Joint perspectives

Interview with Alice Mounissamy, journalist and scientific mediator, co-founder of the Nantes Futurable association and Jules Sekedoua Kouadio, research engineer at the Water and Environment Laboratory (LEE) at Gustave Eiffel University.

Alice Mounissamy : Discussions around climate change or socio-environmental issues sometimes tend to be “taken over” by administrative or technical agents. However, everyone has knowledge, experience and legitimacy to contribute to and understand the challenges posed by the major issues that will impact the world. That was the initial idea of the association and that’s what drives me: giving a true opportunity to speak to people who are not used to doing so and supporting them to develop democratic debate around issues that affect their future.

Jules Sekedoua Kouadio : Scientists’ perspective cannot be perfect without citizen contributions: the two are complementary. To respond sustainably to climate issues, it is necessary to create a framework for collaboration between science and society with more dialogue, co-construction, co-analysis and co-implementation. This project also involved the challenge of interdisciplinarity. For it to succeed, a range of actors needed to understand each other in terms of vocabulary, tools and timelines.

Alice M. : There have long been efforts to develop dialogue between researchers and local municipalities, and the Futurable project was able to contribute in a very concrete way. It helped make the discourse of researchers intelligible and allowed local municipalities to receive this expert information, anchored around a specific question. We built bridges for a common working culture, which is very useful for transferring knowledge, in both directions. The other important result is that by combining the ethics of researchers, mediators and literature experts, we were able to establish a common code. By backing the game with expert knowledge and methodology to produce the story, we made our consideration of this question serious once again, after it had been relatively cheapened by recent narratives, and preserved its potential power to build the future and create a society.

Jules Sekedoua K. : With Futurable, we were able to go beyond the terms of the game and concretely observe the appropriation of ideas produced and discussions in implementing policy. One of the highlights of the project was the great debate titled “Shaping our cities. Together, let’s invent the life of tomorrow” organised by Nantes Metropole. This resulted in a booklet for actors filled with recommendations and a report of the workshops. It was a tangible success, showing the influence that the game can have. Concerning the game itself, the aim is to continue improving it, create new extensions, a board and take it to other territories... Many perspectives are emerging, thanks in particular to the renewed trust between the various stakeholders.