The territorial big bang: which assessment about the territorial reform in France?

ABSTRACT

After a new and ambitious reform, referred to as the ‘Territorial Big Bang’, France was confronted, from the end of 2018, with the revolt of the yellow vests, often originating from the country’s most peripheral or troubled territories. These oppositions and contestations from the territories may seem all the more astonishing since the ambitious territorial reform initiated in 2015 and which took shape with the NOTRE and MAPTAM laws aimed precisely at repositioning the role of the territories at each scale. How and why have we arrived at the current result, which seems to revive the historical territorial divide between Paris and the provinces, transforming it into an opposition between the major cities and the rest of France? In this article, we show how the territorial reform of 2015 was a failure and we take stock of the fact that far from affirming a new stage of decentralization, it has consisted above all in favouring large structures and the search for economies of scale, and has left behind territories that don’t matter anymore for the public policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Decentralization
• territorial reform
• territory
• public policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Thus, the initial draft law did not provide for a merger for the regions Aquitaine (‘its economic and social balance and its size justify that this region should remain on its own’) and Nord-Pas-de-Calais (‘there is no reason to group the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region with other regional entities; its economic dynamism and its central location in Europe make this entity a major asset for France’). Champagne-Ardenne and Picardy were grouped together to give rise to ‘a border and maritime area of more than 3.2 million inhabitants integrated and linked to both the European economic backbone and the Ile-de-France region’, as were the Centre, Limousin and Poitou-Charentes regions, on the grounds that ‘the new area comprising these three regions already constitutes a particularly integrated whole thanks to a road network strengthening interconnections (A20-A10 network), particularly with the capital region’.

2 legal concept reflecting a local authority’s capacity for initiative in an area of competence over and above those assigned to it by law, on the basis of its territorial interest in the subject matter – In UK and Ireland (« general competence »), or in Germany (« allgemeine Zuständigkeitsvermutung »).