Résumé
The liberalization of the electricity market at the end of the electrification period was underpinned by a centralized global value chain (GVC) model in which the state, but also increasingly large industrial firms, played a dominant role. Initially regarded as a national public good/service, electricity was gradually commoditized and dematerialized into interconnected flows of transnational trade, which are channeled through stock exchanges and financial actors. This shift towards market self-regulation of electricity is characterized by the disembedding movement theorized by Karl Polanyi. In opposition to this model of governance, alternative forms of citizen organization have emerged at the local level, bringing together local residents and public actors in renewable energy cooperatives. These cooperatives are organized around a mission of energy transition as part of the social and solidarity economy, while relying on decentralized production of electricity from renewable sources. To enhance their ability to drive sustainable change and extend their alternative socio-political project, these cooperatives are questioning the objective of scaling up. The search for a change of scale implies - from this perspective - analyzing forms of inter-organizational cooperation through partnerships or networks. Hence, they are experimenting with constructing an alternative, disintermediated value chain that connects production, supply, and consumption activities locally.This research lays the groundwork for a theoretical characterization of “alternative value(s) chain” to understand how alternatives are organized in the face of the global value chain (CGV) of electricity. We use the Polanyian approach to study the conditions of social and environmental (dis)embedding of energy governance. The following question is raised: How can an alternative value chain be built to emancipate from the market and achieve systemic sustainability? What disembedding tensions might be generated by scaling up within local citizen cooperatives?An embedded ethnography was conducted to study two citizen renewable energy cooperatives located in the south of France. The first case, ACTTE, located upstream from the chain, is a meta-cooperative of production, which federates eight collectives as members on a departemental scale. The second case, Enercoop Languedoc-Roussillon, is part of the Enercoop National network, which operates in electricity supply, downstream of the chain. The study mobilized description and analogy to produce empirical narratives through abduction.The results describe according to a processual arrangement a three-phase for building an alternative energy value chain: (1) from the emergence of collective citizen actions, (2) to the orientation towards a goal of scaling up, (3) to the operationalization of a chain organization during the two years of participant observation of the thesis (2021-2023). They show the foundations of the socio-environmental embedding of these alternatives. But they also highlight the fact that, in the structuring of this alternative chain injunctions to change scale emerge of a productionist, standardizing and accelerating order. This orientation generates four types of disembedding tensions in relation to nature, culture, politic, and time. These tensions destabilize the territorial anchoring of cooperatives and fragment the positioning of actors between several visions: domestic, public service delegation, and industrial.We therefore make two main contributions in the light of embeddedness theory. The first characterizes the foundations of an alternative value chain and its construction process. The second aims to identify a typology of disembedding tensions when these "alternative organizations" cooperate and organize themselves in chains.