Household access to energy : how does the French State organize the levers of action of the economic actors involved ?

From the suspension of the raise of the carbon tax in response to the Gilets jaunes in 2018 to French government's measures to tackle rising electricity and gas prices in autumn 2021 and 2022, the energy changes in recent years have put the energy consumer at the forefront of the political stage, and in particular the "fuel poor" consumer. Public action in France to take in charge fuel poverty has three strands: management of unpaid bills and energy supplies; access to rights and the fight against exclusion; and incentives for renovation (Dubois [2012] 2013; Cacciari 2017; Labussière 2017; Marin and Noto 1998; Perrin-Heredia 2013). In each of these areas, two levers of action are mobilized: solvency and information for households, whether considered energy insecure or not. In this paper, we study the interweaving of collective action and public action in order to characterize the place occupied by the State in the distribution of the tasks of qualifying the "energy insecure" households and taking charge of them. To this end, we use two materials: a review of the legislative literature and the corpus resulting from semi-structured interviews conducted with organizations involved in the fight against fuel poverty as part of our thesis, defended in 2022. We begin by showing that the two main levers used by institutional measures to combat fuel poverty are designed not only to contribute to access to energy, but also to "shape" the energy consumer (Batifoulier, Domin, and Gadreau 2008). This leads to a distribution of economic players according to whether they are located on the energy market or at its margins. Thereafter we characterize the place occupied by the state, based on an application of "state conventions" (Salais 2015), from which we conclude that two forms of coordination between actors coexist in terms of access to energy. Batifoulier, Philippe, Jean-Paul Domin, and Maryse Gadreau. 2008. "Mutation du patient et construction d'un marché de la santé. L'expérience française." Revue Française de Socio-Économie 1 (1): 27–46. Cacciari, Joseph. 2017. "Les guichets de la misère énergétique. Le traitement social des impayés d'énergie des ménages comme mode de production, de tri et de moralisation des ‘consommateurs' à l'ère de la transition énergétique." Sociétés Contemporaines 1 (105): 53–78. Dubois, Vincent. (2012) 2013. "The sociology of administrative work, a study of ‘street-level bureaucracy' à la française." In La France et ses administrations – Un état des savoirs, edited by Jean-Michel Eymeri-Douzans and Geert Bouckaert, 169–77. Bruxelles: Éditions Bruylant. Labussière, Olivier. 2017. "Enquête sur l'émergence d'un espace de coordination marchande : l'offre de rénovation globale de la maison individuelle dans la Biovallée (Drôme, France)." Géographie, Économie, Société 2 (2): 221–41. Marin, Robin, and Renée Noto. 1998. "La gestion des impayés d'eau et d'énergie : stratégies d'entreprises et services aux plus démunis." Politiques et Management Public 16 (4): 101–17. Perrin-Heredia, Ana. 2013. "La mise en ordre de l'économie domestique. Accompagnement budgétaire et étiquetage de la déviance économique." Gouvernement et Action Publique 2 (2): 303–30. Salais, Robert. 1998. "À la recherche du fondement conventionnel des institutions." In Institutions et conventions: La réflexivité de l'action économique, edited by Robert Salais, Elisabeth Chatel, and Dorothée Rivaud-Danset, 255–92. EHESS. ———. 2015. "Revisiter la question de l'État à la lumière de la crise de l'Europe." Revue Française de Socio-Économie 2: 245–62.