From the Paris Conference to the Paris of the Yellow Vests: a laboratory for characterizing transition profiles and cultural repertoires to apprehend social and perceptive conflicts of sustainability

Abstract: This paper contributes to sustainability transitions studies in delivering stronger focus and relevance on culture and discursive features to apprehend social resistances towards transition agendas, and the unprecedented emergence of the challenging antagonism of the ‘end of the world’ versus ‘the end of the month’ revealed by the case study of the Yellow Vests crisis in France since November 2018. Aiming at opening the door to broader “ontologies” to transition frameworks, while supporting narrower profiles for the formulation of transition strategies, the paper initiates a narrative analysis and a tracing process to assess how the universal resolve of the 2015 Paris Conference and its established legitimacy of the sustainability discourse has been further contested by the Yellow Vests, and their fractured framing that would permeate the national public cognitive stage. From the Paris Conference to the rise of Yellow Vests, from the ‘end of the world’ to the ‘end of the month’, is to be investigated the rise and fall of the legitimacy of the French sustainability discourse in analysing how both events and their cultural and discursive resonance played out through the five dimensions of salience and plausibility brought by the cultural performative approach. Tip of a broader social crisis, the movement reveals an original conflict of temporalities which embodies the symptom of the inevitable interdependency of socio-economic inequalities to sustainability transitions. Beyond the resistance itself, the Yellow Vests embody an original exemplar for the importance of cultural appropriation within the sustainability discourse’ legitimation processes.