(Associate Researcher, March 2022 – present)

BIOGRAPHY:

Bérénice Girard is a researcher with the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD). Her research sits at the crossroad of environmental sociology, sociology of the State and South Asian Studies. Her work has focused on the management of the Ganges River, on energy changes in urban and urbanizing localities of Northern India and on the transition to solar energy in India.

Bérénice Girard defended her PhD in sociology in July 2019 at EHESS Paris (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales — School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). Her thesis, entitled “The Engineers, the River and the State. The role and place of engineers in the management of the Ganges”, was awarded the French Academic Network on Asian Studies (GIS Asie) 2020 PhD Award. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés (Gustave Eiffel University, 2018-2020), at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (2021) and at the University of Stavanger in Norway (2021-2023). She was also awarded a Landhaus fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (LMU Munich, 2022).

Recent publications:

• Siddharth Sareen, and Bérénice Girard. 2025. “Renewable Energy Communities for Energy-Poor Households : Policy Mobility Challenges in Urban and Peri-Urban European Contexts.” Pp. 25–46 in The cultural complexity of carbon : green transformations in contemporary society, edited by Steffen Dalsgaard, Andy Lautrup, Katinka A. Schyberg, and Ingmar Lippert. Londres: Routledge.
• Girard, Bérénice. 2025. “Public Civil Engineering, an Expertise of the Past?: Insights from a Contested Public Utility in a Time of Reforms.” Pp. 289–314 in Engineers and Society in India, edited by V. Caru. Oxford University Press Oxford.
• Shokrgozar Shayan, and Girard Bérénice. 2024. “‘The companies are powerful, people are weak’: India’s solar energy ambitions and the legitimation of dispossession in Rajasthan”, Journal of Political Ecology. 31(1):48-66. 10.2458/jpe.5410 50 51 15.
• Girard, Bérénice, Sareen Siddharth. 2024. “Change everything so that (almost) nothing changes? Investigating the territorial distribution of solar energy subsidies in rural India.” Environmental Sociology, 10(4), 385–396. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2024.2372890 16.
• Girard, Bérénice, Shokrgozar Shayan, and Sareen Siddharth. 2024. “The Meaning of Solar Energy: Political Imaginaries of Solar Energy in Contemporary India.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 25148486241302185. doi: 10.1177/25148486241302185.