La France en mutation 1980-2005 (Sciences Po Gouvernances) (French Edition)
Contents:
No State can adopt a stance of benign neglect for long. One of the main recommendations of the Balladur Committee report was to impose a ceiling for local government expenditure to be introduced in the annual budgetary exercise. The first pillar of this traditional organisational structure is that of the central Ministries in Paris and their field services situated in the 22 regions and departments. In the pre- decentralisation period, the departmental prefect was, in theory, the pivot of the system of territorial administration.
He represented the central state in French localities and was charged with controlling local communes, implementing central government policies and maintaining public order Machin, Even in the pre-decentralisation period, however, the authority of the prefect was challenged by powerful rival interests and actors within the state. The traditional mode of operation was for the central Ministries to prescribe the policy objectives and the means by which these were to be achieved whilst the field services were expected to apply these centrally devised directives to their respective local environments de Montricher, , Jones, , Duran and Thoenig, The prefect never had his authority fully recognized over the Education, Finance or Justice Ministries and had great difficulties in imposing his authority on Infrastructure or Agriculture as well.
The resources at the disposal of the prefect to prevent this were limited. For his part, one regional prefect interviewed in complained of being ignored by the lead field officials from the Infrastructure ministry on account of their belonging to a separate corps highways and bridges, rather than the prefectoral corps. Second, and more powerful even than these hierarchical logics of integration, was the system of technical and administrative corps, which dictated understanding of corporate identities and hierarchies within the state Kessler, , Suleiman, The corps are very distinctive groups within the French civil service, at their strongest comprising a set of self-regulating elites that jostle for ascendancy and influence within and beyond the state.
Members of civil service corps are usually imbued with a spirit of loyalty to their grade which prevails over and above their attachment to different ministries. And they are anxious to preserve their influence against rival especially lesser ranked corps. In the early years after , decentralisation was experienced as a loss of prestige by the highways and bridges corps, but the corps subsequently demonstrated a capacity for strategic re-adaptation and survival Gervais, The main corps are today in the process of being merged, including those at the heart of the French technical state; there have been recent mergers between highways and bridges and the corps of civil engineers, geographers and meteorological services and between the mining corps and the telecommunications engineers Gervais, The third dimension of the territorial state concerns the long tradition of competition between the regional and departmental levels.
Strengthening the regional state has been one of the constant themes of French post-war territorial administration, a movement justified by the imperatives of post-war modernization, the popularity of ideas of territorial planning and, since , by the capacity building enterprise of regional councils themselves.
Regional structures were first created in the s as outposts of the French state, to assist in strategic functions of economic development, transport and territorial planning. In time, these nominated bodies became directly elected levels of sub- national government from onwards.
The creation of the regional prefectures in marked an important staging post in the regionalisation of state structures. Rather like the regional councils later, the regional prefectures were light, strategic bodies that attempted to coordinate the activities of the much weightier departmental prefectures. The decree formally established that the regional prefect would also be the prefect of the lead department within the region Kada, Relations between regional and department prefects have often been tense, though their corps loyalty they are all members of the prefectoral corps can also produce a closing of ranks against external threats.
In practice, the regional prefects had little real authority over the territorial field services until the second round of decentralization reforms in Indeed, reforms in the machinery of the territorial state during the early s looked to the departmental prefect, who, in the key reform, was vested with the role of coordinator of governmental services at the local level. The decentralisation reforms strengthened the regional prefect in more substantive ways. The regional level was identified as being the one of strategic reflection and deliberation of the state. Above all, the regional prefect acquired more budgetary authority over the regional and department field services.
In the spirit of the LOLF see below a decree established a new budgetary process bringing all ministerial field credits under the regional prefecture. From the perspective of efficiency minded governments, the point about affirming the primacy of the regional over the local state is to avoid institutional duplication, make efficiency savings and reduce costs. Alongside a process of legal clarification, the regional state has undergone a process of restructuring and rationalisation. In , a first restructuring took place, whereby a number of services the regional directorates for external trade, small business and tourism were either suppressed or merged with other services.
In further mergers were announced, specifically between those services in charge of economic development and those concerned with employment, as well as between the Regional Hospital Agencies and the regional directorates for health and social affairs. The remaining state services were regrouped into eight poles from around 30 that corresponded more to the logic of the new budgetary law, the LOLF, than the traditional mix of corps-based interest and ministerial directives.
La France en mutation 1980-2005 (Académique) (French Edition)
In its first report of December , the Steering Committee CPMM of the General Policy Review declared that the State organizes itself first and foremost on a regional basis and that the regional prefect is the hierarchical superior of the departmental one. Notes bleues de Bercy, The RGPP calls for a strengthening of the capacity of the regional prefectures, and confers several new functions upon them: The RGPP repeats its concern with efficiency gains, through reorganizing the missions of the regional state around the core strategic areas of sustainable development, agriculture, infrastructure, housing, economic development and training and youth and sports see tables 2 and 3.
Regional directorates for Merged regional directorates of former Agriculture and Forestry and food, agriculture and forests Infrastructure ministries. Direct link to the DDT in the departments. Regional directorates for The DRECCTE bring together, in one regional division, seven firms, competition, previously separate field services of two ministries Work and consumers, work, Economy, Industry and Employment including training and lifelong employment and training learning, industry and research, competition and several other DRECCTE responsibilities.
Regional directorates for The DRJSCS will regroup all activities dealing with social policy, youth, sports and social youth and associative life in one division — to be placed under the cohesion DRJSCS authority of the regional prefect. Regional Heatlh agencies ARS, to be headed by a director, to lead on issues of hospitalization, ARS healthcare and medico-sociaux services. A state productivity narrative has been embraced in a more forthright manner than ever before by the ministers and officials of the Sarkozy regime.
Consistent with the model of territorial administration, on the other hand, the stated ambition to build state capacity at a regional level has run up against the basic architecture of the French state, built upon vertically based ministries, a corps-based model of public service and a mode of inter-governmental relations that has traditionally favoured the departmental level over the regional one.
Strengthening the regional state has had as a primary motivation the need to adapt the state machinery to the partly unintended consequences of decentralization, a theme we now consider. Reframing inter-governmental relations The third dimension of the debate about the French State and its territories relates to inter-governmental relations, a concept that sits uneasily with classic models of French territorial administration. In the traditional model of territorial administration, inter- governmental relations were either ignored, or conceptualized by organisational sociologists in terms of cross-regulation, signifying the adjustment of laws and regulations to accommodate territorial interests on the ground.
The modernizing State of the and s was more concerned with relations within the state levels and corps, as discussed above than about the formalities of relationships between central and local governments. The idea of local government itself was traditionally contested in the French public law tradition; government, signifying sovereignty, was the affair of the centre, not the periphery Payre, For a country with so much government, inter- governmental relations were relatively under-theorised.
Decentralisation forced debates about methods of inter-governmental coordination onto the political agenda.
The proposal in the Balladur report to create new forms of metropolitan governments, or City Regions, was considerably watered down. Regional structures were first created in the s as outposts of the French state, to assist in strategic functions of economic development, transport and territorial planning. Richard Balme , P. French Policy- Making Adaptation to Europe. Third, core agents of the state themselves engage in strategies in order to preserve their positions of power. Attempts to forcibly merge regions were abandoned. There remains a question over how far the territorial state can be reformed against the will of powerful veto players operating within the state itself amongst departmental prefectures, departmental councils, or departmental based public services as well as amongst interested social partners.
How to deal with the newly empowered local and regional authorities created controversy and division within the state. Though any effort at periodisation over-simplifies the complex dynamics at play, two broad phases might be identified in the post-decentralisation period; the contractual state , and the productivist state From the perspective of all fragments of the central state, the reforms created serious new challenges of inter- governmental coordination, not least because they strengthened distinct levels of sub- national authority is a rather indistinct way. Controlling central-local interactions was bound to be far more complex when there were multiple interlocutors within local government and no single level able to speak on behalf of all territorial interests.
Contractualisation provided a means for the Socialist government to combine the logics of decentralisation, democratic planning and central steering. Under the terms of the law, the regional council first draws up a regional plan and then negotiates with the State-in-Region, represented by the regional prefecture.
La France en mutation (French Edition) Paperback; Publisher: PRESSES FONDATION SCIENCES POLITIQUES (); Language: French. The State transformed, the markets, especially financial, increased their domination on French economic life while the political sphere - and.
The sums of money involved in the State-Region plans are considerable. For a number of interlocutors in the French regions, the State-region plans were a means for central government to mobilize the financial resources of local and regional government in the pursuit of its own objectives. Through the State-Region plans now renamed projects , the central state was able to impose some of its own priorities on the regions, in the fields of higher education and transport notably. State-Region plans could never, however, be reduced to crude central steering. The State-Region plans involved negotiation.
All actors involved are under pressure to agree the State-Region plans because agreement opens up the prospect of match funding from EU structural funds. Since , there has been a movement away from contractualisation, accompanied by a more systematic reference to productivity in the new discourse of inter-governmental relations.
The State-Region plans have been relabeled as State-Region projects, with much stricter national criteria governing their operation and less room for adaptation to local and regional circumstances Interview, DIACT, The most recent State- Region projects, covering the period from , were negotiated in the context of the new budgetary law the LOLF and the Act 2 of decentralization.
While the LOLF emphasizes targets and clear programmes, the decentralisation laws strengthened the regional level. In the negotiations for the projects, the regional prefects negotiated with the regions only, rather than contractualising with departments or inter- communal bodies Pontier, Rather than praise the merits of partnership, the DGCL emphasized the importance of targets that addressed the three main priorities defined by central government.
The government openly voiced the belief that competition improves efficiency and that targeted investment in either high performing, or underprivileged territories would contribute to national efficiency far more effectively than blanket grants. In the DATAR was remained the DIACT Interministerial delegation for the planning and competitiveness of territories , replacing the old reference to regional action in its title with that of competitiveness. Another indicator of the concern for state productivity has been the increasing use of agencies to manage public services.
The evidence from the first two years of the Sarkozy regime suggested an acceleration of the managerial and budgetary trend apparent since Arguably the core territorial reforms of the RGPP are in fields that only indirectly involve local and regional authorities. The ARS are intended to provide leadership on issues of hospitalization, healthcare and medico-sociaux services, policy fields where these health agencies will be able to direct resources not only from the state ministries and field services , but also from the vast social security budget..
In the above examples, new forms of central steering have been designed in part to address the cost of public service delivery. State financial transfers form an important part of the budgets of communal, departmental and regional councils Loughlin, The problem of local and regional debt emerged as one of the principal challenges during the first decade after the laws. The financial situation of local and regional authorities has improved markedly since the mids, as large capital investment projects have been implemented especially in education.
In , local and regional authorities carried out over 70 per cent of all public investment, a proportion comparable with other countries that is likely to increase further as the transfers of competencies decided in the decentralization reforms are fully implemented. From the perspective of the Budget and Public Accounts ministry, institutional duplication and local government capacity building has had an unacceptable financial cost.
The increase of staff numbers in the EPCI in particular has raised fiscal sustainability concerns. As the European constraint weighs more heavily, the fight against public sector debt and deficits empowers the Budget and Public Accounts Ministry in its attempts to rein in local government expenditure.
Since the s, the effects of Europeanisation and closer European integration have led to the European Union EU emerging as a key reference point in policy making, including as an intervening variable of French inter-governmental relations. There are complex interdependencies between the French State and its territories in the area of European integration.
On the one hand, France has traditionally had one of the tightest, most state-centric forms of interaction with Brussels Eymeri, Bids for local and regional funding under EU structural and cohesion funds are coordinated by the DIACT, a central state agency, in close liaison with the regional prefectures. On the other hand, EU rules for the attribution of regional development and structural funds insist upon the involvement of local and regional authorities and voluntary associations. Since the passage of the decentralization law, moreover, French regions have been allowed to bid to exercise complete control over the management of structural funds on an experimental basis the first contender being Alsace.
Away from narrow funding issues, in their day to day work, local and regional authorities often face a harsh edge of European integration, especially as structural and cohesion funds have dried up or been diverted to eastern and central European countries. Local authorities have had great difficulties in complying with public services legislation and the prevailing belief in the Commission in DG Competition, if less in DG Regio of the importance of competition as the basic principle of public service delivery.
Local authorities have had to devise expensive means for tendering out public service delivery and complying with the rules of public procurement. The European Court of Justice has consistently sided with the Commission, insisting that the rules of public procurement and tendering must apply, even for small communes.
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In particular, the specific rules for the provision of inter- communal services, whereby cross subsidies are considered as state aids, has created great practical difficulties for the smallest communes in providing basic public services. In this specific case, the French state and local authorities combine to defend a threatened model of public service delivery. The above example demonstrates that central-local relations in France are not in essence a zero-sum game. IGR involves relationships, hence interaction, a theme we now develop further in the conclusion.
The French State and its territorial challenges Three frames were presented as heuristics to guide us through this article. Evidence can be mobilised to support each of these interpretations, which concentrate on rather different aspects of the broad object of the French State and its territories and more broadly engage with distinct literatures on convergence, state traditions and discursive institutionalism.
Our first frame was that of convergence. Agencies, performance indicators, monitoring and budgetary autonomy all have rings of a new public management ethos about them Pollitt, This expenditure driven approach can be a blunt one; as in the area of territorial justice, where the closure of many small rural tribunals and the merger of others since has followed a naked logic of restructuring and economy. In a rather more sophisticated manner, the LOLF the new budgetary procedure and RGPP the policy review are designed to enhance productivity through target setting, monitoring and performance indicators.
The theme of state productivity has progressed even in areas such as welfare that have traditionally resisted central steering. New organizations such as the Regional Health Agencies exercise core steering functions in health care and strengthen the argument that new public management reform strengthens the state.
In sum, there is considerable evidence that French governments have resorted to a policy toolkit that is fundamentally similar in core respects to those of its natural comparators. That the RGPP was strongly influenced by the policy and spending reviews of the Canadian and British governments reinforces the point Bezes, Our second frame was that of the French State tradition and the model of territorial administration. The State tradition typology allows a broad brush organization of states into groupings. France is often presented as the paradigm of the unitary state and occasionally as the inheritor of a Napoleonic state tradition Page, , Sharpe, , Loughlin, In practice, the territorial model of public administration was one of imperfect implementation and of parallel state networks.
The key legacy of the model of territorial administration ought to be evaluated not so much in the development of local and regional governance capacity, but in the persistence of parallel state structures and actors since decentralisation.
La France en mutation 1980-2005
Institutional and corporate path dependencies remain extremely powerful. The core dimension of institutional layering has consistently proved to be a force favoring at best incremental reform. With echoes of a garbage can model, new policy problems and agendas have produced new layers of public administration, but rarely dispensed with the old. The weight of the millefeuille institutionnel is such that endogenous institutional structures are likely to overwhelm any efforts at synoptic state reform. And yet, ultimately, though a state tradition approach can elucidate the pathways of institutional evolution, its utility is limited if it is unable to account for the accompanying of change.
The core drivers of change in this article have been identified as broad trends in international public management and political and administrative decentralization. Both are mediated by the basic architecture and understandings of the French state, while gradually reconfiguring the state through their iterative character.
Three examples illustrate this well. First, though the regional state has developed its capacity, the departmental prefectures retain a key role in administering core services of security, social welfare, and infrastructure. Revisiting French Diplomacy in the Age of Globalization.
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