International Colloquium 2011 - 8/9/10 June - Paris

In 2007 Gerpisa launched its 5th international research programme on "the automobile industry and sustainable development". Its focus was the co-existence of both the traditional contraints of the automobile industry and more recent ones linked to forms of social and environmental sustainability and the extent to which this would lead to synergies and/or trade-offs at different levels of decision-making. We assumed that that the conflicts that emerged and the innovations adopted to address them would differ among firms, localities and/or national and regional contexts.

Since 2007, the work conducted and presented at Gerpisa's annual international meeting has largely confirmed this assumption. The traditional and the new constraints have combined in different ways to reconfigure automobile firms and industries generally. We have had to integrate the impact of the financial and economic crises of 2008 and 2009. These have caused firms to fight for their survival at the same time as they develop practices of sustainable development and both dimensions have had to be taken into account by researchers in our programme.