analyze the development of these spatial conflicts by providing a novel methodology that combines the two approaches mentioned above. To overcome the gaps of these approaches, our analysis incorporates an additional variable: the resources for collective action (e.g. money, time, knowledge, etc.) that actors mobilize to enforce their purposes and representations. The diversity of resources used at the project different steps relates the intensity of actors’ commitments. It therefore gives additional information on the conflict dynamic. Wind power development is an undeniable example of projects causing recurring social conflicts about spatial uses. We experiment our methodology in the particular case of a wind power project in the Switzerland Jura Mountains that started 18 years ago. The project length makes it a particularly interesting case of study. Our research question is the following one: How can an evaluation of the resources for collective action contribute to model the dynamics of actors’ commitments? In the first part, we present the conceptual and methodological framework to investigate these social dynamics. Then, in a second, we implement this framework to study the case of the wind project in order to discuss the relevance of our methodology. The empirical results show that the methodology improves the understanding of the conflict process, and more especially of the actors’ strategy games. However, it faces a number of temporary difficulties related to the coding of primary data.

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