Local and regional development policy in France: Of changing conditions and forms, and enduring state centrality

Abstract

Since the end of World War II, local and regional development policies, and a politics around these policies, have been common to all advanced capitalist societies. However, how and why that is the case varies from one country to another. Amongst the reasons for contrasts between national policies of local and regional development, the following seem to be of high significance: the degree of central state regulation, the underlying reasons for interventions designed to support development, and how both central regulation and the major objectives of local and regional development policy have changed over time and across advanced capitalist countries. This paper investigates the significance of the state amidst all the other agents and conditions that have to be taken into account in understanding any politics of local and regional development and any success that the state might enjoy in that politics. This is done with respect to the case of France—an informative case given the powers usually attributed to the French state. It is argued that the French central state has remained over the post-war decades a key agent in the politics of local and regional development, a formulator as well as an implementer of local and regional development policies. This enduring central role in the contemporary knowledge-based economy era can be observed despite significant changes in the French local and regional development policies since the Trente Glorieuses era—the golden age of capitalism in France—in terms of objectives, forms and other actors' changing roles. The argument is informed by two key assumptions. First, the state should not be regarded as somehow opposed to capital; rather, capital and state enjoy considerable overlap in their objectives. Secondly, just as with capital, so with the state, there are forces beyond its control to which it must adapt.

The author would like to address many thanks to Kevin Cox for his extremely valuable insights and help during the writing of this paper and would like to thank, also, three anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the present paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

1. According to Swyngedouw, ‘glocalisation’ corresponds to the double shift of governance away from national governments: the upward shift to global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, or the European Union (EU) in the case of European countries on the one hand, and the downward shift to cities and regions, without meaning, however, the end of the nation-state, but rather the restructuring of the state (Swyngedouw, 1997).

2. Since the end of World War II, the French state has used what is known as ‘Le Plan’ as a major tool for regional planning. This term refers, in fact, to the (about) five-year successive plans—known in French as the plans quinquennaux—that were devised by the Commissariat Général du Plan—the General Commissariat for Planning—until 1993.

3. From the time of its creation, it was expected that the co-ordinating powers of this new agency—even though it was a central state bureau—would make more flexible the traditional closed horizontal partitioning of the French administrative system as well as its rigid vertical—i.e. hierarchical—character. However, the DATAR is still very much a technocratic structure, which does not always handle co-operation with local governments very well.

4. The Ile-de-France is the richest of the 22 French administrative regions, and constitutes Paris' immediate hinterland.

5. France Télécom was a national public company whose workers had a civil service status until the 1990s, when an important part of its capital was privatised, in order to comply with European Union rules.

6. Unfortunately, many of those start-ups have crashed by now and the rates of unemployment in Lannion and its surrounding rural area have increased considerably of late. Moreover, in 2004 and 2005, Alcatel has decided to decrease significantly its production and employment in Lannion.

7. As far as Strasbourg is concerned, the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, for example, was one of those cultural institutions that were supposed to balance the concentration of cultural production in Paris. Later on, the city also benefited from the transfer from Paris of the Ecole Nationale d'Aministration, one of the top grandes écoles in France and the biggest pride of the French central state apparatus.

8. For instance, one of General De Gaulle's big projects for western France, and more specifically for the north-western region of Brittany, was the development of a very sophisticated railroad system, to reduce the access time between Brest—the most western city in France—and Paris to less than five hours by train. Now, one can reach Paris from Brest in only four hours by train.

9.  This ambition implied a concentration of the main crossroads of Europe in the region, for  motorways, high speed trains (TGV), optical fibres, and an airport hub of 80 million passengers a year, plus a preferential national support for high-tech industries and some tax exemptions. The idea was to attract the ‘floating’ headquarters of multinational companies, with the justification that such a location would induce (by trickledown) some manufacturing jobs in other French regions (Lipietz, 1995, p. 5).

10. UNESCO provides a list of science parks in western Europe, by country (http://www.unesco.org/pao/s-parks/europe/europe.htm). According to this UNESCO census, there are at least 60 science parks scattered across France. This constitutes a very large number when one compares it with neighbouring Germany, a larger country with only 12 so-called technopoles according to the same UNESCO listing. Indeed, in western Europe, only Britain can compete with France in terms of this impressive number of science parks—UNESCO lists 63 science parks in Britain. However, these impressive figures do not mean at all that there are about 60 ‘French Silicon Valleys’. Rennes and Toulouse, for example, and Paris of course, have quite important science parks, which are quite successful, but Sophia-Antipolis, in the Nice metropolitan area, on the French Riviera, is by far the most impressive one in France, one that has today a leading role in European technological innovation.

11. CUB stands for Communauté Urbaine de Bordeaux—that is the intercommunal or metropolitan government of the Bordeaux's urban area. It was created by the central government in 1968.

12. The exact date is 5 April 2000.

13. It is just a practice that ministers assumed after then-Prime-Minister Lionel Jospin (1997–2002) asked the ministers he appointed not to cumulate two or more executive offices after the municipal elections of March 2001.

14. The connections between local and national officers are reinforced by the fact that most of them not only share similar educational backgrounds, but also were trained in the same school, the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), one of the most prestigious schools in France and the main provider of state administrators and politicians at the central, regional, departmental and municipal levels.

15. The other main concept of this new Socialist ideology was autogestion, or self-management. However, it remained an idea and was never implemented.

16. According to the Loi du 13 août 2004 relative aux libertés et responsabilités locales.

17. The communautés urbaines were created by a 31 December 1966 law.

18. However, the latest report by the Cour des Comptes on this matter, from October 2005, led the government to decide to put some restrictions on this process due to numerous incoherent patterns. Incoherencies were identified in particular in rural intercommunal groupings where some municipalities were suspected of abusing the system by forming a syndicat or a communauté de communes for the sole purpose of receiving additional fiscal and financial resources from the central state without really implementing intercommunal policies (Le Monde, 8 October 2005).

19. The medical and healthcare sectors provide examples of these types of transverse state agencies, such as the Agence Nationale d'Accréditation et d'Evaluation en Santé (ANAES).

20. One has to bear in mind, here, that political parties in France do not fund any person who wants to run for office and claims to be from such or such party. Parties operate a selection of the candidates they present and support for elections, at any level of political representation. They select their candidates according to what they will be able to achieve for the nation as a whole according to the party's political lines—loyalty to the party being of very high importance in French politics.