Introduction. The making of ecological compensation: Towards more ecological modernization?

The requirement of ecological compensation that had not applied since its first official introduction in France in 1976, has gradually imposed itself in French law for projects subject to environmental assessment. The 2016 law on biodiversity, which could have provided an opportunity to build a veritable right of compensation, leaves areas of uncertainty, both in terms of methodology (measurement of ecological equivalence, spatio-temporal dimensions) and governance (regulation of relationships between the different actors). Following analyses highlighting these shortcomings, we wished, in this issue, to address the current mechanisms of compensation and the various contributions that compose it. We provide keys to understanding this process through the controversies revolving around compensation, but also experiments to which it gives rise. Compensation thus appears as a tool that directs in a particular way the integration of the environment into public policies and, more broadly, into the economy: it induces this integration through a standardization process of nature designed to allow the displacement and substitution of the impacted nature. Furthermore, it does not solve governance problems which are left to the experts, the judge and self-regulation. The proposed analyzes are thus part of a wider context, which they help to illuminate, that of the profound transformations of the State’s action in the dynamics of “ecological modernization.”