The ‘espace productif’, the ‘théâtre de la nature’ and the ‘territoires de développement local’: the opposing rationales of contemporary French rural development policy

Abstract

This paper examines how the current EU‐driven shift of CAP reform, away from a purely agricultural support agenda towards a broader approach to both agricultural and rural development, challenges many of the fundamental French beliefs as to what a European agricultural policy should be, yet, at the same time, responds very closely to, and indeed parallels, emerging social and political concerns within France. These concerns confront a domestic agricultural policy edifice that has grown up with, and been nurtured and strengthened by, the Common Agricultural Policy. The paper argues that the new EU agenda, in introducing a fundamentally different conceptualization of rural development from the agrocentric one that has so dominated French rural policy over the last 50 years, adds to an already confusing repertoire of rural development paradigms in France. Either directly, or in association with other trends in French policy evolution, CAP reform is articulating with French rural development in a number of different ways: through a growing acceptance of the multifunctional role of farming within rural space, societies and economies, through the redistributive potential of public funding streams within agriculture, through the support and enhancement of environmental capital, through the implicit decentralization of agricultural policy making that such changes necessarily imply and, finally, through the relationship established between farming and other rural development policies aimed at fostering territorial cohesion.

Notes

Formerly (prior to July 2002) the Ministère de l'Aménagement du Territoire et de l'Environnement, currently the Ministère de l'Ecologie et du Développement Durable.