Abstract
In recent years, France has undergone a series of administrative reforms. In 2015, two successive laws modified the boundaries of France’s mainland administrative regions, reducing them from 22 to 13 in number, whilst also devolving new competencies to them. The promoters of these laws argued that ‘large regions’ are levers of power and attractiveness, while changing the boundaries of the regions would demonstrate a real capacity to reform France’s existing political–administrative organisation, which has been widely criticised for being cumbersome and costly. In short, the 2015 reform has been touted both as a mechanism for adapting to new economic situations as well as a means for modernising public action. In view of all that, what has actually happened? What are France’s regional authorities really capable of today? How does the change in scale allow public action to be transformed? In line with the general perspective of this book, this chapter provides some answers to these vast questions by analysing specifically how the ‘large’ regions address development policies. The chapter begins by presenting the reform and the new competencies that regions have gained in regional planning. It then looks at the transformations that this renewal of regional planning has brought about.
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Notes
- 1.
The French term aménagement du territoire may be variously translated as spatial development planning or regional development planning. Here we use the former for national policies and the latter for policies conducted within the regions.
- 2.
Xavier Desjardins is a member of ACADIE. He is involved in supporting regional councils (conseils régionaux) responsible for designing the SRADDETs in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and Occitanie regions. He is also participating in a mission for the Ministry of Urban Planning, organising a network of locally based central government actors responsible for follow-up planning documents. Anna Geppert was strongly involved in debates on regional development planning when inter-regional contracts were established for the Paris Basin during the 1990s, as well as in the restructuring of France’s planning system in the 2000s and collaborative projects between metropolitan areas in the mid-2000s. She has also worked on the role of regions in the redeployment of European Union cohesion policies between 2007–2013 and 2014–2020.
- 3.
The French word décentralisation involves the devolution of political authority to the regions, departments and the municipalities. We use the terms decentralisation and devolution synonymously here.
- 4.
When the ERDF was created in 1975, funding was minimal. Resources were attributed by the State, and their use was almost discretionary.
- 5.
This acronym refers to France’s previous, national Delegation for Spatial Planning and Regional Development (Délégation à l’aménagement du territoire et à l’action régionale) which was an administrative unit of central government created in 1963 under De Gaulle and disbanded in 2014.
- 6.
Conseil Régional de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, Ma Région, Le Magazine, no. 4, April 2018.
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Desjardins, X., Geppert, A. (2020). Governance Rescaling and Regional Planning in France: Is Big Really Beautiful?. In: Lingua, V., Balz, V. (eds) Shaping Regional Futures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23573-4_9
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