Environment inspector: a green job you probably don’t know about

Hugo Wajnstock, currently a postdoc at INED, studies environment-related inequalities; specifically, in connection with the professional practices of civil servants working at the French Biodiversity Agency (Office Français de la Biodiversité or OFB), which he analyzes on the basis of those staff members’ social trajectories. We asked him a few questions. 

(Interview conducted in June 2025)

I’m studying a job that we know little about: environment inspector at the Office Française de la Biodiversité (OFB). These national civil servants play an essential role in preserving nature and monitoring compliance with environmental laws, notably when it comes to water pollution, protection of wetlands, and safeguarding wild animals and plants. 

I’m particularly interested in their occupational trajectories. Who are these inspectors? Why did they choose this area of work? How do they conduct their work on a daily basis? And what the role of gender is in all of this, in a profession where one-third of staff members are women, a higher figure than in most inspection and police jobs.

The project also explores environment-related inequalities; that is, the fact that some populations, often poor and/or of minority status, are more exposed to pollution and other environmental risks, and have less access to high-quality environments, that is, surroundings with pure air, green spaces, clean drinking water, etc. Such inequalities may in fact be intensified by the practices of those civil servants in charge of implementing France’s environmental protection laws, though this varies by the region they monitor, the people or businesses they inspect, and how often they do so. 

I’m trying to get a better understanding of the concrete ways such inequalities are produced through the daily operations of these state civil servants. To do so I use interviews and analysis of administrative archive material (inspection and arrest or apprehension reports). 

My study uses a mixed-methods approach (i.e, it applies different types of methods in the same piece of research).

On the one hand, I’m conducting detailed interviews with diversity preservation inspectors in the working-class department of Seine-Saint-Denis, within the greater Paris agglomeration. The interviews enable me to better understand these civil servants’ personal and occupational trajectories, their motivations, the way they see their jobs, the difficulties they encounter, and their relations with the population groups whose actions in relation to the environment they monitor and inspect. I’m particularly attentive to the way(s) that gender may influence their attitude toward their work and the environment. 

On the other hand, I’m analyzing a set of OFB-produced documents (arrest reports) to attain a more objective perspective on verification-of-compliance practices. What types of infractions do people get fined for? What personal or business profiles are most often targeted? This helps me to see whether certain population groups are inspected more often than others, which, if it turns out to be the case, may well fuel feelings of injustice or discrimination in environmental matters. 

Last, I’m getting those two qualitative and quantitative data sources to dialogue with other to get a finer-grained, more nuanced view of this group of civil servants’ professional practices. 

There are two. 

On one hand, I’m trying to enrich our knowledge of the occupations implicated in the environmental transition, particularly that of environment inspector, which, as I mentioned, the public at large is not very familiar with. These professionals play a crucial role in implementing environmental laws and supporting the ecological transition in our society.

On the other, I’m trying to better circumscribe how monitoring and inspection practices may deepen certain social and regional inequalities, in some cases involuntarily. I hypothesize that particularly vulnerable groups are in some cases surveilled more persistently, which may engender feelings of environmental injustice—in other words, the perception that the work of protecting against environmental risks is not equitably distributed.

My project also fits into wider research studies being done at INED on ties between populations or population groups and the environment, as well as on questions of gender and social inequalities. Ultimately, it could be used in thinking about how to construct public policies that are more equitable and that more efficiently protect the environment.