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Abstract
This paper analyses the interlinked usages of the concepts of ‘governance’ and ‘sustainable development’ over the past two decades of French urban policies. It shows that the importance of ‘sustainable development’ procedural principles has significantly declined in public agendas alongside the rise to prominence of climate change issues. Based on a study of the urban policies developed by central French government authorities since the 1990s, it identifies two main phases. In the 1990s and early 2000s, ‘sustainable development’ and ‘governance’ slogans were extensively mobilized in urban policies for the purposes of modernizing public action. In a context of economic, social and institutional transformations, these urban policies aimed at constructing local dynamics of collective action and encouraged the emergence of projects relying on incremental and deliberative practices. As of the mid-2000s, this dynamic weakened and climate change replaced sustainable development as a reference in urban policies. This shift occurred in the context of a neo-managerial restructuring, with central government authorities regaining influence over cities and urban policies being redefined around quantitative and technical objectives.
Funding
This paper received support from the Excellence Initiative of the University of Strasbourg, itself funded by the French government's Future Investments programme.
Notes
† Translated from French by Jean-Yves Bart.
1 EPAs are powerful local state agencies in charge of urban development in specific areas of several French cities. Created in the 1960s as a local extension of the Gaulliste State, and thus heavily involved in the development of New towns, they fell into disuse in the 1980s and 1990s, before gaining a new momentum in the mid-2000s. Generally speaking, these agencies could be compared to British Urban Development Corporations.
2 In France, state field services are local agencies in charge of a specific sector such as planning, industry, welfare, culture or the environment. As ‘deconcentrated’ authorities, they have no political autonomy and are strongly linked to the central state and its local representation: the Prefect.
3 The years that followed the decentralization Act were marked by over-sized projects of utilities and urban development and the multiplication of municipal communication media. To fund them, mayors sometimes used questionable methods which drove some of them, such as Jean-Michel Boucheron (mayor of Angoulême from 1977 to 1989), Alain Carrignon (mayor of Grenoble from 1983 to 1995) or Michel Noir (mayor of Lyon from 1989 to 1995), to have trouble with the law.
4 CPERs (State—region planning contracts) were set up in the early 1980s to adapt the national economic planning frame to the new context of decentralization. The objective was twofold: first, to ‘regionalize’ the prescriptions of the five-year national plans; second, to involve the regions, and more generally, local governments in the planning process. In actual fact, the CPER became a scene where public investment in sectors in which both the State and the local and regional governments exercised their jurisdiction was discussed and programmed and where the financial contribution of each level was negotiated. Interestingly, this negotiation device has since been maintained, while the national planning framework was abandoned in the early 1990s.
5 The Politique de la Ville was set up in the early 1980s in order to deal with the crisis of the Banlieues, deprived neighbourhoods usually located in the outskirts of urban cores and often embodied by large social housing estates. Since the 1980s, it has been transformed several times, but it has remained one of the main French urban policies.
6 Created in 1964, the Direction à l'Aménagement du Territoire et à l'Action Régionale (DATAR) was the most influential State agency regarding issues such as regional policies, spatial planning or city competitiveness.
7 Loi d'Orientation pour l'Aménagement et le Développement Durable du Territoire, aka Voynet Act – Framework Act on Spatial Planning and Sustainable Regional Development.
8 The RGPP was introduced in 2007 in order to favour the implementation of structural reform in the French national and local bureaucracy. By strengthening the evaluation of public action, it aimed at reducing public expenditures and making public policies more efficient. This scheme could be compared to the Canadian Programme review or to the British Spending review.
9 Loi Organique relative aux Lois de Finances, or Budget Framework Act.
10 In 2010, a budgetary law abolished the taxe professionnelle, a business tax levied by local governments since 1975 and which was based on payroll, and replaced it by the contribution économique territoriale which still benefits local governments and still hits businesses but is now based on land values and added value. The implementation of this new tax put local finances under pressure. Local authorities lost part of their financial resources in the transition, and the compensation promised by the central state was insufficient to cover the loss of revenues. More generally, this reform is typical of the new propensity of the state to manipulate the parameters of local governments' fiscal revenues for political consideration or to reduce the public debt.
11 This legal rule implies that local authorities can exert functions even in domains that are not explicitly designated by the law as belonging to their area of competence. In a way, this clause is the exact opposite of the British ultra vires rule.
12 The Grenelle de l'Environnement was a broad state-led consultation of politicians, associations, companies, scientists and academics on environmental issues that led to the creation of a new French environmental strategy. It is considered as a tipping point in French environmental policies.
13 This trend is also visible in other public policy domains such as urban biodiversity where new instruments dominated by a regulatory approach have been recently designed by the national government. This evolution and its uneven impact on local authorities have been well analysed in the case of Trames vertes (Greenway) (Cormier, De Lajarte & Carcaud, Citation2010).
14 The Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations (CDC) is a public financial institution, created by the law of 28 April 1816 to collect the deposits of notaries and local saving banks. After the Second World War, the institution provided huge funding for the construction of large social housing estates. If the CDC has diversified its interventions in both real estate and increasingly in commerce and industry, it remains an important funding body for urban policies and local government initiatives.
15 The Commissariat général à l'investissement is a central state agency in charge of implementing the Investissements d'avenir (Investments for the future) programme. This programme is financed by a public bond (Grand Emprunt) issued by the French State on the financial markets in order to fund large research and development programmes and public investments in infrastructure or research.