The citizen experience of Saillans (2014-2020) : A real and concrete utopia of participatory democracy facing the challenge of ecological transition

International audience

anglais. In the French village of Saillans (1300 inhabitants), in 2014, citizens demonstrated against the installation of a supermarket on the outskirts of the village and against the opaque management of elected officials. They then won the municipal elections and set up a radical and alternative village governance project. The newly elected officials give the inhabitants the power to co-construct, decide and implement municipal policy. As for them, they are only responsible for animating and supporting collective action and decision. Citizen participation is massive: a participatory event takes place every 3 to 4 days; 1 in 2 inhabitants participate in the experiment at least once during the six years.The village of Saillans is a changing rural area, marked by urban exodus and growing environmental concerns linked to climate change. The central political stake is the transformation of lifestyles: less carbon-intensive mobility, more grouped housing and less energy intensive, more local and organic food, etc. The greening of daily practices appears as an injunction to change for some and a desired and chosen transformation for others. The revision of the Local Urban Plan appears to be one of the major challenges: it tests the village community on its capacity to live, to decide and to cope together in the face of environmental changes.In this sense, the Saillans experience constitutes a real and concrete utopia, where citizen participation is the main driving force of socio-ecological transition. Breaking with the national tradition of planning and the logic of strategic projects, the inhabitants are developing a new, more improvised mode of action. They see the transition as setting in motion towards an indeterminate objective, to be built collectively along the way. They thus combine two democratic practices, action and deliberation, based on the ethics of “doing” and “discussion”. This experience informs and accelerates economic, social and political transformations, foreshadowing a possible rural “counter-anthropocene”.The article offers a situated analysis, presenting (1) the intentions and practices of the municipal team of which the author was a part, (2) the trials and tribulations experienced (3), then an overview of the transformations underway. It ends with a discussion on the transformative potential of this radical citizen experience of social and ecological transition.