Producing knowledge, or making action possible?

Yesterday I spent the day in a room where the air conditioning was broken, with about ten researchers, working on the societal impact of their research project. The irony did not escape me: there I was, still preaching a science in the service of society, with motivated researchers who want to see their work produce results, while that very work was made impossible (you cannot think properly at that temperature) by the fact that the work of other scientists, precisely, had been ignored.

It was, of course, entirely predictable.

We have known for more than fifty years. In 1972, the Meadows report already laid out the curve we should expect. Since then the reports have piled up, year after year, each more alarming than the last, all the way to the work of the IPCC, which leaves no room for doubt. This week's heat is not an accident: Météo-France says plainly that these episodes will be more and more frequent, earlier, and more intense. The night of 22 June broke the country's all-time record for nighttime heat. All of it had been predicted, and we are following the announced trajectory.

So there is no shortage of knowledge. The data is here.

And yet we keep producing more. Each report is finer than the one before: the models sharpen, the projections grow more granular. Every year you can read studies in ever more specific fields: the impact of climate change on health, agriculture, work, migration, finance. We hope that, through sheer precision, knowledge will finally move things. But it is neither knowledge nor precision that is missing.

Everyone in their role

Overwhelmed by the heat, we would like to find someone to blame. If the data is known, why, or because of whom, are we here? And yet, while we can blame the economic system as a whole, and the race for economic growth (a priority over every other concern) as a political horizon, it is hard to find any obvious culprits. We can turn to past governments that failed to anticipate, to the heads of oil companies protecting their legacy business. But that is not a number of people large enough to paralyse an entire country. What is most troubling today is that very few people are actually playing a bad part.

Take the scientists who warn about the climate, the ones who act on the world mainly by informing public decisions. They do their job, and they do it well: they measure, they model, they write. Producing this knowledge is what is expected of them, and they often consider that this is where their role ends. It is true that the political decision is not theirs to make.

And then there is something we often forget: a researcher is an employee. They depend on an employer, an institution, a public research and funding policy whose criteria for success they did not choose. We may hope they act as citizens, and some do. But asking them to carry alone what the entire organisation of their work discourages is asking a great deal of an individual, and too much of a profession as a whole.

Alongside them, the elected official handles the crisis when it is at the door, the institution answers the request it is given, the employee or the administrator does what is asked within the perimeter of their job description. Each of these behaviours, taken on its own, is reasonable. You could defend them one by one without difficulty. And yet their sum is a country at 35 °C, with no one inside who feels directly responsible for the heat.

Staying in your role is not merely "comfortable": it is the path that rewards. Your career advances, you are well rated, even listened to. Stepping out of your role, by contrast, costs. Making waves is not appreciated, and it takes a tremendous amount of energy. I followed a researcher through his ordeal, inside a large research organisation, when all he wanted was to get more involved in environmental questions and to have it written into his job description. He had to fight his own management, for months on end, to earn the right. Nothing heroic, just the wish to do a little more than his current remit, and it exhausted him. I will not even mention here the researchers who speak out in the media and pay for it on social networks, in waves of hatred and threats.

This is what we have to grasp. The system needs no ill will to produce inaction: staying in your role is comfortable and leaving it is costly. Responsibility dilutes until no one carries it anymore. Ulrich Beck spoke of organised irresponsibility, and it seems to me the term fits our era. We are not facing the moral fault of thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals, but an architecture that lets each person do their job conscientiously, and conclude that it is now for others to make the changes that are needed.

And yet, faced with an existential threat, the question has to be asked: how far should loyalty to one's role go? Is doing well what is expected of you enough?

What is asked of us

Recently, the head of a large public research institute told me, plainly: "As a public institution, we respond to what the government asks of us." That is true, and it is indeed a large part of the mandate. But is it enough in the face of a threat unlike any other?

Because politics turns to science only in a crisis. Mad cow disease, Covid, the heatwave: each time, researchers are called in urgently, listened to, thanked. Then the crisis passes, and calm returns with its silence. But climate change is not a crisis. It is a relentless rise that will provoke a reaction only when it is far too late. The alert is given, set down as a report on a desk, but what real impact does it have if it is not heard?

Does a public institution's responsibility stop at the report it produces? Or does it extend to undertaking every action necessary until that alert is heard? Is it the scientists themselves, as individuals, who must carry the message louder and louder? And what, then, is the place of their employer?

Some call for scientists to drop their reserve and become activists. A few scientists are becoming more present in the media, backing public campaigns, and they often pay the price. That stance is not without problems of its own either. Activism is another profession, one they do not necessarily master. Knowing that a problem exists does not tell you what solution to bring. It can even be counterproductive: a scientist judged alarmist or too engaged runs the risk of no longer being heard by the administration. What we need is not a dramatic gesture, nor a few individuals sacrificing themselves for the rest. It is a different organisation of work.

Outside of crises, politics has steered research and innovation by a single compass: economic performance. Competitiveness, patents, company creation, growth. That is what gets measured. The production of knowledge is structured for that. Asking it to weigh on what it was never organised to address is wishful thinking.

Working differently

During the Green Deal, in the post-2020 enthusiasm, scientific institutions laid out the trajectories to follow. And yet, in the prevailing optimism, you could already hear certain members of parliament and local officials: "All of this is very good, but I do not see how we are going to put it into practice on the ground." How did the scientific institutions respond to that question? By staying in their role: implementation is not our job, at best we can study where things will get stuck on the ground. Years later, once the anger of stakeholders had swept through, and as the advances were being unpicked one by one, the head of a research organisation told me: "Maybe we missed something."

That something, I believe, was not one more report on the blockages. It was the people from the ground in the room, from the very start. It is what we did for fifteen years at SoScience, and what I see at work today in a deep tech company whose growth I support. When it works, there is nothing magical about it: the solutions are slower to design, but they hold, because they were thought through by those who will have to implement them and live with them.

A different organisation of work means exactly this: bringing together, from the outset, those who produce the knowledge, those who live the problem on the ground, those who already carry solutions, and those who make public policy. Not so that the researcher stops being a researcher, but so that "doing your job well" takes on a new meaning: producing knowledge that takes into account, from its very conception, how it will be able to act. This is not about citizen science, or a handful of "different" projects to showcase in an annual report. It is about rethinking entirely the way research and innovation work is organised, so that the knowledge produced does not take the form of a report, but of solutions co-designed with, and made actionable by, the actors who took part in the research (whether they are activists, workers, farmers, artists, and so on).

It is a return to a form of democracy. Not the democracy of the ballot box, but a technical democracy, the kind that widens the circle of those who have a say in what science makes and in the proposals it puts forward. Not handing down top-down solutions in reports, but going out to create the research, and its implementation, together with stakeholders, is still too rare. It is not built into the way research and innovation work is organised.

We are not short of knowledge. We have even learned to turn it into economic value: that is the whole point of what we call valorisation, with its professions, its structures, its funding. But we have never given social and environmental value the same standing: no organisation, no funds, no training, no career path. The real question, then, is not to ask researchers to be more responsible. It is to ask when we will decide to build, for the transition, the infrastructure we knew how to build for the market.