Institut Rousseau
The Rousseau Institute is a French think tank created in 2020, led by Nicolas Dufrêne. The institute publishes mainly works relating to the French and European economy.
Main areas of research concentrate on the climate transition, digital sovereignty, egalitarian democracy and republican participation.
Overview
The Rousseau Institute is a think tank created on 4 March 2020 in Paris and which defines itself as a "laboratory of ideas which attempts to reconcile republican refoundation and political ecology".The institute sees itself in the tradition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who emphasised the sovereignty of the people, and free will based on exercised reason as the path to modernity. The institute's work follows a generalist framework.
The French newspaper L'Humanité classifies the journal on the left side of the political spectrum.
Operations
Headed by Nicolas Dufrêne, a senior civil servant and essayist, Its deputy director is Beverly Toudic. Its director of studies is Benjamin Morel, lecturer in public law.Its scientific council has some twenty members, including the demographer Hervé Le Bras, the geographer Anaïs Voy-Gillis, and magistrate Magali Lafourcade. Fabien Escalona, Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Nathan Sperber and Christophe Ventura are also part of the scientific board.
The institute is financed by donations and membership fees. It is constituted as an association.
Position papers
Climate transformation
With the position paper 2% for 2 degrees: Investment needs for the climate neutrality of France in 2050, the institute has presented an overall cost calculation for the climate neutrality of France. Based on sector analyses, an overall financing requirement and fields of action were identified, and proposals for financing were elaborated.An executive summary of the French report is available in English. Key statements of the report include
- The climate targets for the 2 °C goal of the Paris Climate Agreement could be met for France with additional annual expenditure of €57 billion
- Total costs of climate adaptation amount to €182 billion per year, of which €125 billion can be covered by reallocating existing and planned spending to climate transformation projects alone.
- The Institute identifies 7 fields of action for which a priority list of 33 emergency measures is proposed.
- Based on these measures, France's emissions should fall by 87% by 2050, while the negative emissions sector's contribution would make France emissions-negative. The aim is to bring France back on the Fit for 55 path.
Democracy
The Institut Rousseau has also published work on democratic reform and citizen participation in political institutions. In July 2024 the institute released a thematic policy note titled « Intégrer le peuple dans les institutions et la vie politique », authored by Beverley Toudic, a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Parliamentary Studies in Lille and director of the institute’s democratic studies unit, together with Harold Coué. The document assesses what it characterizes as a democratic deficit in France, marked by declining trust in political institutions, a sense of disconnection between citizens and representatives, and increasing political disengagement. It identifies a need to go beyond a purely majoritarian, top-down conception of democracy and proposes a series of reforms aimed at strengthening citizen involvement in law-making and public decision-making processes.The proposals outlined include improving representativity through proportional representation elements, reconsidering presidential and legislative electoral calendars, and creating new mechanisms for citizen control over legislation, such as post-parliamentary veto procedures triggered by a threshold number of elector signatures. The note also advocates for more direct citizen inclusion in the development of laws and public policies, the expansion of deliberative democratic practices like citizen conventions, simplification of shared initiative referenda requirements, and enhancing local democratic co-construction processes. These measures are presented as ways to restore trust, increase responsiveness of institutions to public preferences, and invigorate democratic legitimacy by deepening participatory channels beyond periodic elections.
In November 2020 the institute public « Une nouvelle République des citoyens: 50 propositions pour renouveler nos institutions », authored by Benjamin Morel, maître de conférences in public law and head of institutional studies at Institut Rousseau. The note diagnoses what it views as structural democratic dysfunctions of the French Fifth Republic, attributing them to excessive executive power, weak parliamentary control, and insufficient mechanisms for direct citizen influence. It proposes a broad set of institutional reforms organized around objectives such as strengthening parliamentary legitimacy and representativeness, rebalancing executive and legislative powers, enhancing the role of citizens in public decision-making, and promoting both deliberative and direct democratic instruments like citizen assemblies and lower thresholds for popular initiatives. Morel’s work emphasizes practical, operationally oriented changes aimed at deepening democratic participation beyond periodic elections and revitalizing republican institutions to better align with contemporary expectations of democratic engagement.
Other works
The institute also publishes on Issues concerning monetary policy. One of the proposals promoted by the Rousseau Institute is to cancel the sovereign debts held by the European Central Bank in exchange for investments to finance "ecological reconstruction". Nicolas Dufrêne, director of the institute, argues that cancelling the debts held by the central bank "would not harm anyone" and "will free up investment capacity to develop the ecological and social resilience of our societies".N. Dufrêne published a book with Alain Grandjean in February 2020 to defend this proposal, Une monnaie écologique, pour sauver la planète. He is also the initiator of a tribune signed by nearly 150 economists and politicians, published in February 2021 in several European media publiciations.
This proposal has been criticised by several politicians, such as the President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, who considers debt cancellation by the ECB "unthinkable".
Five members of the Rousseau Institute, including the economist Gaël Giraud and Nicolas Dufrêne, also have a simplification of the method of calculating income tax, promoting it under consideration of to progressiveness and social justice: the ABC tax.
The Rousseau Institute's work also focuses on digital sovereignty.
The institute's proposals focus in particular on the following two areas focussing on French political sphere:
- « Reinvest in the idea of a shared republican reason and of a common good for humanity.. »
- « Sovereignty must return to the people who, through the Republic, must make the State the instrument for shaping their future. »
- Based on the observation that decentralisation has failed for 40 years in France, the Institute wishes to "abolish the regions and give autonomy and inspiration back to the communes".
The institute has also engaged in research on monetary and financial issues, notably through work led by Nicolas Dufrêne on crypto-assets. In this context, IR contributed to the report « Les crypto-actifs : du mirage à la réalité », which assesses the financial, economic, ecological and political impacts of crypto-assets. This work highlights risks associated with the rapid growth and volatility of crypto-asset markets, questions the promises of decentralization and monetary sovereignty, and discusses the need for robust regulation to mitigate systemic, environmental and investor protection concerns. IR has published several works criticizing the unregulated emergence of crypto-assets and advocating for policy responses at the European level.
Commentary
Lenny Benbara commented in the French magazine Marianne on the think tank's mission by saying"Republicanism is a response to the other great threat hanging over us: the spectre of division, fragmentation and isolation of individuals in a society where all instances of solidarity are being dismantled. Republicanism is therefore neither a slogan nor an ideological posture, but a solution to prevent France from breaking up into antagonistic archipelagos. If the law of the strongest were to apply in the future, society would risk being more violent than it has ever been due to climate change."