The use of Law to change influence models: the "Name and Shame" technic as a degrowth tool?
Abstract
Overcoming ecological, social and democratic challenges requires reshaping our cultural and political settings and socioeconomic organisation to align them with a degrowth pathway. The organized reduction of the extraction and consumption of resources calls for an appropriate legal framework, yet to be designed. To be fair and effective, this legal framework should differentiate and enforce progressive rules according to the nature and intensity of the consumption. While conceptual frameworks to differentiate consumptions have already been developed, as the Negawatt model, the main challenge lies in establishing a collective decision-making process to define operational criteria and consumption thresholds and ensure their application. Participatory schemes, such as citizens' conventions, backed by solid legal guarantees, could offer a promising democratic tool for this purpose. Besides, the low effectiveness of coercive measures on powerful actors, who have low sensitivity to price signals and use strategies to avoid legal sanctions, calls for innovative sanction mechanisms. In this respect, existing sanctions could usefully be complemented by “naming and shaming” strategies. Public denonciation could discourage excessive and unsustainable practices from certain individuals or companies by criticizing them publicly. It would also help to de-normalize and devaluate the models of over-consumption that such practices propagate through trickled-down imitation and emulation effects. The proposal to create a dedicated citizen-led institution in charge of denunciating excessive and harmful consumptions could therefore play a key role in exerting social pressure on offenders while influencing the social imaginary and raising awareness. However, its actions should be regulated under a specific legal framework in order to guarantee the proportionality of the measures and their compliance with fundamental rights.
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BibTeX
@article{lambert2026change,
title = {{The use of Law to change influence models: the "Name and Shame" technic as a degrowth tool?}},
author = {Marie-Laure Lambert and François Briens},
journal = {Lexelectronica},
year = {2026},
month = jul,
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05734287v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - The use of Law to change influence models: the "Name and Shame" technic as a degrowth tool?
AU - Marie-Laure Lambert
AU - François Briens
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/07/06
JO - Lexelectronica
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05734287v1
AB - Overcoming ecological, social and democratic challenges requires reshaping our cultural and political settings and socioeconomic organisation to align them with a degrowth pathway. The organized reduction of the extraction and consumption of resources calls for an appropriate legal framework, yet to be designed. To be fair and effective, this legal framework should differentiate and enforce progressive rules according to the nature and intensity of the consumption. While conceptual frameworks to differentiate consumptions have already been developed, as the Negawatt model, the main challenge lies in establishing a collective decision-making process to define operational criteria and consumption thresholds and ensure their application. Participatory schemes, such as citizens' conventions, backed by solid legal guarantees, could offer a promising democratic tool for this purpose. Besides, the low effectiveness of coercive measures on powerful actors, who have low sensitivity to price signals and use strategies to avoid legal sanctions, calls for innovative sanction mechanisms. In this respect, existing sanctions could usefully be complemented by “naming and shaming” strategies. Public denonciation could discourage excessive and unsustainable practices from certain individuals or companies by criticizing them publicly. It would also help to de-normalize and devaluate the models of over-consumption that such practices propagate through trickled-down imitation and emulation effects. The proposal to create a dedicated citizen-led institution in charge of denunciating excessive and harmful consumptions could therefore play a key role in exerting social pressure on offenders while influencing the social imaginary and raising awareness. However, its actions should be regulated under a specific legal framework in order to guarantee the proportionality of the measures and their compliance with fundamental rights.
ER -