Territorial Sufficiency A Pathway to Empower Bottom-Up Action

Dear City Council,

In November 2023, the French Association of Mayors (AMF) spoke out about the centralization ofenvironmental governance, implying «downsizing policies (external link) »at the local level. This statement reveals a clear reality: decisions taken in Parliament rarely reflect the complexity of territories, or the importance of their self-governance.

This letter sets out to clarify the concept of Sufficiency, too often misunderstood, and therefore poorly implemented, and to show how local elected officials can champion bottom-up, sufficiency-driven approaches.

First and foremost, we should clarify what Sufficiency is not.

1. Sufficiency is not confined to the energy sector: France's national low-carbon strategy (SNBC) treats it as merely one physical lever to achieve ecological transition, alongside efficiency and decarbonization levers that too often overshadow Sufficiency's systemic dimension.
2. Sufficiency is not an answer to shortages as developed by the French government in its Sufficiency Plan: a short-term response to the Ukraine war's impact on the French economy, which undercuts the long-term transformation Sufficiency calls for.
3. Sufficiency is not a set of top-down decisions localities must endure such as the failure of the Citizen Climate Convention (CCC) in 2020: a citizens' assembly convened by the government in response to the Yellow Vest crisis, whose proposals were largely ignored. Sufficiency is not a moralizing discourse about individual behavior and sacrifice.

Second, we must understand what Sufficiency actually is.

Sufficiency means achieving a 'good life' for all, enhancing social justice and respecting fundamental rights within our Earth's capacities. France is at the forefront of Sufficiency, where it is already embedded in two public institutions, CESE (the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council) and ADEME (the French Ecological Transition Agency), which specifically champion:

1. Consistency across political scales: EU, France, regions, local governance.
2. The involvement of every stakeholder and public actor in co-constructing solutions that respect social and environmental justice.
3. A positive narrative, a "culture of Sufficiency", based on living differently to achieve a good life, rather than having less (as it is too often framed today).

Third, we must recognize the role local elected officials could play. The experience of the CCC showed the failure of a purely top-down approach on environmental and social justice subjects. Sufficiency therefore calls for building bottom-up counterpowers to complement these insufficient institutional processes. Here, local elected officials can act as a coordinator of the two approaches, rather than merely implementing national policy.

Fourth, we must go beyond existing frameworks. To go beyond ADEME's proposition, we have developed a framework to support broader bottom-up action, drawing on two complementary theories. Max-Neef's Human Fundamental Needs matrix identifies what people need across nine fundamental categories and how they seek to meet those needs through culturally determined 'satisfiers'. Sen's Capabilities Approach then asks under what conditions people can pursue those needs, given their resources and context. Combined, the two frameworks form a tool that is both diagnostic and prescriptive: the first reveals what needs to change; the second grounds that change in what is realistically achievable.

In practice, the framework guides users through four questions: i) What is the situation? ii) What should be done? iii) What can be done? iv) What do we prioritize?

The questions move users from needs identification to ethical filtering of satisfiers, to feasibility assessment, and finally to informed collective and democratic choice. Because it can be adapted to different issues, scales, and stakeholders, it works equally at the individual, community, or territorial level.

My proposed framework is not a rigid protocol, but a starting point for what a Sufficiency Agora could look like in practice: a structured yet flexible space for communities to deliberate on their needs and choose how to meet them sustainably, with respect for the environment, fundamental human rights, and social justice.

Concretely, it could take the form of facilitated citizen workshops at the commune level, built around a specific territorial issue such as mobility or housing.

Local elected officials are the architects of the collective narrative that makes transition acceptable, desirable, and sustainable. This framework can help you bridge the gap between political decisions and people's real needs.