The symptoms of social tensions and democratic crisis are now glaring, even as we face formidable challenges such as the ecological crisis, the digital revolution, and demographic shifts. Yet, the widespread sense that our current model is unsustainable, strongly voiced during the Covid-19 pandemic, among other moments, runs up against the feeling that no meaningful change is truly possible. Are we collectively unable to renegotiate what we call our “social contract,” that is, the arrangements and compromises that shape our society, or at least some of its key components? Under what conditions could such a renegotiation take place? These are major, sometimes daunting questions — but today’s social and political context makes it urgent to bring them to the forefront.
The social contract represents the “rules of the game” for life in society. It is a set of collective expectations and compromises that encompasses the rights we enjoy, the duties we accept, the responsibilities held by institutions, and the narratives we believe in. It takes concrete form through four major pacts: democracy, work, consumption, and security. One central question has guided the work carried out over the past two years by IDDRI and Hot or Cool: what kind of new social contract would allow us to both address current failures and live together within planetary boundaries? This question may seem disconcerting, both in its idealism and its ambition. Yet history is full of moments when our social contract, or at least some of its key pacts, was revised — often driven by the momentum of social movements.
When can we identify a “key moment” of renegotiation?
First, there is a renegotiation of a pact when an amendment or addition to our collective arrangements significantly alters the nature of the promised benefit or the obligation required. For example, the French Revenu de Solidarité Active (RSA) could be revised to require a number of activity hours from recipients in order to access benefits. A renegotiation can also shift the symbolic status of a group and its relationship to others, for instance, the same-sex marriage law helped reduce the marginalization of homosexual couples.
The types of renegotiations that interest us, because they are rooted in particularly central promises in French history, are those that promote equalization or democratization processes. These include improvements through increased social protection (e.g., the creation of Social Security in 1945), better living conditions (e.g., paid holidays in 1936), political participation (e.g., women’s right to vote in 1944), or upward social mobility (e.g., free and compulsory schooling for all). In the long run, renegotiating a pact often acts as a springboard for future laws or amendments pursuing the same ambition. It also reshapes a society’s cultural and political reflexes, as well as its shared narratives.
The negotiation processes we focus on, because we see them as potential catalysts for significant change, sit at the crossroads of these four dimensions.
The major amendments to the social contract that we tend to highlight often carry historical weight, such as the waves of strikes following the Popular Front’s election in 1936, the 1944 “Les Jours Heureux” program, or the 1942 Beveridge Report in the UK. But our criteria also recognize that more targeted revisions, such as integrating a new law into labor codes, or legalizing and regulating new practices, can meaningfully update our collective arrangements and respond to emerging social demands. In general, while pact changes usually result from long processes and a variety of loosely controllable factors (historical context, shifts in public opinion, influence of social movements, etc.), they always require a conscious phase of negotiation between different stakeholders in society, and it is this phase we aim to analyze.
Looking into renegotiation is also based on the idea that elections alone are, for now, insufficient to generate proposals and projects that are both truly transformative and rooted in citizens’ aspirations.
The exploration we aim to carry out is twofold. On the one hand, we ask whether new democratic mechanisms could enable citizens to have greater influence over the political and social direction of the country, particularly in a context marked by democratic crisis, distrust, a widening gap between citizens and decision-makers, and a representative model seen as insufficient.
On the other hand, we seek to identify, at the level of decision-makers and institutions, the conditions that make negotiation possible within our democracy, that is, the factors that make such negotiation both necessary in the eyes of those with the power to effect change, and the forms that this negotiation may take. These favorable conditions may include concrete tools (legislation, public policies, local experiments, institutional reforms, etc.) or contextual elements (strong citizen trust, solidified dialogue among actors and institutions, the outbreak of a crisis, etc.).
We address these two dimensions in the following sections.
To better understand the strengths and limitations of citizen-led processes, we can draw on lessons from recent exercises in deliberative democracy.
By offering a shared space for discussion among citizens from diverse social backgrounds, deliberative democracy is valuable in itself. It emphasizes public debate and argumentation among citizens to generate collective directions aimed at the common good.
Built on inclusive methods and informative, educational frameworks, citizens’ assemblies aim to ensure high-quality deliberation in order to form an informed public opinion that can guide public debate.
But are they suited to truly challenging and rethinking our social contract? Evidence suggests they are. Citizens’ discussions within these frameworks often lead to questioning collective arrangements and exploring how they might evolve. For instance, participants in the French Citizens’ Convention on Climate (CCC) recognized that the status quo was untenable in the face of environmental urgency. They questioned a societal model based on infinite material growth and resource abundance. Going further, they reflected on fundamental issues such as land-use planning, working time, meaningful jobs for the ecological transition, business models, and our relationship with nature.
Another example: during a public consultation organized by the French government in 2019 ahead of a proposed pension reform, participants raised key questions, some of which were deemed off-topic by the organizers, about the future of pensions. These included: What kinds of jobs will be needed in light of AI and ecological challenges? How can we recognize socially valuable but unpaid forms of activity? How can people be supported to switch careers and train throughout their lives?
These discussions naturally lead citizens to reflect on how society is organized and to identify the rights and responsibilities assigned to different social groups. In doing so, they debate not only our norms of justice but also how these norms are expressed in compromises and practical arrangements: What is a fair distribution of efforts among individuals, businesses, and public authorities to change our ways of living? What constraints are seen as acceptable, and under what conditions of support? Through negotiating these compromises, a new vision for society begins to emerge.
However, no deliberative exercise to date has truly had the means to fully address these questions, primarily because such ambition often exceeds the expectations of the organizers, who tend to prefer technical solutions.
Yet citizen deliberation alone cannot reshape the real world or the collective compromises that govern it. The CCC’s proposals, for example, were never used as a foundation for a broader renegotiation of the social contract in light of the ecological transition. At best, they were ignored or ridiculed; at worst, they were attacked by interest groups threatened by the proposed measures. In short, there was no follow-up political negotiation in the public sphere based on these citizen proposals. A missing link remains: how to connect democratic deliberation, collective action, and political decision-making, elements too often treated in isolation.
A deliberative process that directly involves both citizens and stakeholders could provide the political translation of the compromises envisioned in citizens’ assemblies, grounded in public aspirations. One lesser-known but inspiring precedent is the Conference on the Future of Europe. After four rounds of European citizen panels, a plenary assembly, made up of Members of the European Parliament, national parliaments, the European Commission, and others,met four times to build final shared proposals based on the citizens’ recommendations. Each citizen panel had its own ambassadors to ensure the final proposals did not dilute the citizens’ voice. While this hybrid process had limitations, it offers a promising way to actively integrate citizens’ perspectives into negotiation between actors with differing interests, a path well worth exploring.
As mentioned earlier, by “negotiation” we refer to all institutional, political, and social processes through which a social contract can be altered or amended. Whether considered as a structured mechanism between actors or as a political culture, negotiation is a discussion aimed at overcoming deadlock through a common arrangement, not necessarily consensus, that involves trade-offs but appears fair to the stakeholders involved, or at least better than the alternative. Negotiation thus seems particularly well-suited to reshaping the social contract in a democratic direction.
Building on this premise, and with a view to potentially renegotiating parts or even the entirety of our social contract, IDDRI plans to conduct an inquiry into the conditions that make successful negotiation possible. In the context of multiple overlapping crises, democratic distrust, social tensions, environmental breakdown, it is essential to engage with the actors directly involved in these negotiation processes. What do recent negotiation experiences, or even failed attempts, tell us about the ingredients required for meaningful change? The reality is that actors, whether political leaders, unions, employers, or citizen movements, only consider the need for change when they feel it directly, and when the prospect of having no agreement is worse than entering a negotiation process. Yet despite numerous current warnings (social, environmental, and more), there appears to be little real momentum toward collective negotiation.
So what shapes these actors’ perception of the “need for change,” and their capacity to act on it? What kinds of shared diagnoses and motivating factors, such as the imminence of a crisis, political costs of engaging or avoiding negotiation, etc. As well as favorable conditions, such as mutual trust, short- or medium-term gains, must be present for collective negotiation to begin?
To identify the conditions conducive to renegotiating our social contract, we will carry out around twenty interviews with individuals experienced in decision-making and negotiation, whether through professional roles, personal engagement, or both, across diverse fields (unions, employer organizations, NGOs, civil society, elected officials, businesses, etc.). These conversations will shed light on the prerequisites for successful collective negotiation.
We will also reflect on the interplay between deliberation and negotiation. What role might deliberative processes, including the hybrid format previously described, play within broader negotiation efforts? Are they a preliminary stage, a parallel track, or the very center of a larger process to amend one or several foundational pacts?
Through this exploration, we aim to better understand the conditions under which fruitful, multi-level collective negotiation can take place, and to lay the groundwork for renewed discussion around our social pacts, and perhaps our current social contract itself. It is possible that today’s polycrisis offers a unique opportunity to revitalize our democracy, as the imperative for transition strikes at the very core of our societal arrangements and ways of life, inevitably generating conflict. Successfully addressing these challenges, and doing so democratically, by crafting compromises “at the heart of the storm”, could be a powerful way to restore public trust in our institutions.
