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Paper short abstract

How do metropolitan marine research infrastructures shape the green transition in French postcolonial territories, and for whom are these so-called ecological transitions made? This paper traces epistemic frictions from the CNRS's expansion into three “scientific outposts” and examines their implic.

Paper long abstract

In the 1990s, France's largest research organization, the CNRS, shifted towards establishing a lasting presence in French overseas territories by founding permanent laboratories, where it had previously operated only through short-term missions.This movement intensified in the 2010s with the creation of the CNRS institute dedicated to the environment (INEE) and the restructuring of major research infrastructures (TGIR), including facilities for long-term ecosystem monitoring.

These developments occurred within the “oceanic turn” (Artaud, 2023), driven by ecological concerns as well as scientific and strategic ambitions, as French policy called to “set a course for the oceans.” Overseas territories thus became privileged sites for producing knowledge on tropical biodiversity and coral reef ecosystems, while consolidating CNRS’s prestige nationally and internationally. This also reflects broader efforts to govern and valorize these spaces amid ecological degradation and environmental transition (Le Meur & Muni Toke, 2024; Bérard, 2025).

This paper examines the effects of these institutional implantations in postcolonial territories shaped by enduring colonial power relations: for whom are these research stations created, and whose knowledge counts in defining the green(s) transition(s) ?

Drawing on three French marine “scientific outposts” (Dumoulin Kervran et al., 2024), a marine station in French Polynesia and overseas deep-sea observatories, we combine ethnography, interviews with CNRS science policymakers, and archival analysis. We show that these epistemic frictions concern not only differences in ways of knowing, but also the material organization of scientific work, the profiles of researchers involved, and the types of actors they collaborate with.