Environmental Protest and the State in France

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Environmental Protest and the State in France Graeme Hayes

Environmental Protest and the State in France

French Politics, Society and Culture Series General Editor: Robert Elgie, Paddy Moriarty Professor of Government and International Studies at Dublin City University, Ireland France has always fascinated outside observers. Now, the country is undergoing a period of profound transformation. France is faced with a rapidly changing international and European environment and it is having to rethink some of its most basic social, political and economic orthodoxies. As elsewhere, there is pressure to conform. And yet, while France is responding in ways that are no doubt familiar to people in other European countries, it is also managing to maintain elements of its long-standing distinctiveness. Overall, it remains a place that is not exactly comme les autres. This new series examines all aspects of French politics, society and culture. In so doing it focuses on the changing nature of the French system as well as the established patterns of political, social and cultural life. Contributors to the series are encouraged to present new and innovative arguments so that the informed reader can learn and understand more about one of the most beguiling and compelling of all European countries. Titles include: Jean K. Chalaby THE DE GAULLE PRESIDENCY AND THE MEDIA Statism and Public Communications David Drake INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS IN POST-WAR FRANCE Graeme Hayes ENVIRONMENTAL PROTEST AND THE STATE IN FRANCE David J. Howarth THE FRENCH ROAD TO EUROPEAN MONETARY UNION

French Politics, Society and Culture Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–80440–6 hardcover Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–80441–4 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England


Graeme Hayes Department of Modern Languages Nottingham Trent University

© Graeme Hayes 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–99043–9 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hayes, Graeme, 1967– Environmental protest and the State in France/Graeme Hayes. p. cm. – (French politics, culture, and society series) Thesis (Ph.D.) – Nottingham Trent University, 2001. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–99043–9 (cloth) 1. Environmentalism – France – History – 20th century. 2. Environmental policy – France – History – 20th century. 3. Protest movements – France – History – 20th century. I. Title. II. Series. GE199.F8 H39 2002 363.7052509440904–dc21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction Political Opportunities and Environmental Protest in France Environmental protest and political opportunity structures Decentralisation, Europeanisation, and sectorisation Serre de la Fare: a brief overview The Somport tunnel: a brief overview The structure of the case studies A word on terminology 1 Environmental Protest in France Narratives of environmental politics: from protest to institutionalisation The persistence of environmental protest Explaining the resurgence of activism The state in environmental discourse, action, and ideology 2 Political Opportunities and Policy Communities: Developing a Network Approach to State–Group Relations The state, social movements, and political opportunity structures Policy networks: sectoral analysis and meso-level differentiation Strength, sectoral analysis, and the French state 3 Institutional Change and the Fifth Republic The legislative arena Centralisation, decentralisation, Europe, and regional action Multilevel governance

vii viii ix

1 3 5 6 7 8 10 12 13 16 23 32

40 41 51 62 71 75 85 92

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Contents

European policy-making, privatisation, and group exclusion 4

Water Resource Management and the Loire Development Programme The development of water resource management in France Regional planning and the Loire development project

5 Vive la Loire Sauvage! Serre de la Fare and the Political Opportunity Structure of Protest The organisation of dissent Reframing the policy paradigm

96

103 105 118

132 133 139

6 Roads Policy and Multilevel Decision-Making Transport infrastructure: a stable policy community and a ‘strong’ national policy sector European transport policy The polycentric model of the European public policy process

155

7 Opportunity, Protest, and the Somport Tunnel The organisation of dissent Environmental protest in a multilevel policy process Competing discourses: frame alignment variations and protest Sectoral strength and protest outcomes

175 176 185 191 201

Conclusion: Explaining Environmental Protest in France Sectoral differentiation Evaluating environmental protest in France

206 208 216

Notes

219

Bibliography

225

Index

243

156 161 167

List of Tables and Figures Tables 1.1 The eight potential sites for the third Paris airport, and their principal promoters 3.1 Percentage share of total votes cast gained by the four traditional major party blocs at successive legislative elections, 1978–97 5.1 Performance of PS and Greens at 1989 European and 1992 regional elections, nationally, in the Haute-Loire and the five cantons of Le Puy (where available). Génération Écologie did not present a list in the Haute-Loire in 1992 6.1 The re-launched motorway construction programme 6.2 Funding sources for the Somport tunnel (France) 7.1 Increase in costs (actual and projected), in million francs, for each part of the Pau–Somport link 8.1 Budget breakdown for the 4th Aquitaine CPER 8.2 Membership of the basin agency committees

31

80

138 159 160 205 207 212

Figures 2.1 Kitschelt’s basic four-point state classification of political opportunities 2.2 The configuration of power 2.3 Policy process phases and success chances 2.4 National policy styles 4.1 The structure and composition of the water basin agencies 6.1 The Somport tunnel project and roads infrastructure servicing the Pau–Tarbes–Lourdes inter-town network 7.1 and 7.2 Anti-tunnel demonstration, May 1998, Oloron. By kind permission of the CAP. © Collectif Alternatives Pyrenéennes, 1998

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44 49 59 68 111 170 194

Acknowledgements There are a number of people without whose help I should never have been able to write this book. The research for the protests discussed was carried out on a series of field trips to France undertaken between April 1995 and May 1999, principally to Pau, Le Puy, Paris, Orléans, Nantes, and Riom. I should like to thank all the people who have been kind enough to answer my questions, on the telephone, by email, or in the flesh over the last six years or so, particularly Eric Pétetin and JeanRenaud of the CSAVA, Gérald Broccot of the CGT, Béatrix of the CAP, Martin Arnould and Roberto Epple of SOS Loire Vivante, Bernard Rousseau of FNE, Régis Thépot of the EPALA, Jean-Luc Laurent of the environment ministry, Christine Jean of Loire Vivante, Maurice Breugnot of the CLVVA and Pascal Braud of the Sortir du Nucléaire network. Closer to home, Jill Lovecy provided the guidance and direction for much of this book, whilst Tom Dickins and Sarah Capitanio were constantly sources of encouragement and help. Finally, I should like to thank my mum and dad, Jim for the help with typing, and of course Vic; I shouldn’t have got this far without your support.

viii

List of Abbreviations ANDRA ANECLA CAP CARDE CCI CEMAGREF CEV CGE CGP CGT CHVVA CJEC CLSVA CNDP CNIR CNR CODER CPER CRELOC CRS CSAVA CTP DATAR DDAF DDASS DDE DG DGAC DIREN DRIRE DUCSAI

Agence nationale de gestion de déchets radioactifs Association nationale pour l’étude de la communauté de la Loire et de ses affluents Collectif alternatives pyrénéennes à l’axe E7 Coordination associative régionale de défense de l’environnement Chamber of commerce and industry Centre national du machinisme agricole du génie rural Centre européen des volcans La Compagnie générale des eaux Commissariat général du plan Confédération générale du travail Comité des habitants pour la vie en vallée d’Aspe European Court of Justice Comité de liaison de sauvegarde des volcans d’Auvergne Commission nationale du débat public Conseil national interrégional Compagnie nationale du Rhône Commissions de développement économique régional Contrat de plan état–région Comité pour la réouverture de la ligne Oloron–Canfranc Compagnie républicaine de sécurité (French riot police) Comité pour la sauvegarde active de la vallée d’Aspe Communauté de travail des Pyrénées Délégation à l’aménagement du territoire et à l’action régionale Direction départementale de l’agriculture et des fôrets Direction départementale des affaires sanitaires et sociales Direction départementale de l’équipement Directorate General of the European Commission Direction générale de l’aviation civile Directions régionales de l’environnement Direction régionale de l’industrie, de la recherche et de l’environnement Démarche d’utilité concertée pour un site ix

x

List of Abbreviations

DUP EC EDF EMO EPALA ERDF ERT FFSPN FNAUT FNE FNSEA GLAT IMP IRF IRU LACRA LOTI MdF MEDEF MEP MF MISE MOPU MWG NSM PaCS PCF PIARC PLGN PS RPR SAGE SDAGE SDRN SEA SEMCA

aéroportuaire international Déclaration d’utilité publique European Community Électricité de France Environmental movement organisation Établissement public de l’aménagement de la Loire et de ses affluents European Regional Development Fund European Round Table of Industrialists Fédération française des sociétés de protection de la nature Fédération nationale des associations d’usagers des transports France Nature Environnement Fédération nationale des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles Grandes liaisons d’aménagement du territoire Integrated Mediterranean Programme International Road Federation International Road Transport Union Liaisons assurant la continuité du réseau autoroutier Loi d’orientation des transports intérieurs Thousand million francs Mouvement des entreprises de France Member of the European Parliament Million francs Mission interservices de l’eau Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Urbanismo Motorway Working Group New social movement Pacte civil de solidarité Parti Communiste Français Permanent International Association of Road Congresses Plan Loire Grandeur Nature Parti Socialiste Rassemblement pour la République Schéma d’aménagement et gestion des eaux Schéma directeur d’aménagement et gestion des eaux Schéma directeur routier national Single European Act Sociétés d’économie mixte de concessionnaires d’autoroutes

List of Abbreviations xi

SEMECLA SICALA SMO SNCF TEN TGV UDF WWF

Société d’économie mixte pour l’étude de la communauté de la Loire et de ses affluents Société intercommunale pour l’aménagement de la Loire et de ses affluents Social movement organisation Société nationale des chemins de fer français Trans-European Road Network Train à grande vitesse Union pour la Démocratie Française World Wide Fund for Nature

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Introduction Political Opportunities and Environmental Protest in France

In June 1997, 24 years after the Alsace-based group Écologie et Survie had become the first environmentalist organisation to fight an election in France, Green politics entered the French parliament. Fielding candidates as part of a Left coalition bringing together Socialists, Radicals and Communists, Les Verts finally succeeded where it had failed at every legislative election since the party’s formation in 1984, gaining six MPs – députés – in the Assemblée Nationale (the lower house of the French parliament). When Noël Mamère and his group Convergences Écologie Solidarité joined the party the following year, this number increased to seven as Les Verts consolidated their position as the most important of France’s competing Green formations. The party’s success was not confined to entering parliament, however; simultaneously, Les Verts entered national government for the first time, as Dominique Voynet was named minister for the environment and regional development in Lionel Jospin’s Gauche plurielle administration. A second ministerial portfolio was to follow in 2000, as Guy Hascoët became junior minister for overseas development and cooperation. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that much of the academic analysis and journalistic reporting on environmental politics in France over the past 30 or so years has focused on the Green movement’s development of partisan structures, and Les Verts’ various successes and failures at successive national, local, and European elections. What is perhaps more surprising is that, since the 1970s at least, there has been relatively little discussion in the specialist academic literature of the significance of the French environmental movement outside of its 1

2


institutional manifestations. The literature analysing the ideology, policies, and practices of the Greens has provided valuable insights into France’s government, institutions, and politics. In contrast, the discourses, strategies, and organisational patterns which characterise grassroots environmental campaigning in France have remained relatively unexplored, apart from accounts of several prominent conflicts which took place in the first decade or so of environmental mobilisation. Indeed, local, single-issue campaigns disappear from much of the political science literature once the recentrage associatif of Les Amis de la Terre (the French Friends of the Earth) was under way in early 1983. In contrast to the emphasis that has been placed on charting and explaining the organisational and electoral evolution of Les Verts in particular, discussions of contemporary extraparliamentary action on environmental issues are therefore quite rare, with the role and importance of local campaigns especially tending to be obscured. This might be considered especially perplexing, given that the late 1980s, the 1990s, and already the first years of the new decade, have seen significant activity in the associative sector as a whole in France, from anti-globalisation groups to AIDS advocacy coalitions to anti-racist organisations to the third-world solidarity and unemployed movements. The broader Green movement has been prominent too: as the first chapter of this book will go on to underline, environmental groups, often localised and based around a single issue, have proliferated over the last dozen years or so. Numerous campaigns have been fought across France, often focusing on infrastructure projects (TGV high-speed train lines, motorways and urban trunk-roads, high-tension electricity cable lines, the Rhine–Rhône canal, the project to construct a new major international airport outside Paris) or public health issues (nuclear processing and storage, industrial pollution, water quality, toxic waste). There is thus a sense in which this book is designed to ‘set the record straight’, to give space to campaigns about which students of environmental politics, used to accounts highlighting a lack of protest activity from a browbeaten French movement, will probably be unaware. This is particularly the case in the English-language academic literature on environmentalism in France; as we shall see, comparative analyses of socalled new social movements in western Europe have consistently played up the decline in grass-roots mobilisation on environmental issues in France after the anti-nuclear protests of the 1970s, and underlined instead the professionalisation and institutionalisation of the movement.

Introduction

3

More than fulfilling this essentially descriptive task, however, this book aims to explain the reasons why the environmental movement should have gained in strength in France over the last decade or so. The French academic Guillaume Sainteny, a prominent and sensitive observer of Green politics, argues forcefully that the discursive and strategic shifts in environmental politics which have taken place in France since the 1970s should be understood as the rational response of Green groups to the institutional structure and regulatory capacity of the Fifth Republic as a whole. He argues, in fact, that the reluctance of the broad environmental movement to form a partisan structure before the mid-1980s can be explained by nothing less than ‘a false analysis of the French institutional, political, and state framework’ (Sainteny, 1993, p. 19), which led activists into a dead end of fruitless protest, vulnerability to the whims and manipulations of allies, and frequent state repression. If this is the case, then – given the successes gained by recent protests as well as their failures – one may reasonably ask what the evidence of such events tells us about the nature of politics and policymaking in France today. Moreover, what light can recent protests shed on the nature of state–group relationships as a whole? This book therefore seeks to examine the organisation and outcomes of protest. Its central purpose is to develop an appropriate theoretical framework and conceptual tools for analysing and accounting for the forms and scale of environmental protest that France has continued to witness in this recent period.

Environmental protest and political opportunity structures Linkages between social movement trajectories and the structural properties of states are especially common within the broader comparative literature that seeks to explain the mobilisation and outcomes of environmental protest. Thus Rüdig (1988, p. 34), surveying European peace and ecology movements in the 1980s, argues that the course of action chosen by each movement crucially depends on what may be called the structure of political opportunities provided by political systems. Countries providing few opportunities to protest groups to pursue their case within the established political system faced the risk of a radicalised movement indulging in direct action and civil disobedience. This radical challenge generally was a passing phenomenon, but in some cases it served as a springboard to

4


mobilise sufficient resources to take advantage of other political opportunities, such as the formation of a new political party able to upset the party political balance. Since its rise to prominence in the mid-1980s, the concept of ‘political opportunity structures’ has been used widely to predict the probabilities of success or failure of social movements in different countries when faced with state policy initiatives. If, following the definition offered by Stepan (1978, p. xii), we take the state to represent ‘the continuous administrative, legal, bureaucratic and coercive systems that attempt not only to structure relationships between civil society and public authority in a polity but also to structure many crucial relationships within civil society as well’, then, as Rootes (1999a, pp. 75–7) points out, the principal advantage of the opportunity structure model is that it encodes the state into the analysis of social movement trajectories. Tarrow (1995a, p. 231) offers further evidence as to why this should be so important: National social movements cannot easily escape from their structure of political opportunities and constraints of their respective nation states. For movements are so inherently lacking in internal resources that they can emerge and prosper only when opportunities for access open up, when exploitable divisions appear among elites, when influential allies offer themselves and when repression declines. When access closes off, elites make common cause, allies retreat and repression heightens, movements go into decline. This is why social movements are so unstable and so volatile – they depend on external structures of opportunity. These opportunity structures developed around the national state, and it is the national state that remains their fulcrum and their major target. The political opportunity model is therefore an important tool, but one that is not without its problems. Indeed, by virtue of their construction of aggregated models of the state, political opportunity structures are a highly useful comparative indicator of the organisation and outcomes of similar protest movements in different states. Yet the model appears less able to explain differences in the outcomes and strategies of different protest movements mobilising on different issues within the same state. A central argument developed over the course of this book is therefore that the structuring of political protest opportunities needs to be seen within the context of a more differentiated sectoral and institutional

Introduction

5

approach to the policy process. In Chapter 2, the political opportunity structure model will consequently be examined in the light of the differing problematics offered respectively by the policy sector, policy style, and policy network approaches to policy-making. Yet even the construction of a more flexible general model would still seem to leave the apparent paradox of environmental mobilisation in France unresolved. If the prevalent French political opportunity structure is as overwhelmingly unresponsive to extraparliamentary protest as the specialist literature maintains, and the Green movement has accordingly transformed itself into partisan organisations, then how is it possible to account for the persistence of environmental protest in France?

Decentralisation, Europeanisation, and sectorisation The second principal argument that this book develops, then, is that the political opportunity structure literature tends to give a rather clichéd view of France, and remains locked into descriptions of the French state which see it as archetypally strong, centralised, and unified. As Chapter 3 discusses, this literature fails to take into account the shift to multilevel governance which has occurred in at least some policy sectors, on the one hand through an internal process of administrative and political decentralisation, and on the other through the external impact of European integration and institution-building. Indeed, this book investigates both the vertical and horizontal fragmentation of state policy capacity. Vertically, the state should not be seen as unified due to its division into policy sectors dealing with specific issues within specific structural, behavioural, and cultural contexts. Horizontally, the French state should no longer be seen as unified and unitary because of the dispersal of some of its policy capacity to supranational and subnational levels of government. In order to engage with the complexities of state–movement interactions shaped by this institutional structuring of power within the Fifth Republic, two case studies have been chosen which illustrate the persistence of environmental extraparliamentary protest in France. In both case studies, the discussion of environmental protest will focus on the sectoral development of multilevel governance as a key structuring mechanism for protest outcomes. The first case study, which is the subject of Chapters 4 and 5, centres on the Loire development project and the resistance to the construction of a dam at Serre de la Fare in the upper Loire. This study offers an especially firm basis for the chosen line of enquiry because of the role of regional political and economic élites

6


within the implementation of a scheme which Christine Jean, a prominent opponent, has termed ‘le premier grand dossier décentralisé’, or the first major planning controversy caused by political decentralisation.1 The second case study, investigated in Chapters 6 and 7, focuses on the campaign waged against the construction of the Somport road tunnel through the Pyrenees mountains. Similarly, this study also provides the basis for an examination of the horizontal fragmentation of the state, in part because the road tunnel was first proposed by the Communauté de Travail des Pyrénées (CTP) European pressure group, and is part of the Trans-European Road Network (TEN). A brief overview of each of these protests is given below.

Serre de la Fare: a brief overview On 13 February 1986, the Socialist government of Laurent Fabius signed a tripartite protocol authorising an ambitious economic development programme for the river Loire basin. Leading regional political, economic and administrative actors grouped within the Établissement Public de l’Aménagement de la Loire et de ses Affluents (EPALA) and the Loire-Bretagne water basin agency, the other two signatories to the protocol, had been demanding such a scheme for almost three decades. This agreement provided for the construction of four dams as well as a number of smaller works, such as the construction of protective walls, at a total estimated cost of some 2.3 MdF (thousand million francs). The chosen sites for the dams were Serre de la Fare on the upper Loire, Chambonchard on the Cher, Le Veurdre on the lower Allier, and Naussac on the upper Allier. The first scheduled to be built was Serre de la Fare, 15 km upstream of Le Puy-en-Velay in the Haute-Loire département and some 60 km from the source of the Loire on the Mont Gerbier-de-Jonc. The entire programme was scheduled to be completed within ten years. Little of this programme has been accomplished. Despite the flooding which caused the loss of eight lives in the suburbs of Le Puy in 1980, strong and sustained local opposition to Serre de la Fare caused Michel Rocard’s government of 1988–92 first to review, then suspend, and finally cancel the proposed dam. Following an intensive round of consultation with interested parties across the Loire basin, Michel Barnier – environment minister in Edouard Balladur’s 1993–95 Conservative government – produced a new charter for the Loire in January 1994. Barnier’s ten-year Plan Loire Grandeur Nature (PLGN) not only confirmed the cancellation of Serre de la Fare, but also strengthened the environmental protection measures of the original scheme and reduced

Introduction

7

the proposed capacity of Chambonchard. Yet even this package of measures did not mark the end of the saga as, following Jospin’s election in 1997, Voynet announced the review of the ‘first phase’ of the PLGN. Despite continued vigorous lobbying by the EPALA with powerful support from a seemingly unlikely alliance of agricultural unions and Communist politicians, in July 1999 she was able to announce the cancellation of Chambonchard. Meanwhile, the Le Veurdre dam remains in limbo, a state of affairs which seems likely to prevail in the current political climate. Of the main projects set out in the 1986 agreement therefore, only the relatively modest construction work at Naussac (in fact referred to as Naussac 2, given its role as a turbine pump for the already existing dam of the same name) has reached completion as intended.

The Somport tunnel: a brief overview In April 1991, Rocard’s government signed an agreement with its Spanish counterpart for the construction of an 8.6 km road tunnel under the col du Somport in the Pyrenees. The tunnel is but one part of an extensive infrastructure and economic development project concentrated around Pau, administrative centre of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques département, capital of the province of Béarn, and historic residence of the French kings of Navarre. Designed to help cut the journey time between Pau and Zaragoza from four and a half to two and a half hours, the tunnel would be complemented by the construction of the A650 motorway between Pau and Oloron-Ste. Marie at the northern entrance to the Aspe valley, and the upgrading of the RN134 approach road to the tunnel in the valley itself. Ratified by the Spanish and French national parliaments in November and December 1991, the tunnel was originally scheduled to come into service in 1995. Opponents to the project have primarily argued that the Aspe valley will suffer the same fate as the Maurienne in the Alps, becoming a bottleneck for a greatly increased amount of freight traffic. Moreover, any beneficial effects of cutting the extra distance travelled on the winding road over the 1632 m high peak of the col du Somport would be more than offset by the increase in traffic flows in an area containing 25 separate classified conservation or special interest sites. The valley is also home to the last remaining population of bears in France living in the wild. Beyond raising national and international awareness of the tunnel, protest actions have been largely responsible for delays to its completion. Though the tunnel should finally have opened in early 2002, the

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public inquiry procedure for the A650 has not yet been launched and doubts persist over its feasibility. Furthermore, the vast majority of the modernisation work has still to be carried out on the route nationale, chiefly to widen the carriageway and bypass a number of villages in the valley. In fact, even before the completion of construction work on the tunnel, the RN134 had become the central focus of protest, with opponents using diverse tactics to block construction work, including physical and legal challenges. Moreover, the protest has secured a number of concessions from the government, such as the 1991 agreement to divert the tunnel approach road, and the proposed installation of greater environmental protection measures. In 1999, Voynet and Jean-Claude Gayssot (the Communist minister for infrastructure, housing, and transport) confirmed that the RN134 would remain a secondary route, rather than a prime international trunk route.

The structure of the case studies Each case study will follow the same pattern, relating group action to state organisation. The first part will explore the initial elaboration of the project within the structural context of the relevant policy sector, before establishing the policy communities and networks which obtain, the types of interests represented, and the openness of each sector to presumed outsider groups. Chapters 4 and 6 will therefore also assess the extent to which decentralisation and Europeanisation have affected the objectives, identity, and organisation of sponsor groups. Thereafter, the second part of each case study (Chapters 5 and 7) will examine the strategies, discourses, and organisation of environmental protest. Starting from the premise that the fact of the emergence of each protest group is testament to its status as policy outsider, the discussion of each project will evaluate the policy means available to excluded groups at the implementation stage, predicted primarily to be the use of the courts, exploitation of public inquiry procedures, and political lobbying. The impacts of the environmental protest will finally be evaluated in sensitising, procedural, and substantive terms. These chapters will therefore argue, in common with the political opportunity literature, that the institutional configuration of the French state is indeed central to explaining protest trajectories and outcomes. In contrast to much of the existing literature, however, these chapters will seek to demonstrate that a more differentiated analysis of this institutional structure needs to be constructed if we are to adequately account for the trajectories and impacts of protest movements.

Introduction

9

The argument therefore developed in this book is that the availability and extent of political protest opportunities is dictated not just by horizontal fragmentation, but by vertical segmentation. Indeed, one of the contentions that will be developed is that processes of policy sectorisation themselves need to be brought to the centre of the analysis, because they are arguably more important to environmental protest trajectories than to those of other social movements. The processes of constructing and reframing policy issues and institutional arenas are of especial importance precisely because environmental protection is not a policy issue that is contained within a single policy sector, but cuts across established policy sector boundaries. The environment is thus a cross-sectoral policy issue. As such, policies affecting the environment cannot be simply and readily incorporated within the remit of an environment ministry even once such a ministry has been established, since such policies are produced by ministries across the entire state administration. The environment is therefore the concern of multiple branches of the state administration, and is subject to multiple structural pressures; this, in fact, is one of the distinctive features of environmental policy-making. Environmental protest, as a consequence, can be expected to find different state interlocutors within different policy sectors depending on the precise project or policy issue under examination. More than one state interlocutor may be involved, and attempts by different branches of the administration to oversee policy formulation and implementation may produce conflict between state interlocutors. The two case studies outlined above offer important contrasts in this respect. Serre de la Fare assesses the importance of links between oppositional groups and the ministère de l’environnement, a weak yet somewhat sympathetic administration attempting to establish its own sectoral policy remit. In order to impose its own authority, the ministry has had to construct relationships with a seemingly ever-growing number of organised groups, producing a policy sector subject to increasing pluralism of interest representation. As a result, the restructuring and reframing of water resource management as a discrete policy sector in the early 1990s runs counter to a number of widespread arguments within the established literature on public policy-making in France. In contrast, the Somport case study is projected onto an altogether different sectoral backdrop. Indeed, the road transport infrastructure policy sector is, as discussed in Chapter 6, characterised by the high degree of central control and coordination that has been seen as typical of the French state. For the Somport study, the pertinent administrative centre is the Direction des routes within the ministère de l’équipement, des transports et du logement.

10 Environmental Protest and the State in France

Although both protests are broadly identifiable as environmental, therefore, the two case studies are differentiated by their remit within different policy sectors (road construction, water provision and protection) and their different sponsoring ministries.

A word on terminology As is perhaps already clear, protest is qualified in this book as environmental rather than ecological. Following the study carried out by Roch (1996) for Les Amis de la Terre, the term is adopted to refer to any grouping which takes the protection of the environment to be its primary goal; it is further assumed that such a definition implies some form of public action at least in the loosest sense, whether aimed towards the legal-political structures of the state, the media, or the public in general. The use of this term is designed to avoid the opposition between environmentalism, conservationism, and political ecology frequently constructed in the specialist literature. Thus Rüdig’s analysis of the development of the Green movement in the 1970s isolates three distinct currents: older, established, conservationist groups; new environmental groups addressing single issues, but maintaining a ‘nonpolitical and non-ideological style’; and a radical ecology movement (1988, pp. 29–31). Moreover, Chafer (1982, pp. 205–8) and Dalton (1993, pp. 62–4) contrast ecology’s critique of a productivist society with a conservationism which is limited to the protection of the environment without rejecting the organisation of society. Conservationist groups, they argue, are able to gain greater support from within the political establishment by virtue of their greater conformity to the existing social and political order. As a consequence, they are able to attract different sources of funding, which leads in turn to different political action strategies and capacities. Whereas ecologists balance conventional and unconventional actions, conservationists are more likely to concentrate on institutionalised operations. Yet this broad distinction, while useful, is also problematic. Firstly, this is because it is not followed by all observers; Rucht (1990a, p. 170), for instance, differentiates between conservationists on the one hand and environmentalists and ecologists on the other, placing the latter two categories together by dint of their protest strategies and political engagement. Secondly, as will be discussed in the first two chapters, the degree of institutionalisation and the deployment of specific protest strategies are not stable but prone to flux over time, and are central areas of investigation in the development of the environmental movement.

Introduction

11

Finally, the study of individual protests does not always enable such clear-cut categorisations to be made. Indeed, the campaigns explored here are waged by diverse coalitions of actors, including party organisations, transnational associations, countercultural groups, and specialised nature-protection associations. It is often difficult to determine which groups are responsible for the initiation of which actions, particularly as individual actors may themselves hold membership of, and their activities may be informed by, the values and objectives of a number of different groups. Palacio (2000, p. 32), in his first-hand account of the Somport protest, explains: I use the term ‘ecologist’ in inverted commas, because I’m hesitant to include all those involved in the fight to defend the Aspe valley and its piedmont under this label, given the diversity in individual motivations. The only thing I am sure of, is that all feel a real passion for the Aspe valley. Moreover, given the nature, goals, and form of activism on environmental issues in 1990s France, it is doubtful whether the opposition between environmentalists and ecologists remains tenable in a movement which is perhaps now more clearly differentiated between parliamentary and extraparliamentary activism. Indeed, in order to demonstrate their legitimacy, single-issue environmental protest groups have consistently attempted to broaden their representativity as far as possible, forming umbrella coordinating organisations enabling numerous and diverse groups, parties, and associations to express their support within a single structure. The fact that SOS Loire Vivante, an organisation which will be examined in greater detail in the Serre de la Fare protest, federates well over one hundred separate organisations, and the Collectif Alternatives Pyrénéennes à l’Axe E7 (CAP), which will be discussed in relation to the Somport protest, is composed of 14 groups and supported by a further 25, appears typical. It is to the evolution of the environmental movement in France under the Fifth Republic, and to the corresponding developments in the organisation, strategies, and discourse of environmental protest, that we will now turn.

1 Environmental Protest in France

Since the late 1980s, there has been a significant resurgence in the scale and breadth of environmental protest in France. For those familiar with much of the exisiting literature on the French Green movement, this observation may seem surprising. This is because some of the most widely known – and often, indeed, best – accounts tend to confine extraparliamentary environmental protest to an initial phase in the construction of national party structures (Les Verts were formed in 1984). Indeed, the conclusion drawn by numerous observers is that the French environmental movement has been demobilised and institutionalised; several studies even argue that extraparliamentary environmental protest has declined to a point of insignificance in France, having been replaced almost entirely by partisan politics (see Prendiville and Chafer, 1990; Faucher and Doherty, 1996). Much discussion of the French Green movement consequently focuses on elections, party construction, and intra- and inter-party conflict (e.g. Shull, 1992; Holliday, 1994). That this shift is mirrored elsewhere in western industrial democracies, and is set against a backdrop of increasing incentives to party formation and possibilities of electoral success afforded by the institutions of the French state, only makes this shift seem all the more powerful and convincing. This chapter paints a somewhat different picture. Green party formation, although clearly a highly important development, should not be viewed as having entirely displaced extraparliamentary protest; in fact, both forms of action have continued to exist, and even flourish, in recent years. On one level, this chapter – indeed, this book – aims to restore the balance, highlighting the wealth of campaigns, organisations and issues which have been major features of the French local and national political landscape over the past 15 years or so. It asks the 12

Environmental Protest in France 13

central question: given that structural trends seem to point to the institutionalisation of the Green movement, and that the evidence of the institutional changes that have occurred in France over the past 25 years in particular have increased the incentives for challenger groups to develop partisan, election-fighting structures, how can we account for the renaissance of environmental protest? Does it simply represent a continuation of the protest of the 1970s after a brief lull, or have there been significant developments in the strategies, discourses and actions deployed by environmental movement organisations (EMOs) in France in the 1990s? Perhaps even more pertinently, this chapter asks what this resurgence tells us about the political and institutional framework in which protest groups operate: to what extent has the political context itself changed? Starting with the literature on the development of Green politics in France, this chapter therefore introduces and contextualises the themes which structure the analysis which will be developed throughout this book.

Narratives of environmental politics: from protest to institutionalisation Narratives seeking to explain the emergence of environmental politics in France have typically focused on the identification of successive developmental phases (e.g. Parkin, 1989; Bennahmias and Roche, 1992; Prendiville, 1993). In such accounts, the organisation of ‘biodegradable’ structures to fight elections, first seen at local level in Alsace in 1973, and then organised at national level with René Dumont’s presidential campaign in 1974, properly belongs to a second phase. In a first, overlapping, phase, isolated protest on diverse issues (including the construction of a winter sports station in the Vanoise national park in 1969, and the Fessenheim and Bugey nuclear reactor projects of 1971) heralds a period of mass extraparliamentary activity centring on the nuclear energy programme announced in the 1974 Plan Messmer. For Chaudron and Le Pape (1979, pp. 27–30), this development is primarily ideological; whereas the Vanoise conflict was fought by a first generation of conservationists organised around the Fédération Française des sociétés de protection de la nature (FFSPN), the early 1970s saw the emergence of a second generation of protest within a much more radical mouvement écologique. Where the first generation had focused on wildlife protection, the second developed a critique of France’s social, political and economic institutions centring on the perceived technocratic confiscation of power.


Indeed, the sheer extent of the nuclear energy programme was central to the development of environmental opposition, as groups focusing on individual siting and procedural concerns were able to forge links with similar bodies throughout France. At the same time, this geographical spread of opposition brought about a broadening of analyses and demands, as we shall examine more closely in this chapter. High-profile conflicts such as the opposition to proposed nuclear reactors at Plogoff and Le Pellerin in Brittany, and the Superphénix Fast Breeder Reactor at Creys-Malville in Isère (as well as the campaign against the extension of a military camp on the Larzac plateau), both testified to the strength of the movement during the early 1970s and acted as a catalyst for its development within a broad countercultural movement, a phenomenon recognised in Dumont’s campaign. Following the entry of the Socialists into government in 1981, a third phase centres on the construction in 1984 of a national party. Strategic battles over the positioning of Les Verts within the French party system characterise the narratives of the party’s initial development, culminating in its breakthrough at the 1989 municipal and European elections. Finally, a fourth phase seeks to explain the challenge of Génération Écologie and the repositioning of Les Verts within the party system (for example Cole and Doherty, 1995; Szarka, 1994). Stress has subsequently been placed on the latter party’s commitment to social issues, such as the PaCS and the reduction of the working week, its success in the 1997 legislative elections, and the appointment of three Green ministers in the Jospin coalition government, perhaps most notably Dominique Voynet as Ministre de l’Environnement et de l’Aménagement du Territoire from 1997–2001 (e.g. Szarka, 2000, pp. 28–34). New social movements and institutionalisation The identification of these phases is attractive because they are congruent with a body of macrostructural literature on the emergence of Green politics in affluent western polities, including Europe, North America, and Australasia. The development of environmental politics in France can accordingly be seen as part of the emergence of ‘new social movements’ primarily, although not exclusively, in western Europe. Studies of the membership and electoral profiles of the French Greens have, as elsewhere, identified a relatively young, highly educated, predominantly middle-class constituency (Bennahmias and Roche, 1992). The formation of Les Verts in 1984 can similarly be placed within the crossnational context of the development of what Kitschelt (1993) terms ‘left-libertarian’ and Müller-Rommel (1990) and Poguntke (1987) ‘new


politics’ parties. Drawing on the theory of ‘intergenerational value change’ (Inglehart, 1977), numerous observers have argued that the development of Green parties in France and elsewhere is a consequence of the inability of established parties to aggregate new demands (MüllerRommel, 1985, pp. 484–91; Kaase, 1990, pp. 94–7). Principally, this is because the established parties predominantly focus on class interests and material concerns, while the new demands are advanced by a significant constituency of citizens with postmaterial values. Moreover, the differences are not limited to values, but are also present in the set of social action repertoires associated with these new actors and groups (Dalton, Kuechler and Bürklin, 1990, p. 5). Discussing the specificity of what she refers to as ‘new political movements’, Nedelmann (1984, pp. 1037–8) argues that they deploy a broad spectrum of mobilisation strategies, incorporating both the conventional and the unconventional. Yet their distrust of established political institutions and forms of interest intermediation leads them particularly to seek alternative, non-institutionalised practices and channels of influence. Similarly, new politics parties display new forms of organisation, rejecting hierarchical, disciplined, leadership-driven models in favour of participatory, inclusive, devolved policy-making. This, according to Poguntke (1992), can be seen as the practice of an ‘unconventional’ political style. Of course, this analysis is not without its detractors; both Alber (1989) and Bürklin (1987), for instance, argue that the success of the German Greens can be predominantly explained by the conjunctural presence in the economy of alienated, highly educated age cohorts rather than by systemic value change. Yet the new social movement paradigm does enable groups such as the Greens to be seen as more than simply an outlet for demands which traditional parties tend to neglect. Indeed, the NSM analysis underlines the structural challenge posed by such groups, threatening not merely policy decisions but the mode of interest representation in western party systems itself. Correspondingly, EMOs throughout the industrialised West are also commonly held to have undergone a number of historical phases similar to those identified in France. These are, first, an overriding concern with nature protection and conservation; second, political radicalisation in the 1960s and 1970s; and third, their growing acceptance as legitimate actors working within policy-making arenas. Naturally, we should be wary of simply casting the development of EMOs within a straight ‘progression of institutionalisation’ narrative. To this effect, Diani and Donati (1999, pp. 22–3) underline the recent emergence of radical, grass-roots environmental groups in a number


of western states, while Rootes (1997a, pp. 326–9) identifies a dynamic of institutionalisation and radicalisation across western environmental movements. As established groups institutionalise, they are outflanked by newer more radical organisations, producing a paradigm where ‘local, informal action gives rise to new formal organizations which are in turn challenged by new local, informal action and so on, ad infinitum’. Yet despite the persistence of radical group formation, narratives of Green party development essentially remain narratives of movement institutionalisation. Institutionalisation, however, takes more than one form; Van der Heijden (1997), indeed, distinguishes between organisational growth, the evolution of action repertoires, and the development of external relationships, particularly with established power centres. As we have seen in France, the environmental movement is primarily seen as having been institutionalised on the first of these counts, principally through the development of formal party structures. Yet institutionalisation, particularly in other western polities, is frequently also apparent on the third count; the movement’s maintenance as a non-partisan structure is often countered by its increased integration into established non-parliamentary forms and processes of interest representation. Thus according to Rootes (1999b, p. 155), ‘EMOs have been accorded at least some measure of institutionalised access to decision-making arenas’ in all the principal northern and western European states in recent years. And despite the emphasis on unconventional behaviour in much of the early movement analyses, confrontational strategies have increasingly given way to more conventional and consensual forms of activism since the late 1980s, as ‘institution-building appears gradually to be replacing confrontational politics’ (Diani and Donati, 1999, pp. 17–18). According to Tarrow (1995a, p. 241), ‘environmentalism [had] become essentially a “consensus movement” in individual European states’ by the 1990s.

The persistence of environmental protest Narratives of the development of Green politics in France are clearly useful for explaining the development of environmentalism during Fifth Republic France, particularly given that – after all – they are so frequently employed to analyse the development of specifically partisan formations. Yet these narratives also tend to assume such development to be a teleological process. While they do not necessarily explicitly argue each phase to be discrete, they nonetheless point to a sense of ineluctable historical causality which privileges the final phase. Indeed,


even Les Verts’ own website adopts a four-phase structure to describe its own development, underlining the party’s own sense of its seemingly inevitable progression to power and influence. But while such phased narratives successfully highlight the emergence of a nationally coordinated, election-fighting, office-holding party organisation, they seem less able to account for the continued importance of extraparliamentary mobilisation on environmental issues in France. The next section of this chapter, then, aims to provide such an explanation, discussing two features of recent protest in particular; these are, first, the connection between protest and party success, and second, the changing pattern of mobilisation. Party performance and extraparliamentary protest The link between extraparliamentary action and electoral success is made apparent by the results of the 1997 legislative elections. Of the seven Green députés elected, André Aschieri and Marie-Hélène Aubert are closely identified with local opposition to infrastructural projects. Aschieri is thus known for his resistance to the A8bis/A58 motorway project on the Côte d’Azur, while Aubert was elected in the Eure-et-Loir département on a platform of opposition to the proposal to construct a third Parisian airport at Beauvilliers, near Chartres. Indeed, she was elected by directly beating the project’s primary sponsor, Maurice Dousset, who had been UDF député for the constituency since 1973, and at the time was also president of the Centre regional council (see below for further discussion of this project). Of the other Greens elected, Yves Cochet was ‘parachuted’ into the Val d’Oise département, to fight and win in a constituency characterised by strong opposition to the construction of two further runways at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport; and Voynet herself is strongly linked with opposition to the Rhine–Rhône canal in Dôle. Further, that Danielle Auroi was able to take Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, former president of France and current president of the regional council, to a second-round run-off was a considerable achievement, founded on local opposition to the council’s Centre Européen des Volcans (CEV) project. This connection is far from novel in the development of the French environmental movement, and has already been often discussed (Sainteny, 1991, p. 105; Shull, 1996, pp. 229–30). Yet in these accounts, local issue movements have primarily been of interest only as a means of explaining spectacular or anomolous electoral performances by Les Verts, Génération Écologie or other Green party formations. In at least one account, local environmental campaigns are actually represented as


a constraining factor on the development of Les Verts, in so far as the high visibility of environmental issues may have impeded the party from effectively presenting elements of its programme less directly related to narrowly defined ‘Green’ issues. O’Neill, for example, claims that ‘even after the movement did acquire a national presence as a party of protest, it remained electorally disadvantaged by its persistent image as a single-issue party – with the status of being little more than a pressure group that fielded local candidates’ (1997, p. 180). Perhaps as a consequence, key decisions such as the cancellation of the Serre de la Fare dam or the rerouting of the approach road to the Somport tunnel have at times attracted attention more as a demonstration of the possibilities of institutional action than as the fruit of extraparliamentary protest (e.g. Prendiville, 1993, p. 78). The importance of protest group organisation also tends to be downplayed. The emphasis on partisan politics in much of the literature on French Green politics has occasionally led to the accordance of a primary role to Les Verts within the organisation of local protest, even though opposition is generally organised by local associations (e.g. Whiteside, 1992, pp. 17–19). The direct role of Les Verts within local conflicts, rather than one of organisation, tends in reality to be limited to symbolic support; indeed, where the party is present in protest groups, it is frequently on the same basis as a host of other political formations. (Génération Écologie, for its part, enjoys little confidence from activists withn the associative sector.) In many cases, in fact, Les Verts have been slow to respond to potentially environmentally damaging projects, only belatedly following action carried out by local groups. Thus the unanimous approval of the regional budget by an Auvergne regional council including three Verts and two Génération Écologie councillors in December 1994 enabled Giscard to claim unanimous cross-partisan support for the CEV, and the initial reluctance of the Greens to oppose the TGV-Méditérranée project was severely criticised by the Coordination associative régionale de défense de l’environnement (CARDE), which formed to oppose the scheme in the Bouches du Rhône département. It was only after 5000 demonstrators gathered in front of the Hôtel Matignon in September 1990 that Les Verts showed enthusiasm for the issue, by which time relationships between party and protesters had declined to one of mistrust (Perrier, 1993, pp. 35–6). As has already been observed, narratives of the development of political ecology in France tend to confine extraparliamentary protest to a 1970s pre-partisan phase of organisation. In an analysis which has


achieved wide currency, Prendiville and Chafer (1990, p. 198) identify a transformation from what we consider to have been an embryonic social movement in the 1970s to a fully fledged political party with principally environmentalist concerns. The latter would seem at present to have replaced the former, rather than becoming simply an indispensable political arm of a broader social movement. By the same token, and despite isolated examples of continued extraparliamentary protest on the issue, Rucht (1994, p. 136) concluded that there was ‘hardly any reason to assume the existence of a vital antinuclear movement in France’ after the 1970s. Duyvendak, observing the same decline in anti-nuclear protest in France in the 1980s, offers two explanations. First, he argues, activists were affected by ‘cognitive dissonance’; in other words, anti-nuclear mobilisation declined because ‘the French no longer considered nuclear energy dangerous (or at least, not as dangerous as they had previously thought during the period of mobilisation)’ (1995, p. 35). Second, along with Kriesi (1995a, pp. 186–9; 1995b, pp. 76–8), Duyvendak proposes an explanation reliant on an analysis of the political opportunities available to protest groups within the French polity. This subject will be discussed at much greater length in the next chapter, but it is useful here to adopt Brockett’s (1991, p. 254) broad definition of the structure of political opportunities as ‘the configuration of forces in a (potential or actual) group’s political environment that influences that group’s assertion of its political claims’. According to Duyvendak, one factor in the configuration of forces interacting with the French anti-nuclear movement was particularly important: the presence, attitude, and influence of political allies. Indeed, because of the fundamental importance of allies to the potential securing of social movement outcomes in the French political opportunity structure, the victory of Mitterrand and the Parti Socialiste in May and June 1981 was a determinant influence in the demobilisation of the anti-nuclear movement. Faced with the loss of the prospect of change after the refusal of the new government to fulfil its election promises and halt the nuclear energy programme, the movement collapsed. In fact, for the environmental movement as a whole, the change inspired by the victory of the Left in 1981 was ‘linear, unambiguous, negative’ (Duyvendak, 1995, p. 128). Lacking allies in government, and faced with a strong, centralised, and repressive state, ‘opponents of nuclear energy in France […] have largely given up their struggle and to some extent have even bent their viewpoints to the inevitable’, argue Duyvendak and Koopmans (1995, p. 160).


Yet attention to individual cases of extraparliamentary protest on environmental issues, and to the emergence of general trends in association membership, tend to belie such negative analyses. Indeed, far from becoming insignificant in France, environmental protest began to enjoy a renaissance from the end of the 1980s, in terms of geographical spread, issue range, and numerical force. Trom recently noted that Not a day goes by without our regional and national newspapers reporting a case of local opposition, in the name of ‘nature’ protection, to an infrastructure project – whether it be a regional development scheme initiated by public authorities, such as a new road or TGV line, the canalisation of a water course, or the erection of high-tension electricity pylons, or a privately-funded project benefitting from the benevolent agreement of the public authorities. (1999, p. 31) Most conspicuously, 10,000 demonstrators came together in Le Puy in April 1989 to protest against the Serre de la Fare dam, similar numbers gathered in the Aspe valley in 1992 and 1994 to demonstrate against the Somport tunnel, and in Besançon in 1996 to protest against the Rhine– Rhône canal. In spring 1997, between 30,000 and 40,000 gathered outside Nantes for a two-day festival in opposition to a proposed nuclear power station at Le Carnet on the Loire estuary. Indeed, anti-nuclear activism in France has since been highly visible, focusing in particular on the search for a suitable waste disposal site by the ANDRA (Agence nationale de gestion de déchets radioactifs) state agency. Demonstrations in Brittany, the Dordogne, the Orne and the Cantal each attracted up to 10,000 protesters on one weekend alone in April 2000. Although protests against train movements of nuclear waste have been considerably less strong than in Germany, small groups of activists have maintained guerrilla actions against freight movements: five activists were arrested outside Strasbourg in August 2001, for example, for chaining themselves to the rail tracks in front of the train. Further protests against French nuclear policy, coordinated by the national Sortir du Nucléaire network, were held simultaneously in Colmar, Lille, Lyon, Nantes and Toulouse in October 2001, each attracting between 1500 and 4000 demonstrators. These demonstrations took place not in isolation, but rather against a backdrop of widespread protest on environmental issues, including numerous actions against the planned reopening of the Mont Blanc tunnel, and a demonstration in September in Puylaroque, in the French south-west, which mobilised nearly 4000 protesters against a planned industrial pig farm. A march later the same month in Toulouse attracted up to 40,000 protesters, following the


ammonium nitrate explosion in which 29 people were killed, 2500 injured, and 10,000 made homeless. Concerned about possible health risks, local environmental organisations had long demanded the relocation of the AZF chemical plant. From mass mobilisation to micro-mobilisations From the outset, any attempt to characterise the extent of extraparliamentary environmental activism in France needs to place the trend firmly in perspective; the proportion of people active within environmental associations is still only about half that for humanitarian groups (Maresca, 1996). Furthermore, while various issues have mobilised fivefigure numbers of demonstrators, they have rarely attracted more than 10,000, and the recent numbers have certainly been much lower than the estimated 60,000 recorded at Larzac in 1973, 60,000 at Malville in 1977, or 100,000 at Plogoff in 1980. Yet these recent mass protests retain their significance because they have developed after a period marked by the decline of associational activity, particularly within the ‘new politics’ sector. Thus although the proportion of the population claiming to belong to at least one association remained relatively stable throughout the 1980s, this was because a kind of zero-sum game operated: while leisure-oriented, and particularly sporting associations thrived, les associations militantes declined in both incidence and membership. Environmental associations were particularly hard hit, with average membership falling from nearly 4 per cent in 1978 to just over 2 per cent in 1984 (Gros, 1985; Haeusler, 1988). Recent studies carried out by Fourel and Volatier (1993), Maresca (1996), and Hatchuel and Loisel (1998), however, have shown that this decline has, at the very least, been arrested. The data show that environmental associations in particular have undergone a partial renaissance since the end of the 1980s, amounting to a second wave of extraparliamentary environmental activism. Maresca charts a recovery from 1988 onwards, with an estimated creation of between 1500 and 2000 new environmental associations per year. The overall figures, giving a total of 5000 to 6000 groups active in France, are, it should be noted, strikingly similar to those given for mobilisation on environmental issues in France in the mid-1970s by Hayward (1978, p. 63) and Wright (1989, pp. 271–2). In general, these groups have a short life, generally of between three and five years. The majority of members of the group are active, with few ‘sleeping’ supporters. Groups have tended to organise at municipal level, particularly where urbanisation and industrialisation have bitten into green belt areas; environmental activism has become une grande cause … locale, with groups mobilising against clearly defined, local projects,


often evolving into associations articulating a broader set of local issues (Maresca, 1996). Roch (1996) found that many associations also mobilise at departmental and regional levels; however, whereas the larger organisations tend to be more naturalist in character and favour a more participatory, management-oriented approach, the more localised associations tend to be more ‘defensive’, or protest-oriented, concentrate on urban infrastructure and quality-of-life issues, and resort consistently to the judicial system. In Lascoumes’ terms (1994, pp. 230 ff), these associations tend to mobilise around either a ‘single specific’ or ‘wide range’ of localised problem, categories which account for about two thirds of all environmental defence associations in France. This trend is confirmed by studies carried out by Fillieule on protest activities in three French cities in the 1980s. Analysing the scale, strategies, outcomes, and policing of protest undertaken by a wide range of challenging groups in Paris, Nantes and Marseille, Fillieule found that while the average number of people participating in individual demonstrations had significantly decreased since the 1970s, the number of demonstrations as a whole had undergone a significant increase (1997, p. 75). While mass mobilisations called by unions and parties were on the wane, the 1980s saw the development of ‘micro-mobilisations’ articulated around a series of revendications ponctuelles, or specific singleissue demands (Favre and Fillieule, 1994, p. 131). Thus 60 per cent of events mobilised between 50 and 100 people, and a further 30 per cent mobilised fewer than 50; events gathering between 200 and 500 participants were particularly susceptible to decline. These findings were particularly representative of groups articulating postmaterial demands (Fillieule, 1997, p. 94). The data produced by influential studies such as that carried out by Kriesi et al. (1995) tend to reveal a very low total number of participants in environmental protest in France. Covering the 1975–89 period, such studies see little evidence for the existence of a ‘protest wave’ across the new social movement sector as a whole in France, given that the overall numbers for mobilisation are low when compared to other European polities such as Switzerland, West Germany and the Netherlands. Yet it is probable that such studies have consistently underestimated the extent of social protest in France, as they are based on a methodological approach which we should treat with the greatest caution. This is because, as Rootes (1999b, p. 172, n. 21) has pointed out, they attempt to provide a cross-national comparative analysis on the basis of noncomparable sources. To be more precise, such studies are based on data culled from reports published in the Monday editions of one leading


national newspaper per country. The choice of Le Monde for France, although ostensibly equivalent (in tone, style, and editorial line) to newspapers such as the German Frankfurter Rundschau, the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Dutch NRC/Handelsblad is in fact highly problematic on at least three counts. First, this is because the Monday edition of Le Monde is actually published on a Sunday, and second, because the paper’s news agenda, as Fillieule (1997) underlines, is highly centred on Paris when – as we have seen – environmental protest in particular in France is widespread, but tends to be small-scale and provincial. Third, Le Monde is unusually statecentred; the paper’s sections are organised to mirror the departments of the state (Fillieule and Ferrier, 2002). Consequently, environmental protest may be underrepresented because it is, as the next chapter argues more fully, intrinsically cross-sectoral, and because the environment ministry is historically the least powerful branch of the administration. If such data is useful, it is primarily because it enables comparisons across time within the same country rather than comparisons between countries; on this basis, we can say that Koopmans’ study tends to confirm the trend towards a renaissance in activism at the end of the 1980s. Thus Koopmans records that the total number of participants in environmental protest events was higher in 1989 than at any point over the preceding 15 years (1995, p. 115).

Explaining the resurgence of activism Such a state of affairs requires an explanation, particularly given the trend to institutionalisation noted above. This section, then, will summarise a number of the developments that have been central to the persistence of extraparliamentary environmental protest in France. Chief among these are the continued existence of localised grievances, but also the effects of institutional decentralisation. The persistence of grievances In his analysis of the emergence of Green issues and politics in Britain during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lowe (1986, p. 71) notes that conflicts over planning and land-use act as a prime catalyst for the development of environmental protest. To be sure, the objective identification of grievances is not in itself a sufficient factor for explaining protest group mobilisation. Indeed, examining anti-nuclear activism across European states, Duyvendak and Koopmans found no direct relationship between the extent of the problem and the level of mobilisation (1995, p. 162).


As Persanyi (1993, p. 139) puts it, ‘environmental degradation is not enough. If it were, the strongest environmental movements would be in Third World countries, where environmental decay is now among the worst in the world.’ Understanding social movement trajectories requires analysis of numerous factors, therefore, most prominently group resources and the structure of available political opportunities, both of which will be returned to at length in the next chapter. Here, however, it is necessary to emphasise that while the presence of grievances is not a sufficient condition for protest, it is a necessary first or pre-condition for it. As we have already seen, environmental protest in France in the 1970s was primarily visible when mobilised against two different types of project: state-led development of tourism infrastructure and national energy policy in the form of nuclear power installations. Even in the case of the nuclear programme, despite the construction of protest as a wider critique of the state, activism intensified in the immediate aftermath of governmental policy and siting decisions (Chaudron and Le Pape, 1979, pp. 57–8). It is interesting then to note that, in this second wave of activism, protest has again predominantly formed in opposition to major infrastructural projects, with tourist and transport development schemes at the forefront of environmental action campaigns. Since the decision taken by the Auvergne regional council in 1992 to construct the Centre Européen des Volcans on the edge of the protected regional park, for example, some 25 different environmental associations have grouped together within the Comité de liaison de sauvegarde des volcans d’Auvergne (CLSVA) to oppose the scheme. Whereas environmental protesters consider the project to be environmentally damaging, superfluous, expensive and ill-located, the regional council promises economic regeneration, tourist expansion, and transport infrastructural development. According to Giscard, in an October 1995 speech to the regional council, This project will create an attractive modern image for the Auvergne, and will be seen as a successful marriage of our region’s historical identity and its ability to adapt. It will be a very important element in the image of the Auvergne as both a French and European region, will preserve our natural heritage, and will contribute to the tourist and economic development of the region as a whole. In particular, environmental campaigns have organised in opposition to TGV railway lines (see Perrier, 1993; Fourniau, 1997; Lolive, 1997), and road construction projects, specifically the vast motorway building


programme launched by the Plan Mehaignerie of April 1987, which had the intention of increasing France’s motorway capacity from 7000 to 12,000 km within the subsequent 15-year period (see Chapter 6). Les Verts set up a ‘Comité national contre les excès routiers’ in October 1990, and the A1 and A16 motorway construction projects were major tests of the alliance with the Parti Socialiste within the Nord-Pas de Calais regional council in 1992. However, opposition to motorway construction projects has been particularly prominent at the associative level. In the spring of 1992, France Nature Environnement (FNE) launched a series of roads protests in conjunction with other high-profile regional, national and European organisations under the title ‘Autoroutes, overdose!’1 More recently, the A51 between Grenoble and Sisteron, the proposed A75 viaduct over the Tarn valley at Millau in the Aveyron, the exact route of the A85 along the Loire from Tours to Angers or that of the A83 through classed fenland between Nantes and Niort and, as we shall see in Chapter 7, the Somport tunnel through the Pyrenees, have all attracted popular resistance and the establishment of single issue action movements. Of the 60 ‘territorial flashpoints’ identified by Le Monde in June 1997, over half were infrastructural projects, the vast majority transport schemes.2 The third Paris airport and ‘nimby’ protests Perhaps the most widespread and sustained recent actions have been mobilised against the plan to construct a new international airport at Chaulnes near Amiens in the Somme, 125 km north-east of Paris. Barring significant revisions to the project, construction work on the airport – essentially designed to relieve passenger congestion at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle and Orly – is scheduled to begin in 2010, with the first flight five years later. By 2020, Chaulnes is scheduled to be a fully operational fourrunway airport, as an initial passenger capacity of 30 million/year will have the potential to be increased to 50 million/year in a second phase of development. The initial projected cost of the project, including a vastly expanded motorway and high-speed rail TGV infrastructure linking the site with Charles de Gaulle, ranges from 40 to 60 MdF. The decision to build the ‘third Paris airport’ goes back to 1993, when the Balladur government commissioned a study in response to the hostility of residents in the Roissy area to the extension of Charles de Gaulle. After further studies, the subsequent Juppé government decided in June 1996 to construct a new airport at Beauvilliers, 90 km south-west of Paris. However, following concerted opposition to the choice of Beauvilliers, led by the Collectif contre l’aéroport, an umbrella organisation federating


consumers’, environmental, and inhabitants’ associations, Lionel Jospin announced his opposition to the project during the 1997 legislative election campaign, and subsequently froze any future plans following the Gauche plurielle’s victory. Within three years, however, Jospin was to revoke his decision. Following transport minister Jean-Claude Gayssot’s commitment to limit the capacity of Charles de Gaulle airport to 55 million passengers per year (a promise made, despite the airport’s nominal capacity of 80 million passengers/year, in response to complaints by inhabitants’ associations protesting at the noise and atmospheric pollution levels at Roissy) and the Air France Concorde crash at Gonesse on 25 July 2000, in which 112 people died, in October 2000 Jospin announced the creation of the DUCSAI (Démarche d’Utilité Concertée pour un Site Aéroportuaire International) commission to review the choice of a site for the project. Set up within the framework of the Commission nationale du débat public (CNDP) introduced in 1995, the DUCSAI held a series of public consultative meetings throughout France in the spring of 2001, before publishing a list of eight potential sites, including both Beauvilliers and Chaulnes, in September 2001. A second series of public meetings, held in the vicinity of each of the retained sites, was then organised before the final report was submitted to the government the following month. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the nominated sites have been the focus for numerous protest actions. Demonstrations have regularly attracted between one and five thousand protesters, petitions have flourished, associations have mobilised. In October 2001, former CFDT railway workers’ leader Bruno Dalberto, standing on the single-issue platform of opposition to a third airport in the Paris region, was only narrowly defeated by the sitting right-wing candidate at a departmental council byelection in the solid conservative constituency of Neufchâtel-sur-Aisne. In such villages as Amifontaine and Prouvais, close to the mooted site of Juvincourt, Dalberto even gained over 50 per cent of the first-round vote. The meetings organised by the DUCSAI commission have been far from conducive to rational debate, typically providing only an arena for displays of hostility between opposing camps, and for mutual incomprehension between local inhabitants and administrative officials. Eggs were thrown at the commissioners at one meeting in Laon in September. It is tempting to label such protests as archetypal nimby responses, particularly in the light of the emergence of a second campaign, led this time by a collective of over fifty environmental and residents’ associations


in favour of the third airport project. Thus one demonstration was held in Paris in November 2001 to protest against the noise and atmospheric pollution suffered by those living near Orly, Roissy, and the smaller Paris airport at Le Bourget; the protest called for relief to be given to residents by diverting future traffic to an urgently required new international airport (preferably – though not necessarily – at Vatry, an already existing freight terminal near Reims with a low surrounding population density). Moreover, Jospin’s decision to authorise the controversial project in November 2001, only six months away from presidential and legislative elections – and when doubts about the validity of passenger growth forecasts following the 11 September terrorist attacks in the United States would have seemed to provide a plausible, even compelling reason to delay the decision until after the elections – can perhaps best be explained by the desire to forestall continued protest by residents near the other mooted sites. At first sight, it would seem therefore that individual concerns outweighed environmental consciousness in the anti-airport protest. Yet even given these factors, there are numerous sound reasons, both conceptual and empirical, which should lead us to avoid the nimby description. The term nimby implies that protesters are acting in only the narrowest of self-interest, and that they would support a similar construction project if it were sited in a different locality. In fact, though widely used in British accounts of localised land-use conflicts, the term is rarely used in France (with the exception of a number of academic analyses which borrow the term with specific reference to the Anglo-Saxon literature) either by activists or observers; as should be apparent from the preceding discussion, the more descriptive terms collectifs de riverains (local residents’ collectives) and comités de défense de quartier (neighbourhood defence committees) are preferred. But aside from linguistic differences, the principal argument against the adoption of the nimby label is that it replicates the paradigm placed on protest by project developers; from the outset, it imposes one partisan-determined frame over the many possible competing analytical frames, and obscures investigation of the motivations and composition of protest groups. Starting from this assumption, it is perhaps not surprising that accounts of so-called nimby protests have frequently identified a process of radicalisation of local inhabitants by outside activists introducing a wider ideological critique. As Cathles (2000, p. 175) points out in her study of environmental protests in Britain, this assumption presumes a one-way flow of ideas and undervalues the contribution of local campaigners to protest


actions, creating artificial and unjustifiable divisions. It gives the moral high-ground to eco-radicals and patronisingly presents local campaigners as having to be educated by camp protesters before they can be regarded as members of the global environmental movement. In reality there are differing levels of understanding of local issues and awareness of wider global issues among both groups, and there are members of both whose motivations are personal as well as political. Local campaigners are often very well informed and do not necessarily start from the classic NIMBY position. Moreover, local campaigns need to be seen in the context of competing claims to legitimacy, particularly where protest involves physical direct action against projects which have been authorised through democratic policy-making structures enjoying wide acceptance. The commitment of actors to local campaigns does not necessarily imply their acceptance of similar projects in other areas, but rather their awareness that action needs to be seen as representative in order to challenge the outcomes of consensual decision-making. In contrast, as the campaigns analysed in detail in Chapters 5 and 7 demonstrate, a key feature of the discourses of project-sponsoring élites is to identify protesters as outsiders who have no legitimacy to speak for the community. Like the protest groups formed in Picardie and Champagne-Ardennes, the Beauvilliers ‘Collectif contre l’aéroport’ certainly underscores the localised environmental, economic and social problems associated with the development, but places them within such broader concerns as the accentuation of regional developmental imbalances, the unreliability of current passenger forecasts, the contribution of air traffic to CO2 emissions and the obligations of the Kyoto agreement, the promotion of rail–air travel complementarity, and concerns over the saturation of European airspace. Far from wanting it to be located elsewhere, the organisation has consistently argued that the third airport should not built at all. It is significant that 20 associations from the three regions concerned came together to organise joint protests and form the SUCSAI collective (Synergie Unitaire pour une Contestation d’un Système Aéroportuaire Inadapté, which translates directly as Unitary synergy to challenge an unadapted airport system). Adopting the slogan ‘Ni ici, ni ailleurs, mais autrement!’, the collective is thus opposed to the principle of the third airport, demanding the suspension of the consultation process pending further studies on air transport growth, a relief package for Roissy, and investment instead in TGV links and regional airport hubs.


Decentralisation and environmental protest One aspect that is immediately apparent from these protests is that whereas dissent on environmental issues in the 1970s typically brought protesters into opposition with the state, since the late 1980s singleissue protest has been predominantly targeted at projects which have been jointly or wholly sponsored by subnational political and economic actors. In fact, many of the projects that have been vigorously opposed by environmental groups during this second wave have been primarily sponsored not by central authorities but by regional and departmental councils in particular. Indeed, the association of local notables (or political grandees) with infrastructural projects contested by environmental associations over the last decade is striking. The role of regional economic and political élites in lobbying central government to proceed with the seemingly mythical Rhine–Rhône canal project is now well documented (Hayward, 1982; Loridan, 1997), and – as we shall see in Chapters 4 and 5 – finds a parallel in western France with the Loire dam scheme. Also in the French west, the construction of the Pont du Ré was heavily sponsored by local political élites, primarily within the Charente Maritime departmental council, which had taken in principal the decision to link the Île de Ré with La Rochelle in 1974. Local political consensus behind the project was absolute and cross-partisan, even including Michel Crépeau, former environment minister and mayor of La Rochelle. Yet the scheme was not given the green light until the 1982 lois Defferre on decentralisation, which enhanced the powers and budgets of subnational authorities and devolved planning and construction decisions, had provided the necessary financial and psychological impetus. Local and regional élites, anxious to attract economic investment and employment, have frequently been key supporters or proposers of infrastructure projects; René Monory, president of the Vienne departmental council, was the driving force behind the construction of the Poitiers Futuroscope, while Giscard is of course one of the greatest notables of them all (although the Centre Européen des Volcans has officially been rebaptised Vulcania after a schools competition, personally adjudicated by the former President of the Republic, the development is commonly known as the Giscardoscope). Even where a major infrastructure development has been drawn up at national level, it has frequently been with the close involvement of regional élites, as Alphandéry (1993, pp. 74–5) and Blatrix (1997) argue in their respective studies of the EuroDisney and TGV Méditerranée projects; similarly, local politicians from the HautesAlpes département long demanded the (since cancelled) construction of


the A51 motorway to Gap, in the belief that it would increase the area’s economic and social wealth. The third Paris airport provides an intriguing example of a similar dynamic. On the one hand, subnational authorities and politicians have been at the forefront of a number of campaigns against the project. In the immediate aftermath of the Chaulnes decision, 25 of the 26 mayors in the Chaulnes communauté des communes resigned, while Gilles de Robien, the UDF mayor of Amiens, has been a leading critic of the proposal. The Picardy regional council, and the departmental councils of the Aisne, the Marne, the Oise, and the Somme, all voted against the project, at least during the final consultation stage. Moreover, an initial proposal to build the airport at Rouvilliers near Compiègne was not even retained by the DUCSAI commission after a petition signed by 30,000 people was submitted to the transport ministry by Philippe Marini, Gaullist senator and mayor of Compiègne. Yet such opposition does not tell the whole story for, on the other hand, only two of the eight sites finally retained were proposed by the state (in fact by the DGAC, Direction générale de l’aviation civile, the French civil aviation authority, a branch of the transport and infrastructure ministry); the others were all promoted by subnational authorities, politicians, or recognised socio-economic organisations such as chambers of commerce and industry (CCIs), which are empowered to manage airports in France (Table 1.1). The choice of a site north of Paris responds to neither of the government’s objectives in increasing air corridor safety or promoting the development of economically and demographically disadvantaged regions. The choice of Chaulnes thus apparently responds primarily to the agenda of the air transport lobby, in particular Air France, which is ensured straightforward logistical coordination with its main operation at Roissy. Yet the bidding process has enabled the state to mobilise public and private subnational actors in support of sectoral objectives, legitimising the nomination procedure and underlining the airport’s role as a lead project in local economic development. Thus the primary sponsor of the Chaulnes bid was not the state but Maxime Gremetz, Communist député for the Somme, backed by the departmental federation of the PCF and Vincent Peillon, the national spokesman for the Parti Socialiste. Charles Baur, Conservative president of the Picardie regional council, was the original prime lobbying force behind Chaulnes before 1997, while influential professional and small business associations, such as the Union des Industries des Métiers de la Métallurgie and the Confédération Générale des Petites et Moyennes

Environmental Protest in France 31 Table 1.1 The eight potential sites for the third Paris airport, and their principal promoters Site

Département

Région

Principal sponsors

Beauvilliers

Eure-et-Loir

Centre

Eure-et-Loir departmental council; Centre regional council; Chartres CCI

Bertaucry

Marne

ChampagneArdennes

Épernay CCI

Chaulnes

Somme

Picardie

Maxime Gremetz; Picardy regional council 1995–7 (later backtracked)

Les Grandes Loges

Marne

ChampagneArdennes

Reims CCI

Hangest-enSanterre

Somme

Picardie

DGAC

JuvincourtAmifontaine

Aisne

Picardie

Initially, Aisne departmental council (later backtracked and opposed); DGAC

Montdidier-Sud

Somme

Picardie

Amiens CCI

Vatry

Marne

ChampagneArdennes

Marne departmental council, Champagne-Ardennes regional council, Châlonsen-Châmpagne CCI

Entreprises, have backed the recent campaign. The Amiens CCI, though it itself proposed Montdidier-Sud, quickly rallied to Chaulnes once the government decision was taken. The list of backers for the Beauvilliers bid was arguably even more impressive: since 1996, regional political and economic élites have lobbied intensively for the airport by setting up an organisation baptised AIRCAP (Association pour l’Implantation en Région Centre du Nouvel Aéroport de Paris). All six of the region’s departmental councils supported the proposal, as did the Chartres and Orléans municipal councils, the Chartres and Alençon CCIs, and such political grandees as Jack Lang (minister and former mayor of Blois) and Jean-Pierre Sueur (mayor of Orléans and former minister). The reason why subnational political and economic actors have continued to champion the siting of the airport in their locality in the face of protest is perhaps not very hard to understand. According to the presidents of the departmental councils which make up the Centre region, the choice of Beauvilliers would be the ‘development opportunity of the century’, with the presidents of the Eure-et-Loir’s CCI and MEDEF


(Mouvement des Entreprises de France, the peak employers’ association) arguing that the effect on the region’s economy would have been greater than that achieved by the decentralisation initiatives of the 1960s, creating over 100,000 jobs.3 And though the Aisne departmental council all but unanimously voted in July 2001 against hosting the airport at Juvincourt, it also reaffirmed its wish that business taxes be shared equally among Picardy’s three départements should one of its neighbours be selected. It is estimated that local authorities benefit from Charles de Gaulle airport by between 400 and 500 MF (million francs) in local taxes and charges every year. Not surprisingly, just before Chaulnes was chosen, the Picardy regional council recognised that the project ‘constitutes an exceptional and unique development opportunity’, while reiterating its opposition … ‘for the time being’.4

The state in environmental discourse, action, and ideology We can therefore tentatively draw a number of contrasts between the form and organisation of environmental dissent in the 1970s and 1990s, especially given the conceptualisation of the state in the first wave of environmental protest. The state is particularly important in environmental discourses in France; as Parodi (1979, p. 41) points out, the legacy of the events of May 1968 gave Green politics a distinctive anarchist flavour in France, and environmental action consequently developed strong anti-statist positions. More generally, Rootes (1997a, p. 329) underlines the importance of state-centred analyses in the formation of Green parties in western polities: significantly, many have evolved from anti-nuclear campaigns aggregating coalitions around a critique of the state. As this section will argue, this is particularly true of the French case. Given the new sets of grievances and policy-making centres that Green protest was addressing in the 1990s, it is important to examine whether the second wave of extraparliamentary environmental activism has seen a fundamental shift in the construction of the state in discursive and strategic terms. The state, anti-nuclear activism, and Les Amis de la Terre Decentralised decision-making, and particularly the promotion of the region as a cultural and political unit, are historically central to environmental discourse, ideology, and practice in France. The statutes and organisation of Les Verts, for example, are emblematic of the party’s internal culture of la politique autrement and its desire to avoid top-down, impositional, ‘professionalised’ policy-making structures.


The party thus aims to resist the emergence of a leadership class by enforcing strict limitations on the number of elected offices any member can simultaneously hold, and elects four national spokespersons rather than a single party leader. An internal referendum must be held if 10 per cent of the party’s members call for one; potentially covering any aspect of policy, the result is binding. The importance of the party’s regional branches is underlined by the large degree of organisational autonomy they enjoy, and by their role in the party’s two-phase conference procedure; decentralised regional assemblies (held at the same time, on the same day, with the same agenda) elect delegates to a subsequent single federal assembly. Held every two years, the federal assembly elects 30 members of Les Verts’ policy-making council, the CNIR (Conseil national interrégional); the other 90 are directly elected by the regional branches. This culture of participation and decentralisation is also prominent within the party’s policy choices. Direct democratic mechanisms are expressed outside the party by such innovative policy initiatives as the consultative citizens’ meetings instigated in September 2001 by the Green group on the Montreuil municipal council; designed to foster public participation in local decision-making, these open meetings discuss the agenda of the forthcoming council meeting. The recognition and promotion of minority languages within the media and state education system have been a constant distinctive feature of Les Verts’ programme, as have alliances with groups articulating demands for regional autonomy. Thus the party has long placed autonomy within the Republic (though not independence) at the centre of its policy on Corsica, and in 1990 the CNIR recognised the existence of the Corsican people and advocated self-determination for the island. The previous year, Max Simeoni, general secretary of the nationalist grouping Union du Peuple Corse, was elected to the European Parliament on the Green list, while I Verdi Corsi, founded in 1988 with a membership drawn from non-violent Corsican nationalist as well as environmental groups, has subsequently fought numerous campaigns and shared a variety of platforms with legitimist nationalist organisations, and participated in coalitions such as Corsica Nazione and Unità. Such girondisme is equally evident in the party’s electoral profiles; voting patterns for Les Verts and associated lists have tended to be strong in peripheral areas with separatist traditions such as Alsace and Brittany (Bennahmias and Roche, 1992, pp. 71–99), while surveys of Green voters and activists have revealed close identification with regionalist movements (Prendiville and Chafer, 1990, p. 187).


It is hardly surprising, then, that a critique of the function and organisation of the central state has long been a central tenet of French political ecology. As Journès underlines, the relationship between the state and civil society was primarily conceived in the environmentalist discourses of the 1970s to be fundamentally antagonistic, emphasising the social domination of the latter by the former (1979, p. 241). The manifesto produced by Brice Lalonde and René Dumont for a November 1976 parliamentary by-election in Paris advocated such anti-centralisation measures as the resiting of government and parliament in a ‘mediumsized town’, and the administrative services ‘in several others’, as well as the suppression of the prefectoral corps and the replacement of ‘the forces of repression based in Paris’ – in other words, the police, and the CRS riot police in particular – with locally elected ‘peace-keepers’.5 For Les Amis de la Terre, French society was ‘authoritarian, hierarchic, and highly centralised’, a mode of organisation which found its primary expression in the nuclear industry but which was also visible in a system of centralised planning which denied local autonomy.6 Lalonde’s speech to the Dijon entretiens écologiques of spring 1977, in which he advocated ‘breaking down the centralised machine’ is further characteristic of such discourse, linking concerns over excessive political and administrative centralisation with those over the societal choice implied by a nuclear state. Breaking down the state, argued Lalonde, must necessarily start with ‘dismantling the nuclear programme’.7 The critique of state authoritarianism developed by the French anti-nuclear movement during the 1970s, particularly given the absence of proper parliamentary debate on the instigation of the electro-nuclear programme under the Plan Messmer, tends therefore to corroborate the analyses proposed by academic observers outlined earlier in this chapter. Accordingly, the defining protests which helped to bring together the fledgling Green movement were frequently organised around demands for the functional and/or territorial devolution of power. The autogestionnaire demands of the Lip factory workers were taken up by René Dumont’s 1974 presidential campaign, while regionalist demands and peripheral opposition to central authority were at the forefront of numerous siting controversies, including the campaign against the creation of a steel works and industrial pole at Fos-sur-Mer, and the anti-militarist Larzac protest. Similarly, the campaign for a national referendum on nuclear power launched by Les Amis de la Terre in 1979 was designed to meet the democratic deficit at the heart of a project which it considered to be the imposition of technocratic decisions on local communities, and where public inquiries were only ‘simulacra of


democracy’.8 Lenoir (1977, p. 63) even goes as far as to compare the technocratic practices of state electricity producer and supplier Électricité de France (EDF) with Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism. During the 1970s, opposition to centralised state control and the absence of democratic accountability and citizen participation in planning decisions were major, even defining, traits of environmentalist opposition to nuclear reactor siting schemes throughout France. Examination of nuclear power sitings has found that protest was strongest when policy decisions were revealed late, regionalist traditions were strong and cities were relatively close. Indeed, opposition to nuclear power was strongest where opposition to the central exercise of state authority was also strongest. In fact, within the French anti-nuclear protests of the 1970s, the alliance between the local population and environmental activists from outside the region was often strained, particularly in such conflicts as Nogent, Braud et Saint Louis, and Cruas-Meysse (Touraine et al., 1983, p. 24, pp. 61–8). Yet the perception of such projects as centralised policy initiatives imposed on frequently economically disadvantaged peripheries without prior democratic consultation was crucial. Studies carried out by Garraud (1979) and Nelkin and Pollak (1981) identified the main focus of anti-nuclear campaigns to be the lack of meaningful parliamentary debate on the programme and the presentation of each new site as a fait accompli. Shared concerns over technological development, local autonomy, and decisional centralisation frequently provided the basis for the construction of broad territorial social movements tying cultural defence to economic bargaining (Surrey and Huggett, 1976, pp. 288–9; Falk, 1982, pp. 173–5). Peripheral resistance and environmental protest: Larzac and regional autonomy The construction of such alliances was also critical to the success of the Larzac campaign, which remains a key reference point for environmental action in France and a potent symbol of victory in the face of state policy initiatives. Yet, although Larzac quickly became a symbolic laboratory for post-1968 alternative lifestyles and ideas (see Michaud, 1989, pp. 97–102), it should not be forgotten that the campaign originated as a highly localised corporatist conflict. The extension of the military camp directly threatened a number of modernised and unionised dairy concerns working within the lucrative Roquefort cheese production business. Indeed, as Pichol points out, the description of the Larzac activists as paysans incorrectly substitutes a definition based on class for one based on professional categorisation: the plateau’s 103 landholdings


ranged from traditional, artisanal smallholdings in the south to large, modernised holdings in the north (1978, pp. 95–6). The first to mobilise against the scheme was the Confédération des éleveurs de brébis et des industriels de Rochefort, supported by the established agricultural union leaders. It was thus the ‘peasant aristocracy’ and ‘a petty bourgeoisie preoccupied by its own destiny’ which originally mobilised against the scheme, in particular the grandees of the sector, forming the Association de sauvegarde in January 1971 (Holohan, 1976, p. 286). In other words, before it developed into a broader regionalist, environmentalist, and anti-militarist movement towards the end of 1971, opposition to the scheme was led by local sectoral élites who perceived the project to be a threat to the development of the local economy, at that time in the midst of industrial reconversion. In particular – and very ironically given the shape of environmental conflict in the 1990s – one of the main objections to the camp’s extension was that it would have exacerbated the region’s enclavement, or enclosure, by blocking the RN9 route south from Millau, depriving the southern Aveyron towns of their principal outlet towards the coast. Nonetheless, as the Larzac campaign developed, its watchwords became the rejection of the economic and cultural oppression imposed by a centralising, colonial state. Regional and linguistic grievances played a vital role in the spread and depth of the conflict, as Occitan activists constructed the fight to stop the extension of the camp as a fight for cultural decolonisation, and the promotion of an oppositional cultural identity in which language was the central element (Holohan, 1976, pp. 291–3). The Occitan slogan of the Larzac conflict – volem vuire al pays – consequently became a signifier of peripheral defence and environmentalist action. Likewise, the environmental opposition to the construction of the Naussac and Villerest dams in the upper Loire basin in the mid-1970s was characterised by regionalist opposition to a ‘colonial state’. Naussac in particular was, in the words of Le Monde, ‘a symbolic place for all those who want to “live on the land”, who refuse to watch the hillsides die so that the valleys might live, and who denounce the centralised and technocratic state.’9 A typical example of the identification of peripheral resistance, regional mobilisation, and environmental activism is provided by Renée Conan’s statement to the State Security Council at the trial of seven Breton autonomists in 1977. Conan argues that environmental protection and regional autonomy are inextricably linked, as pollution is caused by multinational capitalism, which in turn is promoted by the practices and institutions of the French state. The French justice system


marginalises ecologists firstly because it does not recognise environmental protection, and secondly because it operates in favour of class interests. The only recourse for activists is to engage in extra-legal activities to combat a repressive state apparatus: We accuse the state bureaucracy, with the complicity of the political elites, of violence … Violence is in a prefectoral order, in the authoritarian decisions of EDF, the DDA and the DDE. It is found on the side of a state which doesn’t hesitate to resort to brutal repression when the people are peacefully protesting against a decision taken with no prior consultation of those affected by it. This is physical violence. But there is also bureaucratic violence, which is perhaps less visible. The government and EDF want to construct nuclear power stations in Brittany? A decree is signed and the choice imposed on a local population which doesn’t want it. This is the way it works in every field.10 Protest, confrontation, and the state As Conan’s statement testifies, the opposition between the state and environmental protest is prevalent not only in terms of the discourses deployed by activists, but also in their strategical choices. The suspension in spring 1978 of construction work on the Flamanville nuclear power station, ordered by the Caen administrative court on the grounds that EDF had breached planning procedures, is an isolated example of successes gained through the judicial system in the 1970s. Indeed, even though all nuclear sitings were challenged in the courts by protesters, Flamanville is the only example of a victory, and even that was partial and temporary. For a number of commentators, it is the inability of the protesters to influence nuclear siting decisions through the courts which provides the most significant feature of the form and outcomes of anti-nuclear activism in France. The absence of a statute clearly establishing safety procedures for nuclear installations, the limited role of judicial review, the identification of the judiciary with the state and the restricted availability of action through the civil (as opposed to administrative) courts all meant that legal action was primarily seen as a publicity tool by campaigners, who consequently adopted less institutionalised, more disruptive forms of behaviour to achieve their goals (Chafer, 1985, pp. 8–12; Nelkin and Pollak, 1981). Lucas (1979, p. 208), underlining the fruitlessness of


protest through legal and parliamentary channels, conceives the optimum anti-nuclear strategy as one which ‘preserve[s] a large peaceful participation whose support will provide a political perspective for particular and limited acts of violence which do not endanger human life’. In contrast to campaigns against nuclear power in Britain during the same period where there were no cases of violent conflict between police and protest groups (Rüdig, 1994, p. 82), and despite the explicit emphasis on non-violent protest which typified the vast majority of campaigns in France, state–group interactions became increasingly confrontational during the 1970s. The perceived coercion and repression carried out by the CRS (the French riot police) were met on numerous occasions by violent responses from protesters, who employed a variety of direct action tactics, including physical resistance, civil disobedience, and sabotage, including the bombing of offices, plants, workshops, and even of the home of EDF president Marcel Boiteux. The violence was to culminate in running battles between the CRS and opponents of the Plogoff nuclear project during a six-week period in February and March 1980. For anti-nuclear activists, the violence of the police justified and reinforced their critique of an authoritarian, anti-democratic state apparatus. Campaigners at Plogoff emphasised the hostility of the CRS, which they criticised for inciting violence, attacking onlookers with teargas grenades, and even taking hostages among local demonstrators (Conan and Laurent, 1981, pp. 46 ff). The death of one protester at the 1977 Superphénix demonstration provided the most visible sign of ‘a supposedly democratic state [which] reacts like a terrorist when faced with a traditional demonstration’ (Collectif d’Enquête, 1978, p. 8). Neither was confrontation the exclusive preserve of anti-nuclear campaigns; resistance to the Naussac dam in 1977 was characterised by battles between protesters and police, site occupations, the blocking of the Paris-Nîmes express, the burning of construction vehicles, the bombing of the headquarters of the project managing organisation, the theft of project documents, and the sabotage of EDF equipment. This chapter has argued that the first wave of French environmental protest was heavily marked by the anti-statist discourses, the construction of defensive regional alliances, the criticism of state planning procedures, and confrontational strategies which on numerous occasions spilt over into violent clashes with police. The grievances which provided the stimulus for the organisation of protest were frequently infrastructural projects, widely perceived as emanating from technocratic, centralised policy-making centres which allowed for little consultation and negotiation with outside interests. As we have seen, the renaissance


in environmental activism in France in the 1980s and 1990s has similarly been catalysed by infrastructural projects perceived as being environmentally damaging. Yet, in contrast to the first wave of activism, this second wave has been characterised by the close involvement with infrastructural projects of local élites stressing regional prosperity. It will be noticed, however, that whereas many of the explanations offered for the downturn in environmental mobilisation in the early 1980s focus both on grievances and on the state’s prevalent configuration of power, the explanations for the resurgence of extraparliamentary protest that have been offered here focus mainly on grievances. To be sure, discussion of institutional centres is a vital component of the configuration of power; yet this overview has only been able to establish areas of further discussion. It is the task of the succeeding chapters, therefore, to investigate the relationships between the state and environmental protest in order to increase our understanding both of protest outcomes and of the power structure of the French state at the turn of the century. The first part of this task will be to review the literature on political opportunity structures, policy networks, and policy styles.

2 Political Opportunities and Policy Communities: Developing a Network Approach to State–Group Relations

As we have seen from the previous chapter, attempts to understand the development of environmental movements, in France as elsewhere, need to be placed firmly within the context of the institutions and practices of the state. Indeed, the accounts of the evolution of political ecology in France given by Sainteny (1993) and Prendiville and Chafer (1990) are quite explicit here; the prevalent structure of political opportunities in the Fifth Republic are such, they argue, that the chances of success for environmental action are dependent upon the mutation of the social movement into an institutionalised, partisan formation. Moreover, it is commonly argued that since the formation of Les Verts, party organisation has not coexisted alongside a vibrant social movement; on the contrary, the former has displaced the latter. However, as the previous chapter has also argued, such assessments of the state of environmental politics in France belie the resurgence in grass-roots protest and activism which has taken place over the past ten years or so. As outlined in the introduction to this book, the evaluation of the relationship between movement and state aims ultimately to assess the performance of the movement within the political process. Yet the conception of policy as a dynamic process is, as we shall see, curiously absent from the political opportunity structure model. Instead, the model chiefly concentrates on producing comparative analyses across states; Tarrow (1986, p. 150), indeed, vigorously underlines the importance of this approach, arguing that ‘the comparison of similar organisations, movements or sectors across national boundaries is probably the most fruitful way of detecting the influence of politics on collective 40

Political Opportunities and Policy Communities 41

action’. The approach adopted in this book is also comparative, although – as will become clear – in a rather different framework. Indeed, comparison is undertaken here not within a cross-national perspective, but by contrasting different policy sectors within the same polity. In order to apply the political opportunity model to the study of different protest movements, therefore, this chapter emphasises the state as a set of institutions characterised by only partial integration, competing logics, and a high level of differentiation (Balme and Jouve, 1996, pp. 220–1). Above all, this discussion focuses on the importance of the structure and composition of policy networks to an understanding of the trajectories and success chances of organised challenges to public policy. This chapter is therefore divided into three principal sections. The first summarises the development of the political opportunity structure model, before the second discusses the benefits of meso-level analysis, arguing that the policy network approach to state–group relationships will enable the production of a more differentiated structural model. The final section of the chapter then discusses dominant applications of the political opportunity structure model to France, and aims to show how sectoral analysis can provide a more accurate tool for explaining the policy process.

The state, social movements, and political opportunity structures The emergence in Western industrial democracies during the 1960s of emancipatory and countercultural movements – of which the environmental, civil rights, feminist, peace, anti-nuclear, citizens’ initiative, and student movements are the most prominent examples – had profound effects on the theory and study of social movements. Approaches which had centred on the social psychology of collective behaviour – such as the relative deprivation model famously expounded by Gurr (1970) – were shown by the new movements to be only partially able to explain the forms, actions, and motivations of this wave of social protest (McAdam, 1988, pp. 125–8). In particular, the identification of participants in movement mobilisation not directly affected by objective grievances, whether in terms of cause or constituency, undermined the prevalent focus on the direct deprivations suffered by movement activists. In North America, social movement analyses began to argue therefore that this new wave of protest could no longer be seen primarily in terms of relative grievances. Rather, grievances are present in all societies, and are alone an insufficient explanatory factor for movement mobilisation (Tarrow, 1986, pp. 145–7). Faced with this difficulty, the development of


the ‘resource mobilization’ paradigm (McCarthy and Zald, 1973; Oberschall, 1973) sought to move away from the identification of aggrieved populations by framing the decision to engage in collective action within the general political context in which grievances were articulated. Focus thus shifted to the identification and perception of the political resources available to challenging groups (McCarthy and Zald, 1977, pp. 1214–17). In Europe, by contrast, the study of similar new social movement phenomena overwhelmingly focused on the emergence of new types of grievances, be it in terms of class, patterns of behaviour, or changing value systems. As Foweraker (1997, pp. 64–8) underlines, the studies of social movement mobilisation identified with American and European scholars therefore adopt fundamentally different lines of enquiry. Taking the identity of social movements and actors as its starting point, European ‘new social movement’ theory concentrates on the ‘why’ of collective action. Ultimately, it sees mobilisation in terms of the failures of established legal and institutional structures and their consequent patterns of interest intermediation to represent new demands. By contrast, ‘resource mobilization’ theory focuses on the ‘how’ of action. Identity is not taken to be problematic, as rational choice is assumed; as a consequence, the main focus of study is the development of strategies and the availability of movement resources. Yet although different in emphasis, resource mobilisation and new social movement paradigms do share a central concern with macro-structural analysis as a tool for explaining the organisation, strategies, and trajectories of such movements. The emphasis on political process, and particularly on the structure of political opportunities available to challengers within any given polity, is thus a central component of analyses developed on both sides of the Atlantic. Generally accepted to have been first developed by Eisinger (1973) and subsequently by McAdam (1982) and Tarrow (1983), the political opportunity model has since the mid-1980s been at the forefront of social movement analysis. Indeed, despite its predominantly American antecedents, European theorists (particularly those working within the so-called ‘Rhine group’) have significantly developed the model. Much of this work (Kriesi et al., 1992; 1995) was in turn catalysed by Kitschelt’s (1986a) systematic study of the effects of the institutional context on social movement development, which enabled the inclusion of state-centred theories within the political process model. Up to this point, political process approaches as developed by Gamson (1975) and Piven and Cloward (1977) had mainly dealt with groups and institutional rules, thus neglecting the role of the state as an independent actor pursuing its own objectives (Jenkins, 1995, pp. 19–22).


The central tenet of the political opportunity structure model is that the state, through the configuration of its formal institutions, electoral system, and the nature of its responses to movement mobilisation, lies at the heart of any enquiry into the emergence and development of social movements: ‘social and cultural change’, argues Kriesi, ‘become relevant for the mobilization of social movements only to the extent that they are mediated by politics’ (1995a, p. 195). Due to its position as organiser of the political system, sole source of legitimised violence, and arbiter of social conflict, the state intervenes in any relationship between social movements and the institutionalised representation system as either target, sponsor, or antagonist (Jenkins and Klandermans, 1995, p. 3). Indeed, key analyses of what constitutes a social movement couch their definition within the relationship between group and state. Tilly (1984, p. 306), for example, argues that a sustained conflictual interaction with the state is central to the very idea of a social movement: A social movement is a sustained series of interactions between power holders and persons successfully claiming to speak on behalf of a constituency lacking formal representation, in the course of which those persons make publicly visible demands for changes in the distribution or exercise of power, and back those demands with public demonstrations of support. The consequences of and potential problems with the inherent association of social movements with conflict will be returned to later in this chapter. It is, however, with the institutions of the state that we will be initially concerned here. Kitschelt’s model Defining political opportunity structures as ‘specific configurations of resources, institutional arrangements and historical precedents for social mobilization, which facilitate the development of protest movements in some instances and constrain them in others’ (1986a, p. 58), Kitschelt’s model implies that given states can be differentiated according to a basic four-point typology. This typology, which gauges the relative openness of a state’s decision-making processes, or input structures, and the relative strength of its policy implementation capacity, or output structures, is reproduced in Figure 2.1. The openness of a regime is measured according to the relative importance of four factors. These are: the number of parties and extent of factionalism; the relative strength of the legislative body; the access of interest groups to executive areas of policy-making; and the relative


political input structures open political output structures

strong weak

closed confrontation

assimilation

Figure 2.1 Kitschelt’s basic four-point state classification of political opportunities (1986a, p. 64), showing the two polar protest responses (italicised).

prevalence of procedures to build effective policy coalitions. The greater the degree of each of these categories, the more open the regime. Similarly, the strength of a regime is measured according to the balance of three factors: the extent of centralisation of the state apparatus; the strength of control of economic resources and decision centres by the state; the independence and authority of the judiciary. The more centralised the state, the more it controls economic resources and the weaker the judiciary, the greater is the state’s capacity to impose policy preferences, and thus the greater its strength. Political opportunity structures thus provide a framework for the operation of challenging groups. Crucially, however, they do not only describe a polity’s prevalent institutional configuration; they also produce a number of hypotheses governing the organisation of collective action within the polity, and the set of state responses to such action. The classification of states between weak and strong, open and closed, thus produces a set of predictions for, on the one hand, the ability of challenging groups to influence policy elaboration (and consequently the set of strategies they might deploy); and on the other, the level of responsiveness of the state when faced with opposition to policies it wishes to implement. Strong states, it is predicted, will attempt to suppress opposition by deploying predominantly exclusive strategies against challenging groups, such as repression, confrontation, and polarisation. In contrast, weak states will produce such integrative élite strategies as facilitation (subsidising or providing other material support to challengers), assimilation (consultation) or co-optation (inclusion in official advisory bodies) (Kriesi et al., 1992, pp. 223–4; Van der Heijden, 1997, p. 30). In turn, the prediction of the type of strategies deployed by the state leads – given rational operation on the part of actors involved – to a further hypothesis governing the strategies deployed in collective protest. In other words, different states will produce different dominant modes


of collective action depending on the prevalent structures of political opportunity. For challenging groups, therefore, success, reform, repression and access are dependent on the strategic calculations of the authorities, themselves constrained by the formal institutional arrangement of the polity. Strategic calculations and formal institutional structures thus combine to create a ‘general setting’ which ‘determines’ the strategic options available to challenging groups. These include: the decision to mobilise or not; the choice of the form of mobilisation; the sequence of events to be organised; and the choice of target (Kriesi et al., 1992, p. 220). Accordingly, open, weak systems invite assimilative strategies: lobbying, petitions, referendums, elections, hearings and litigation. Closed, strong systems, on the other hand, invite confrontational strategies, from civil disobedience and public demonstrations to site occupations and physical violence. This typology produces one final set of hypotheses, governing the likely consequences of protest on the system in return. Here, three categories of impact are possible. First, impacts can be procedural, as new channels of participation are created. Second, impacts can be substantive, as changes in policy are implemented. Finally, impacts can be structural, as protest activity changes the formal structure of the regime. We will return to these possibilities in greater detail. Problems and refinements By centring the examination of state–group relations and social protest on the form of the state itself, the opportunity structure approach to the political process thus offers a credible alternative to sociological or actor resource-based explanations of state–society interactions. Yet though Kitschelt’s analysis enables clear cross-national comparisons to be made, the extension of the findings for one social movement to the whole new social movement sector of each state produces misleading results. In fact, Giugni and Kriesi’s (1990) analysis of new social movements in Switzerland found that not only do the incidence and action repertoires of collective protest vary significantly between movements with different goals, but that marked variations exist between groups with broadly similar goals. Similarly, Rucht found that strategic preferences, forms of organisation, and mobilisation differed significantly between West German women’s and environmental movements, even though the two movements shared similar basic political assumptions and social bases of recruitment (1988, p. 312). In order to resolve this problem, a greater degree of differentiation between movements in terms of their goals, constituencies and practices


is needed. This difference, Rucht argued, can be explained by a movement’s ‘logic of action’, placed on an ideal-type continuum ranging from ‘instrumental’ to ‘expressive’ (1988, pp. 319–20). While the former implies a ‘power-oriented strategy, which is concerned with the outcomes of political decision-making and/or with the distribution of political power’, the latter is an ‘identity-oriented strategy, which focuses on cultural codes, role behaviour, self-fulfilment, personal identity, authenticity, etc.’ (Rucht, 1990a, p. 162). Building on this typology, Duyvendak and Giugni (1995, pp. 84–95) distinguish between instrumental movements and ‘identity’ movements. This latter category is refined to include both countercultural and subcultural groups, for which identityconstruction is either the main or one of the dominant focuses. These groups, then, are expected to react differently as a function of the concrete opportunities available to them. While instrumental movements are expected to mobilise on a rational choice cost–benefit basis, minimising their costs and maximising their benefits, this is less true of countercultural movements, whose mobilisation may increase as repression increases (Koopmans and Kriesi, 1995, pp. 39–43). A second problem is that little allowance is made in Kitschelt’s model for the diachronic evolution of social movement activity. Indeed, as Della Porta and Rucht (1995, pp. 229–30) point out, Kitschelt’s model assumes political opportunity structures to be stable or even inert, producing static analyses of social movement mobilisation. Moreover, in their objection to Kitschelt’s formulation, Flam et al. (1994a) underline that opportunity structures cannot account for changes in élite responses and movement strategy choices over even a relatively short period of time. Indeed, their comparison of anti-nuclear movements across European states divides anti-nuclear conflicts into a series of phases, or encounters, between the state and oppositional groups. These encounters evolve, both in the nature of the strategies used by the authorities and by protesters, and in the arenas in which they are played out. Against the conception of a monolithic state determining a set of protest strategies therefore, Flam et al. oppose a relationship where both protest groups and élite responses adapt over time as a result of their experiences. Structural explanations cannot account for varying speeds and forms of élite responses between states with similar opportunity structures, nor can they account for differences in policy outcomes. A third source of criticism of Kitschelt’s model has been its perceived structural determinism. The reduction of challenging group strategies to the influence of external factors seems to allow little room for élite or group-led conflict management, or for the influence of conjunctural


factors or contingent events, and credits oppositional groups with little capacity for autonomous decision-making (Flam, 1994b, p. 14). Indeed, as Melucci reminds us, movement actors are ‘capable of going beyond the linear logic of stimulus response’ (1988, p. 331). The mediation between structural determinants, individual evaluation, and mobilisation is thus primarily a question of ‘collective identity’, a process where actors ‘produce the common cognitive frameworks that enable them to assess the environment and to calculate the costs and benefits of the action’ (Melucci, 1988, pp. 342–3). Whether, like Melucci, adopting constructionist approaches, or in contrast working within the resource mobilisation paradigm, scholars have used a number of strikingly similar terms to qualify this process. Thus McCarthy and Zald refer to ‘consciousness mobilization’ (1977, p. 1215), Tarrow argues the key intervening factor in the relationship between structure and action to be ‘consensus mobilization’ (1986, pp. 158–63), and Koopmans (1995) refers to ‘cognitive mobilisation’, while McAdam argues that ‘cognitive liberation’ creates a ‘structural bridge’ between the macro-structural political conditions and microlevel decisions to act (1988, pp. 132–5). Resource mobilisation theorists have concentrated in particular on the how of this process: McCarthy and Zald (1977, p. 1215), for example, argue that grievances are framed by ‘issue entrepreneurs and organizations’, while Schmitt similarly underlines the role of ‘movement entrepreneurs’ as mobilising agents, enabling collective political deprivation to be transformed into collective action (1989, pp. 585–6). Perhaps the most important point, in terms of this discussion at least, is made by Bartholomew and Mayer (1992, pp. 152–3). In their review of the importance of Melucci’s work, they argue that his focus on ‘how’ collective identity is formulated and continually reformulated has the advantage of shifting the analytical attention away from what structures have done to actors to what actors do within the space produced by the limits and possibilities thrown up by the structures. […] This emphasis on active participants who can now be held accountable for their strategies, victories and defeats is an empowering […] social theory.

The configuration of power Faced with the complexity of the relationship between structure and mobilisation, the development of the opportunity structure model has


principally been carried out through the inclusion of a greater number of determinant variables. Thus Kriesi initially develops a political opportunity structure model with three broad sets of properties: formal institutional structures; informal procedures and prevailing élite strategies with regard to challengers; and the configuration of power, itself constrained by the ‘general setting for the mobilization of collective action’ created by the first two properties (Kriesi, 1995a, p. 168). Together, these elements create a national-specific ‘funnel of causality’, constructing the ‘concrete opportunities’ of a given social movement; these opportunities ‘determine to an important extent’ a movement’s mobilisation level, outcomes and strategies (Kriesi and Giugni, 1995, p. xv) (see Figure 2.2). The configuration of power refers therefore to the effects of the organisation and operation of the political system on social movement mobilisation. As such, this element of the opportunity structure leans heavily on the work of Tarrow (1983; 1989a,b), who emphasises the stability of political alignments, availability of alliance partners, and extent of élite conflicts on the mobilisation of a potential protest constituency. Here, political alignments are assessed with respect to the prevalence and effect on the party system of national cleavage structures, which Lipset and Rokkan (1967, pp. 14 ff) argue to be the result of the ‘freezing’ in western party systems in the 1960s of the oppositions within the social structure produced in the aftermath of the First World War. This freezing is generated according to the relative strength of four critical lines of territorial and functional division. These are the oppositions between church and state; between subject and dominant culture (opposing centre and periphery in terms of ethnic and linguistic identity); between primary and secondary economies (rural and urban, landed and industrial interests); and between workers, and owners and employers in terms of class. The strength of these cleavages will have a decisive effect on social movement mobilisation, they argue, because parties not only reflect the conflicting interests, latent strains and contrasts in the existing social structure, but also shape the range of alliances and alternatives available for the representation of interests within the party systems (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967, p. 5). As a consequence, Kriesi and Duyvendak (1995, pp. 3–5) hypothesise that the stronger the traditional socio-cultural cleavages within the organisation of the party system, the less opportunity there will be for new social movements to mobilise protest, given that they are representatives of a new social and cultural cleavage. The configuration of power, therefore, refers to the ‘intervention’ of the electoral and party systems on the formal institutional structure and


Political opportunity structure informal procedures and dominant strategies

formal institutional structure

configuration of power

strategies of authorities

facilitation and repression; chances of success or reform

strategic options of challengers

Figure 2.2 The configuration of power. Reproduced from Kriesi (1995a, p. 170).

élite responses to protest (Duyvendak, 1995, p. 70). The pacification or institutionalisation of traditional cleavage structures may produce electoral dealignment, a process which is facilitated by proportional and hindered by majoritarian electoral systems. As a result of dealignment, a more volatile electorate may be created, which may in turn be more susceptible


to the influence of single-issue protests (Wallace and Jenkins, 1995, p. 115). For Kriesi and van Praag (1987, p. 320), The more intense the class conflict in a society and the more the system of interest intermediation is dominated by this conflict, the more the political system has difficulty in assimilating the demands of new social movements and the more restricted are the perspectives for their influence on the decision making process. In a situation of intense class conflict, the traditional organizations of interest intermediation cannot be expected to take up demands coming from new social movements. Further, social movement mobilisation will be affected by the conflict and alliance system faced by challenging groups, particularly parties and interests groups, but also those created by cooperative and countermovements (Della Porta and Rucht, 1995, pp. 235–6). Given the ideological identity of new social movements, it is expected that the parties of the Left will hold specific interest for their emergence, to the point of becoming a ‘strategic target’ of group mobilisation (Maguire, 1995, p. 201). The extent of facilitation provided by prospective allies will again be influenced by the prevalence of traditional cleavages, but also, crucially, by the existence and position in power of a social democratic party. Where such a party is in power, it is expected that social movement mobilisation will decline, although their development will be facilitated by such parties when in opposition. The existence of a strong party to the left of the social democrats will have a negative effect on movement development. Again, different broad movement types will be more or less dependent on the configuration of power; instrumental movements will be the most affected, and subcultural movements the least (Kriesi, 1995b, pp. 93–5). Strong states, weak states These developments in the opportunity structure model clearly provide for greater suppleness and differentiation of analysis. Nonetheless, a number of conceptual problems remain, particularly leading to an overdetermination of macro-level variables in explanations of social movement interactions with the state. Perhaps the most prominent of these problems relates to the classification of states within the model, a problem which is liable to produce misreadings of group–state relationships within individual polities, and therefore prone to misrepresent the nature of social movement impacts on the policy process. As is apparent


from the preceding discussion, much of the analysis provided in the opportunity structure literature frames states within a binary strong– weak opposition. Kriesi (1995a, p. 172) explicitly adopts this dichotomy: Strong states […] are at the same time autonomous with respect to their environment and are capable of getting things done, while weak states not only lack autonomy, but also the capacity to act. This greatly simplifies the classification of states according to their institutional structure: we just retain the distinction between strong states and weak ones. Predicated on a causal relationship which argues that the institutional organisation of a given polity dictates the form of policy-making and consequent policy outcomes, the importance of such macro-structural theory is that it attempts to explain variations in the form and effectiveness of similar policy initiatives across nations. Moreover, an important feature of this model is that it does not vary across different policy issues, but applies equally to the set of policy arenas within a state, as Kitschelt (1986b, p. 72) argues: In the most general sense, domestic regime and opportunity structures of politics are expected to shape the participation, organization and processes in all policy arenas of a country. The specific national ‘policy styles’ that emerge are based on complex institutional patterns that govern entire political systems. This model of the political process accordingly assumes a high level of state integration and coordination. There is, however, considerable work (both theoretical and empirical) arguing that states are subject to increasingly significant levels of fragmentation. It is to these alternative models that this chapter will now turn.

Policy networks: sectoral analysis and meso-level differentiation Rather than arguing that it is the institutional properties of the central state which shape processes and outputs, alternative models proceed from the recognition of policy-making as a process which is fragmented not only horizontally (between different territorial levels of government) but also vertically (between discrete policy areas). Accordingly,


such models focus on policy sectors as the basic structure of policymaking, constructing the policy process from the specific nature of separate policy issues. Rather than politics dictating policy, in other words, here it is policies which determine the shape of politics. The policy sector model is founded on two propositions. First, the model holds that, across separate liberal democratic states, policy processes in a given policy area will tend to co-vary or converge. Second, sectorisation argues that policy processes in different policy areas within the same state will demonstrate different patterns and characteristics. There will, therefore, be substantial variations between the way different policy issues are handled within the same state. Thus Lowi (1964, pp. 689–91) constructs a general typology based on distributive, redistributive, and regulatory policy arenas, arguing that such categories will tend to demonstrate different basic characteristics. These characteristics include the type of political unit or organisation with which the state deals; the relationship between such units; the structural basis, arena, and stability of bargaining between such units and the state; and the method of policy delivery (Lowi, 1964, p. 713). For Freeman (1985, pp. 482–3), The decisionmaking style of the political élite in any country might put its own brand on each type of politics, but distributive, redistributive, and regulatory politics (or whatever type one settles upon) ought to determine the underlying structure of debate, options and procedure. Generalised institutional models may not be able to account for differences in the policy process between, on the one hand, nuclear and defence policy, and social welfare provision on the other (Rhodes, 1988, p. 127). The argument that ‘states are not uniform in their capacities in all policy areas’ (Jordan and Schubert, 1992, p. 10) thus renders the production of clear macro typologies of group–state relationships increasingly difficult to sustain. Lowi’s objective, indeed, was conditioned both by the observation that ‘it is on the basis of established expectations and a history of earlier government decisions of the same type that single issues are fought out’ and by a ‘resistance to the assumption that there is only one power structure for every political system’ (1964, p. 689). Freeman (1985, p. 491), setting out the basis for a research methodology which would be carried out on the basis of systematic comparative analyses in similar policy sectors across states, acknowledges that: In the end, the validity of the policy sector approach does not rest on the discovery of stable patterns of convergence across the Western


nations. At base it merely assumes that each sector poses its own problems, sets its own constraints, and generates its own brand of conflicts. There is room within this framework for considerable variation among nations in the way these are handled. Policy communities and policy networks Sectoral analyses stress the importance of the relationship between the state and policy actors grouped within policy networks, which may provide the state with coordinated policy information, negotiation, and delivery capacity. The network framework characterises a spectrum of relationships from ad hoc issue networks to tightly knit, restricted, routine, regular group relationships. The most highly integrated policy networks form policy communities, characterised by stability, durability, shared values, and consensual operating practices: these are networks of discrete sets of actors, brought together by mutual needs, expectations and experiences (Rhodes, 1990, pp. 304–5; Jordan, 1990, p. 326). A consensus of core values and beliefs among policy community members is likely to translate into a shared, ideologically informed, interpretation of the nature of the issue at hand, producing a dominant ‘policy frame’ or ‘policy paradigm’. In turn, this paradigm will influence public policy formulation, as some policy outcomes will be more likely than others to be advocated and agreed by community members. Naturally, different policy sectors and even sub-sectors will produce different sets of state–group relationships depending on the policy focus; even within the same state, relationships will thus potentially range from pluralist issue networks to corporatist policy communities. Thus Wilks and Wright (1987, pp. 284 ff) argue persuasively for a more differentiated paradigm of relations between the state and interest groups than that provided by aggregated macro-level models. For them, state–group interactions must be seen on a sectoral basis, as the strong– weak state dichotomy is often merely a misleading and inaccurate guide to the structure and process of such relationships, at best only able to provide a context for investigation. Comparative analysis must therefore be undertaken not only between states, but within states, distinguishing between structures of relations in different policy sectors and sub-sectors. Such arguments are therefore based on a reading of the political process which argues that policy is formulated and implemented within vertically differentiated divisions of the state apparatus. The horizontal fragmentation factored into macro-level characterisations of the policy process is thus paralleled by the vertical fragmentation produced by the


organisation of the state apparatus into ministries, departments, and agencies, each pursuing their own objectives (Sharpe, 1985, p. 374). As a consequence therefore, we need to be aware that ‘states and different state institutions [may] treat different social movements and movement organisations in different policy areas differently, both generally and at different points in time’ (Rootes, 1997b, p. 84). In this light, the basis of the political opportunity structure model needs to be re-examined. Rootes (ibid, p. 93) continues: The characterisation of a national political opportunity structure needs to be carefully qualified. Systems may be relatively open or closed to different kinds of issues and/or groups, and this makes global categorisation hazardous if not entirely arbitrary. Yet it is worth bearing in mind that both macro- and meso-level analyses emphasise the importance of formal regime characteristics within the policy process. Katzenstein (1976, p. 19), for example, argues that ‘the structural constraints of domestic policy networks shape policy responses’, recognising both the vertical differentiation of the policy process and the importance of institutional structure. For Atkinson and Coleman (1989, pp. 66–7), there will continue to be a relationship between strength and weakness at the macro-level and the pattern of the policy process at the meso-level, such that: ‘the relative frequency of different types of policy networks will vary systematically across democratic polities depending on the macropolitical institutions.’ They continue: both continuities and discontinuities are possible between the general orientation of state and society at the macro-level and the patterns of policy networks at the sectoral level. There is reason to suspect that meso-level networks will take on forms not found at the macro-level, but this does not necessarily jeopardize the conceptual work that has been done at the macro-level on the subject of strong and weak states. Rather, macro-level phenomena provide one set of constraints, which, in combination with the economic organization of a sector and the institutional legacy of state agencies and interest associations, combine to favour the dominance of a particular sectoral policy network. Meso-level phenomena cannot be explained in isolation from broader political institutions. Duyvendak and Giugni’s (1995) construction of a differentiated opportunity structure model in terms of variations across ‘policy domains’ is,


therefore, an important development. They argue that some policymaking systems will have a higher profile than others, and that élite responses will differ according to the relative profile of each issue. Some issues will accordingly be subject to a more closed or open opportunity structure, and more inclusive or exclusive élite responses. In much the same vein, Rootes argues in his account of the British Conservative government’s handling of environmental, trade union, and nuclear weapons protests in the 1980s that varying élite responses may be conditioned by ideologically determined perceptions of issue salience (1997b, pp. 84–94). Such accounts are clearly valuable, opening up a number of avenues towards further research into social movement interactions within disaggregated models of the state. Yet useful though these analyses are, they remain problematic. For, predominantly couched in terms of the effects of issue-specific élite responses on movement mobilisation, they do not underline what may be structural about the policy sector itself. Yet, turning to Lowi once more, ‘each [policy] arena tends to develop its own characteristic political structure, political process, élites, and group relations’ (1964, pp. 689–90). Our analysis of policy sectorisation needs therefore to isolate what is specifically structural about the availability of political opportunities. Indeed, as the introduction to this book pointed out, the search for sectoral specificity is especially relevant for the examination of environmental protest. This is because the environment is, by the nature of institutional development, a cross-sectoral issue. Even though virtually all western industrial states have established a separate regulatory ministry for environmental policy, environmental protection was introduced from the outset into established dependency relationships with other sectors as a competing policy objective. Social movements, success, and the policy process The study of policy communities and policy networks privileges the interactions between the state bureaucracy and ‘policy insiders’. Recognised by the state and typically integrated into policy-making at the agendasetting or elaboration stages, insiders such as industrial pressure groups and lobbying organisations are valuable by dint of their specialised knowledge and policy delivery capacity. In contrast, the literature on political opportunities seeks to explain the trajectories of new social movements or, in the words of Dalton and Kuechler (1990), the ‘challenge to the political order’ represented by ‘outsider groups’. Indeed, outsider groups are generally reduced to resisting policy at the final stage of the process, or attempting to influence future policy direction


through agenda-setting. Attempts to synthesise these two approaches might appear, therefore, to be problematic. The policy community model, articulated as a series of mutually beneficial encounters between like-minded groups, assumes that ‘unrecognised groups’ will find the ‘policy-making map’ impenetrable (Richardson and Jordan, 1979, p. 174). Policy communities, as we have seen, lie at one end of a continuum of relationships characterised by degrees of integration and commonality of purpose. Policy networks, on the other hand, have a much more open structure and greater fluidity of membership. Even in the policy community model, outsider–insider status is nonetheless not inherently fixed, but evolves according to the process of interaction between groups and state. Thus Benson (1982, pp. 166–7) argues that while policy sectors are characterised by general stability, they are prone to differentiation over time, as internal contradictions between dependencies, administrative structures, and policy paradigms may produce crisis, breakdown and reorganisation within sectoral networks. Indeed, Coleman and Perl (1999, pp. 697–700) identify three levels of response to the potential destabilisation of institutionalised policy communities. First, the established policy community may revise its dominant policy paradigm to recuperate the challenging policy frame. Second, the state may intervene, modifying the rules of the game by changing the membership of the central actors in the community (and thus causing a shift in the likely range of policy outcomes); third, if neither of these methods deals successfully with the new structural pressures, ideological conflict may ensue, within and without the policy community, as actors seek to redefine the policy paradigm. Consensus on values and norms is likely to decline, integration loosen, and community membership change. The policy network may subsequently re-form, therefore, but with different dependency relationships, sectoral rules, and even group members. And although Coleman and Perl place their argument in the context of the challenges posed by the increasing globalisation of public policy, we might hypothesise that such effects can be caused not just by macro-structural catalysts but also by micro-level challenges, as collective action potentially succeeds in reframing a policy issue (or at the very least, destabilising the dominant, institutionalised policy frame). In some cases, policy legitimacy may not be achievable on the basis of established membership patterns, and excluded groups may be co-opted or integrated into new or even existing advocacy coalitions. Just as insiders can be marginalised from the decisional process, therefore, so should outsiders be able to attain the status of insiders.


We might further hypothesise that collective action will have to meet three criteria in order for SMOs to successfully integrate policy networks. First, collective action must demonstrate legitimacy, through both technical command and public representativity; the ability to mobilise popular support is thus vital. Second, SMOs must stress instrumental goals and demonstrate a willingness to engage in collective problem-solving; needless to say, they must also have the creative and financial resources to do so. Third, and perhaps most crucially, collective action must provide an effective challenge to the dominant policy paradigm, reframing the policy issue (or at the very least destabilising the dominant, institutionalised frame). Under such circumstances, it may be that, just as insiders can be marginalised from the decisional process, so can outsiders potentially attain the status of insiders, whether this is as core, specialist, or peripheral actors (Maloney et al., 1994, p. 30). Such potential outcomes will again depend not just on the ideology, resources, strategies and representativity of the challenging group, but also on the structure, strength, and composition of the pre-existing policy network, which may in turn be influenced by macro-structural phenomena. Explanations of the decisional process provided by the policy community and political opportunity structure models are derived from contrasting approaches. Given the possibility of the entry of previously excluded groups into policy-making structures, however, negotiation between these two models does seem to offer a number of benefits to explanations of the interactions between states and SMOs. Yet this does leave us with a conceptual problem. For, as previously discussed, definitions of social movements stress outsider status as an integral component of their identity. This status is a function of, variously, their action repertoires, the constituency mobilised by the movement, and their exclusion from formal political structures, particularly government institutions. Rucht therefore argues that social movements are ‘articulate, explicit collective attempts to defend established positions of power which do not rely on established institutionalized procedures but resort to methods typically used by outsiders of the system’ (1988, p. 354). Contentious, disruptive, direct action must dominate over non-contentious action in the repertoire of the social movement, argues Tarrow (1995a, pp. 228–9). The reason for this is relatively straightforward: social movement organisations have ‘a vested interest in contentious collective action because protest is their major – and often their only – resource’ (Tarrow, 1995b, p. 93). Indeed, Most students would agree that social movements operate in some way outside the routine political institutions and boundaries which


define the acceptable limits of legitimate political activity. (Tarrow, 1986, p. 157) Thus for Burstein et al. (1995, p. 277), although competing definitions of social movement status tend to disagree on which aspect of outsider status is the most crucial, it is nonetheless ‘really “outsider” status that distinguishes social movements from mainstream institutions’. They neatly summarise the resulting problem, arguing that such approaches suggest that once a movement begins to succeed – by mobilizing its constituency or gaining formal representation – it ceases to be a movement, even if its goals, membership, and tactics do not change. […] Conceptually, many of those studying social movements find themselves in a trap of their own devising: once an SMO has gained regular access to political decision makers, it is considered an ‘insider’ group or a lobby rather than a true SMO, and social movement researchers lose interest in it. (Ibid, p. 277, p. 291) Yet, as we have seen from the discussion of Kitschelt’s model in section one, a key argument of the political opportunity structure literature is that social protest is, in theory, able to produce different types of success depending on the nature and extent of those opportunities available to it. Success – or, to put it another way, the likely impacts of social movement mobilisation on the political system in return – was disaggregated into three categories: procedural, substantive, and structural. To these, a fourth can be added: sensitising impacts (Giugni, 1995, pp. 210–17). In fact, much of the discussion of social movement successes in western industrial democracies has since focused on procedural, substantive, and sensitising impacts, as structural impacts (where the legitimacy of the state is called into question, producing regime change) are held only to be available through the effects of long-term cumulative action, and thus do not influence short-term mobilisation considerations (Kriesi, 1995a, p. 173). Opportunities, success chances, and policy phases Sensitising, procedural and substantive impacts can be identified in terms of their correlation to each of three phases in the policy process: initiation, formulation, and implementation. Sensitising impacts relate to the primary, initiating, or agenda-setting phase of the public policy process. Here, public attitudes and policy-makers are sensitised through


issue reframing produced by collective action. Substantive impacts, or policy changes – whether proactive (creating ‘new advantages’ for challenging groups) or reactive (preventing ‘new disadvantages’) – are gained at the final phase of the policy process, affecting policy implementation. Most importantly in the terms of this discussion, procedural impacts denote the gaining of access to the policy-making system, whether on an ad hoc or a permanent basis, and entail the recognition of the challenging group as a legitimate actor within the policy process at the formulation stage (Kitschelt, 1986a, p. 67). Figure 2.3 illustrates this relationship. Rochon and Mazmanian offer three hypotheses for the relationship between mobilisation and success (1993, pp. 78–80). First, SMOs will tend to stress policy goals, and organise in terms of producing substantive

agenda-setting

decision-making sensitising impacts

authorisation

policy implementation

substantive impacts

social protest

Figure 2.3 Policy process phases and success chances.

procedural impacts


policy impacts. They will, however, have a greater long-term impact when they focus on access to the policy-making process. Second, public authorities are more willing to accept less externally visible policy process changes than make substantive concessions. Finally, the inclusion of new groups within the policy process will ultimately produce long-term substantive changes through the introduction of new social values to the sectoral policy arena. Moreover, they also argue that the opening up of the policy process will normally take one of three basic forms. These are: the inclusion of pressure groups in informal consultation procedures; the creation of formalised mechanisms of consultation and negotiation; or the decentralisation of policy authority, as public authorities may trade access to defuse political challenge or diffuse policy responsibility. Procedural success seems therefore to be the most significant; indeed, for movements whose logic of action is held to be predominantly instrumental, dominant strategies can be expected to focus on access to and the redistribution of power within policy-making structures. Yet the consequences of such strategies appear to be problematic for the study of social protest. As Duyvendak (1995, p. 29) points out, instrumental movements such as EMOs are especially prone to institutionalisation, as external goal orientation (representativeness) can predominate over internal group identity construction (participation), as they attempt to advance new issues within the political system or gain access to the policy process. Given that, as we have seen in Chapter 1, institutionalisation is widely seen as one of the key developments in environmental movement mobilisation in western polities over the last two decades, one may reasonably wonder exactly where this leaves the study of environmental protest in particular. It is important therefore that we revisit the centrality of strategies to social movement definitions, especially as the use of physical, disruptive protest is in fact neither the sole preserve of ‘outsider’ groups nor proof of an antagonistic relationship with public authorities. Protest is rather a political resource which may be deployed by groups for a variety of reasons. Duclos (1998, pp. 36–49), for example, argues in her study of farmworkers’ mobilisations in France that the road blocks set up in Paris in 1992 and 1993 by Coordination Rurale point not to a resurgence of state–group conflict in agriculture, but rather to its subsidence. Designed to demonstrate both the union’s representativeness and its responsibility through its control of a membership traditionally known for its recourse to violence, the protests were staged to persuade the agriculture ministry that the group should be included alongside more established farmers’ unions in the corporatist bargaining structures which characterise decision-making in the sector. In this case,


therefore, a tactic of confrontation is perfectly compatible with a strategy of consensus. Roads protests in Britain in the 1990s provide a similar example, but this time a ‘radical flank effect’ benefits not the groups engaged in direct action but rather their allies (Seel and Plows, 2000, pp. 117–19). In fact, beyond their ostensible goal of blocking construction work, the direct action tactics of such groups as Earth First! UK are designed to increase the institutional access and leverage enjoyed by established EMOs such as Friends of the Earth. In these conditions, apparent conflict therefore forms part of a supportive strategy designed to increase the effectiveness of ‘responsible’ ally groups. By the same token, institutional actors and interest groups may use tactics more readily associated with social movement action repertoires, or in other circumstances facilitate conflictual protest by allies, such as when corporations mobilise their workers to defend the interests of the company. An example of the latter is the tacit encouragement given by Cogema, the French nuclear production group, to its workforce’s reaction to a Green party campaign visit to the La Hague reprocessing plant near Cherbourg in January 1999. A reception committee organised within the plant, and clearly led by workers’ unions, pelted the Green party delegation led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit with rotten fruit, eggs, and animal excrement. Institutional actors may therefore adopt conflictoriented action repertoires, or in this case protest by proxy at Les Verts’ opposition to the nuclear industry. Moreover, if Koopmans’ analysis holds, the link between new social movements and unconventional modes of political participation highlighted in Chapter 1 is in need of some serious reappraisal. Koopmans explicitly rejects the thesis linking new social movements with unconventional action repertoires, finding instead that states with relatively strong new social movements have relatively low levels of civil disobedience. Indeed, associations which have emerged from the new social movement sector tend to deploy more conventional strategies as they aim to integrate policy networks. Focusing on the Netherlands, he argues that: In fact, the new associations that have sprung from the NSMs meanwhile operate like traditional interest groups. Their budget often amounts to millions of dollars, they work with professional staff, often receive state subsidies, and only rarely mobilise their constituencies … The hypothesis that the rise of the NSMs is associated with a strong increase in unconventional mobilisation should therefore be rejected. (1996, pp. 35–6) Diani’s review of the literature on definitions of social movements is therefore particularly illuminating. Here, he argues that extra-institutional


mobilisation is not in fact an integral characteristic of an SMO, but may help only to differentiate between types and phases of movements. Defining movements as ‘informal networks of actors (organizations, groups and individuals) engaged in conflicts for the control of material or symbolic stakes, on the basis of shared identities’ (2000, p. 389), he therefore explicitly excludes strategies, citing the qualification that a movement must only be ‘engaged in political or cultural conflict’ (1992, pp. 12–13). Moreover, this qualification applies to the nature of the issue rather than the strategy. Conflictual strategies may thus develop in tandem with political protest, but our identification of the latter does not depend on the presence of the former. For Diani, the consequences of this characterisation are clear. By removing the anti-systemic or extrainstitutional basis of our definition of social movements, we are better able to follow the evolution of the strategies, organisation, and arenas of social protest over time. Movement trajectories are therefore once more a central part of our analysis in terms of the policy process. Although institutionalisation is frequently held to imply a moderation of goals and loss of movement characteristics, analyses of social protest need to be able to account for the penetration of policy-making arenas. The study of state–movement relationships needs to be able to take into account the ability of ‘outsider’ protest groups, over time, to extend their action to the central phase of the policy process, as social challenge may produce outcomes which are not just substantive but rather procedural, modifying the institutional terrain for future movement mobilisation. This may amount to the creation of new, or the modification of existing, policy networks through formal forums for interest representation. Alternatively, social movement actors and organisations may be accepted as legitimate, and consequently integrated into existing informal channels of influence and negotiation. Even policy communities need to be seen in cyclical terms, allowing for group penetration and exclusion. Antagonistic as the political opportunity and policy network models may appear, therefore, it should be possible to negotiate between them. Indeed, given the general stability of policy communities over time, it is important to see access to policymaking arenas not as a procedural outcome of protest, but as an example of potential structural change wrought on the sectoral policy framework.

Strength, sectoral analysis, and the French state To what extent therefore does this paradigm help us to understand the trajectories of social movements in France? The omens do not look


promising. Indeed, applications to date of the opportunity structure model to France have represented the Fifth Republic as the archetypally strong state. Formally, France is characterised by the dominance of an ‘all-powerful’ executive over a weak and marginalised legislative, and a dependent judiciary (Kriesi, 1995a, p. 171). A highly integrated and coordinated administrative apparatus ensures the exclusion of particularist interests. France presents ‘the prime example of a strong public administration’, argue Koopmans and Kriesi (1995, p. 31), ‘[…] so strong that it largely dominates the policy process in the administrative area’. The majoritarian electoral system ensures the exclusion of third parties and the continued salience of traditional cleavages, particularly industrial class politics. The polity is highly centralised, functionally and territorially, with ‘virtually no access points’ for challenging groups at sub-national levels of government (Kriesi, 1995a, p. 171). Alternative or ‘new democratic’ forms of political representation, such as citizens’ initiative referendums, are unavailable (van der Heijden, 1997, p. 29). Although the referendum was constitutionalised in 1958 as a cornerstone of the Gaullist state, it is élite-initiated; the Fifth Republic has no formal constitutional provision for a référendum d’initiative populaire, the citizen instigation of binding local or national public consultations on specific policies or projects which, Giugni (1995, p. 217) contends, enable challenging groups to influence or even set the political agenda without having to rely upon allies operating within the political system. Moreover, the strength of the French state in the political opportunity structure model is not restricted to the denial of access to challenging groups, but also derives from its ability to impose policy preferences once formulated. The Fifth Republic is closed to challenging groups both formally and informally, producing a ‘strong state with an exclusive dominant strategy’, termed ‘selective exclusion’ (Koopmans and Kriesi, 1995, p. 36). Conflict management is found to be rigid, with poor élite policy responsiveness, and a high degree of repression (Diani and van der Heijden, 1994, p. 375). The conditions are held to be unfavourable for both substantive and procedural impacts; proactive and reactive substantive successes are extremely difficult to attain, and almost exclusively dependent on the presence of allies in power (Giugni, 1995, p. 213). In terms of procedural success, the situation is equally unpromising; challenging groups can count on neither formal nor informal access to the system (Rucht, 1990b, p. 211). ‘Procedural impacts in France’, argues Kitschelt (1986a, p. 74), ‘have been virtually non-existent.’ In such circumstances, the action repertoires of


challenging groups are characterised by the dominance of confrontational, anti-system, disruptive strategies at the expense of conventional, assimilative ones (Kriesi et al., 1992, pp. 227–8). Such characterisations are far from new. Indeed, they replicate the view of France found in much of the state-centred domestic regime theory. Thus Katzenstein argues that institutional centralisation and the strength and coordination of the bureaucracy allow ministerial control of the policy process, with policy directed by decree (1976, pp. 15–18). The ‘tactical advantages’ enjoyed by the state therefore enable it to avoid ministerial capture from sectional interest groups, act independently, and deny effective consultation to societal interests (Wilsford, 1989). Though such accounts do not argue the Fifth Republic’s closure, strength or autonomy to be absolute, stressing the relative and comparative bases for analysis, the overall picture of the French state remains one of a ‘powerful and independent force’ (Zysman, 1978, p. 265), where the strength and legitimacy of the state as representative of the popular or ‘general’ will render pressure groups to be ‘virtually illegitimate’, accordingly ‘refused access to the state apparatus’ (Birnbaum, 1988, p. 187). Lacking alternative points of access to the policy process, challenging groups are obliged to resort to conflictual modes of action, characterised by ‘an anti-state dimension which grows in intensity as the state confronting it increases its powers’ (ibid, p. 190). The detailed analyses offered by Schmitter (1981), who highlights the lack of societal corporatism in France, and Wilson, who argues that France is characterised by a limited, state-directed pluralism, tend to confirm this viewpoint. Though the state administration willingly engages in consultation with numerous competing groups, this is often only superficial; by contrast, it refuses to involve societal groups in policy formulation (Wilson, 1983, pp. 252–3). His appraisal of the state’s policy capacity (Wilson, 1990, pp. 80–1) has a familiar ring to it: France under the Fifth Republic has acquired the reputation of being a strong state capable of resisting demands from outside groups. Its strong political executive, disciplined parliamentary majority, centralized administration, and Rousseauian notion of the state’s duty to the general will have permitted the regime to ignore even noisy groups pressing for self-serving demands when the dominant political élite has so chosen. Few other democratic governments are able to act so decisively and to be as free from the need to consult powerful interests as the French government.


Yet there is a problem with such a scenario, a problem best encapsulated by the agriculture policy sector. In fact, far from finding interest groups to be excluded from policy formulation, close attention to state–group relations within this sector has revealed the existence of privileged, collusive relations between the state bureaucracy and the Fédération nationale des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles (FNSEA), the dominant farmers’ union (Keeler, 1987; Hall, 1993). During de Gaulle’s presidency in particular, the strength of the FNSEA was such that it was accorded the power to implement policy within a formal framework of departmental commissions composed of sectoral and territorial representatives. From the early 1960s, the FNSEA enjoyed ‘privileged access’ to the decision-making centres of the state, and had control over a network of semi-public agencies charged with the administration of agricultural programmes (Keeler, 1981, p. 205). While retaining a measure of control over the policy process, the state was able to co-opt sectoral élites and shift (at least in part) responsibility for unpopular decisions onto their shoulders. Following Mitterrand’s election in 1981, attempts by agriculture minister Edith Cresson to install a more pluralist form of policy-making by including rival unions into the agriculture policy community were met with strong resistance from the FNSEA, whose demonstration of strength in the hiver chaud of 1981–82 rendered the government increasingly reluctant to alienate the union. Initial radical reform produced revolt and subsequent government retrenchment under strong union opposition. Such analyses are important because, as Hayward argues, the ‘fact of policy sectorization’ constitutes the structural basis of policy-making (1991, p. 401). Meso-level analyses, indeed, have provided the clearest basis for the revision of dominant descriptions of the French state. ‘It is often believed’, argue Monod and de Castelbajac (1997, p. 30), ‘that the administration is unified; in fact, in each ministry there lies a will to power which pushes it to ignore its bureaucratic partners.’ As we shall see in the next section, close examination of individual policy sectors by a number of authors, both Anglo-American and French, has questioned the validity of the categorisation of the French state as the archetypal strong, unified state, and instead found numerous examples of state–group collusion, ministry capture, bureaucratic fragmentation and rivalry, institutional ouverture, and atomised policy-making. Sectoral analysis and the Fifth Republic Wilson treats the agriculture sector as very much the exception to the pattern of state–group relationships which characterise the Fifth Republic.


Yet one might rather argue that it is merely the most pronounced example of a widespread phenomenon of comprehensive negotiation with interest groups on a sectoral basis. As Cawson points out, there is ‘no necessary correspondence between the incidence of meso-corporatism and that of macro-corporatism’; indeed, he argues, ‘[o]nly if we concentrate on the macro-level is corporatism invisible in France [as] sectoral corporatist policies at meso- and micro-levels have been pursued’ (1985a, pp. 225–6). Indeed, Muller and Saez (1985) identify the French system of interest intermediation as corporatisme, but nonetheless à la française. This they argue to mean a ‘a mode of social interest organisation which privileges, within the framework of democratic decision-making, negotiation on a sectoral and independent basis with a branch of the state bureaucracy’ (quoted in Jobert, 1988, p. 11). Rather therefore than a tripartite, macrolevel corporatism constructed around representatives of employers and labour, the French version of corporatism is firmly situated at the mesolevel. Its principal features are the strong association of interest groups with the formulation and implementation of policy, and the influence of the state in the structuring of representative groups, whose influence stems from a combination of their professional and technical expertise, and their power of mobilisation. Groups lose part of their margin of manoeuvre through association with government policy, but gain a set of resources which strengthen their control over their sectoral constituency (Jobert, 1988, pp. 6–10). The state administration, in return, is assured of a central position within all forms of social representation (Muller, 1992, pp. 279–80). Detailed empirical studies of policy-making in policy sectors other than agriculture under the Fifth Republic have thus produced results which contrast starkly with conflictual state–group models. Sokoloff places the ‘fruitful network of corporate relationships’ between the FNSEA and the state within a ‘general trend’ of ‘closer collaboration’ between the state and interest groups (1985, p. 253); Keeler (1985) finds patterns of formal corporatist decentralisation instigated by the 1973 loi Royer in the commercial development sector. Analyses of, inter alia, fishing (Shackleton, 1986), the police (Gleizal, 1988), steel (Rhodes, 1985), and the notarial profession (Suleiman, 1987) have pointed to the existence of diverse relationships between professional interest groups and their regulatory ministry, particularly ones that are close, collusive, clientelistic, and complicitous – even to the point of, as in the case of the notaires, ministry ‘capture’ by private (as opposed to the general) interests. Further, this phenomenon is bilateral; the practice of pantouflage, where high-ranking bureaucrats move to top-level posts in


client organisations, ensures a mutually supportive atmosphere of protection and cooperation between state and industry. Wright therefore argues that the Napoleonic politico-administrative model is undermined by the increased sectorisation of policy-making, especially within highly integrated policy communities. This is particularly marked within education, agriculture, and industry, but is apparent across the state apparatus. Indeed, he argues that state–group relationships can be classified within four separate models, two of which – domination-crisis and endemic and open conflict – are fundamentally antagonistic, and two of which – corporatist and concerted politics and pluralist – stress mutuality, institutionalisation, consensus building, and conflict management (1989, pp. 257–74). Indeed, he ultimately concludes that: it is misleading to speak of state–group relations and more accurate to think in terms of relations between a particular decision-maker and a specific group. There is, in truth, an infinite and bewildering variety of situations. […] Perhaps the only statement that can safely be made is that the relationship between the fragmented state and the no less fragmented groups during the Fifth Republic is like the rest of government – infinitely complex, intrinsically untidy and constantly changing. (Wright, 1989, p. 290, p. 293) Policy styles: recurrent macro–meso difficulties From this picture of the state, it is perhaps to be expected that corresponding macro-level attempts to define national policy styles have also been subject to methodological difficulties and conflicting empirical observations. Where the opportunity structure model seeks to explain policy outcomes in the context of state institutions, policy styles aim to do so in terms of the set of national-specific legal and cultural norms which supervise public action. Richardson et al., defining policy styles as ‘the interaction between (a) the government’s approach to problemsolving and (b) the relationship between government and other actors in the policy process’ (1982, p. 13), argue that the sectorisation of policy does not preclude the identification of nationally distinct ‘standard operating procedures for handling issues’ (ibid, pp. 2–3). States are therefore classified in terms of their policy style according to a basic four-point typology: problem-solving can be placed on a continuum


from rationalist (or ‘heroic’) to incrementalist (or ‘humdrum’), and state– group relationships from consensual to impositional, Figure 2.4. Hayward’s discussion of the Rhine–Rhône waterway in the context of a French policy style is especially illuminating. Drawing heavily on the Crozerian stasis–crisis model of organisational change, Hayward hypothesises a putative policy style of the French state to be characterised by ‘a capacity for policy initiative, a potential for far-sighted planning and a propensity to impose its will when this is necessary to obtain public objectives’ (1982, p. 116; italics in original). In the classic ‘heroic’ vision of state–society relations in France, the state unilaterally formulates policy with little significant input from societal interests, whose input is limited to accommodation and negotiation at the implementation stage. Alternatively, of course, the state may simply seek to impose its policy choices, running the risk of confrontation (Schmidt, 2000, pp. 142–3). This model thus correlates closely to that advanced by Crozier (1964) and Hoffmann (1974), who argue that rapid reform, modernisation and innovation under the Fifth Republic can be explained in terms of executive authority and imposition. Change in a centralised regime such as France comes through the ‘ambitious assertion of political will’ (Hayward, 1982, p. 113), after bouts of stasis; stagnation therefore alternates with radical change, stimulated by external pressures. As a result, the choice tends to be either major reform or no reform. This is a vision of France where incremental change is not possible. Yet Hayward is careful to add a number of caveats. First, he stresses the gap between the normative construction of a dominant policy-style and the behavioural reality of its application within the policy process. Far from an actual guide to policy-making, therefore, policy styles should be ‘distinguished from how people involved in the policy process actually

consensus

anticipatory

reactive

imposition Figure 2.4 National policy styles (adapted from Richardson et al., 1982, p. 13).


behave’, and seen rather as a ‘higher-order, meta-political phenomenon to which actual conduct more or less remotely approximates’ (ibid, p. 112). As a consequence, a second caveat (ibid, p. 113) stresses the importance of sectoral differentiation: while it might be possible, in normative terms, to locate particular countries in relative positions along the dimensions proposed, it is not possible to average out a range of behavioural policy styles for each country because these will vary according to subject-matter and circumstances at any particular time, owing to changes in the balance of power between the actors involved in the particular policy issue. Some sectors, it seems, are more heroic than others. Indeed, the findings produced by numerous studies have emphasised the variation in policy styles across policy sectors under the Fifth Republic, from nuclear reactor development (Rüdig, 1987), to defence (Menon, 1994), high-speed rail technology (Dunn and Perl, 1994), and macro-economic policymaking (Mazey, 1986). Although Dunn concludes his analysis of transport infrastructure by noting that ‘[i]n some policy areas, some of the time, the French state is a strong state’, capable of far-sighted, ‘heroic’ policy implementation (1995, p. 290), the evidence of other studies does little to support the application of this style to policy-making throughout the state as a whole. Investigation of the telecommunications, and consumer electronics industries has led Cawson et al. to conclude that the state’s ability to coordinate and impose policy upon industrial sectors is ‘the exception rather than the rule’ (1987, p. 33). Mazey found that macro-economic policy under the 1981–86 Socialist government provided a ‘spectacular example of incremental policy-making’, as ‘Socialist economic strategy was reduced, by politicians and administrative officials pursuing narrow sectional interests, to a myriad of competing policies’ (1986, p. 418, p. 421). Even in the case of education, widely perceived as highly centralised and bureaucratic, studies have tended to belie the myth of assertive policy reform. The first Mitterrand government’s attempts at heroic reform of education and agriculture fell under the weight of concerted resistance by organised interests (Hall, 1993, pp. 170–1). And even though such reforms as the 1968 Faure law present a fine example of structural reform in a time of crisis, Ambler argues that this is far from typical; indeed, the most common form of policy innovation in the education sector under the Fifth Republic is the ‘incremental pursuit of longterm goals’ through a series of laws, ordinances, decrees, and circulars


(1988, p. 473). In several cases, ministers have been unable to impose policy change over strongly entrenched vested interests. The principal reason for this inability is perhaps surprising. DuclaudWilliams (1983), Suleiman (1987), and Dunn (1995) all agree on the excessive centralisation of the French state in the contrasting policy sectors they discuss; yet while for Dunn it is precisely because of the advantages created by institutional centralisation that the state is able to impose its own preferences in roads policy, Duclaud-Williams’s analysis of education and Suleiman’s account of the notarial profession both see centralisation as a weakness rather than a strength. Given this framework, they point out, pressure groups can also organise centrally, focus their efforts on one part of the decisional process, and therefore increase the intensity and the effectiveness of their opposition. Objections to the identification and consequences of a single overarching macro-level policy style go beyond the differences evident in specific case studies, however. Thus Griggs (2000), discussing the development of health policy under the Fifth Republic, even rejects the very notion that there can be a ‘French’ policy style, in terms both of its general applicability to different policy sectors and, indeed, in the very usefulness of the concept as a means of explaining patterns of policy change. Instead, he argues, policy change is erratic, driven by contingent responses, policy learning, and policy transfer, as policy-makers may switch from policy style to policy style in order to find solutions to intractable problems. On this basis, Griggs argues that France is little different from other west European polities, and that analyses of public policy must be able to take into account not only differences in policy discourses and the structure of policy networks between policy subsystems, but also differences in discourses and networks within the same subsystem over time. Moreover, the weight of sectoral analysis points to a vision of the state as neither weak nor strong, but rather fragmented under the pressure of polarising dynamics. To borrow the term proposed by Elgie and Griggs (2000, pp. 15–25), the French state is disoriented. In the next chapter, we will see that attempts to conceptualise state–movement interactions in France must not only proceed from the basis of disorientation, but must also take into account significant developments in the Fifth Republic’s policy-making capacity over the past 20 or so years.

3 Institutional Change and the Fifth Republic

It is worth returning at the start of this chapter to some of the problems of the political opportunity structure model identified in Chapter 2, particularly its perceived structural determinism. Consequent attempts to create a more nuanced, flexible model have typically centred on attention to the configuration of power. Analyses dealing with France in particular have focused on the relationship between social movement mobilisation and élite responses, and above all on the presence and role of allies and opponents. Such arguments are frequently marshalled by investigations of the environmental and anti-nuclear power movements; similarly, accounts of the rise of the anti-Front National counter-movement have found the facilitation by the Socialist party to be crucial, and the behaviour of its opponents to occupy a central role in the movement’s choice of strategies (Mayer, 1995; Waters, 1998, pp. 177 ff). Duyvendak (1995, p. 124) argues that the ‘dynamic’ properties of the configuration of power are central to movement trajectories in France, as in a country where electoral laws stimulate bipolarization, social movements are forced to choose between one of the sides of the left–right cleavage. The NSMs therefore become highly dependent on the French leftist parties … [D]ue to the polarized French system, political changes are of enormous consequence regarding the opportunities provided to NSMs. Essentially, the position mapped out by Duyvendak here continues to form the basis of scholarly accounts of NSM activity in France. Thus Appleton, who contrasts a ‘second wave’ of movements in France in the 1990s, organising around issues such as solidarity, anti-racism, 71


gay rights, and parity, acknowledges the importance of the decentralisation and deconcentration of power within France and highlights the failure of applications of the opportunity structure model to address this properly. Yet his emphasis on mobilisation (rather than policy-making) leads him to frame his explanation of NSM trajectories at the macro-level, within ‘the logic of partisan control of the state apparatus’ (Appleton, 2000, pp. 72–3). Just as, therefore, the demobilisation of the ‘first wave’ of NSM protest in the 1970s can be explained by the victory of the Left in 1981, second wave mobilisation in the 1990s can be explained by the return of the Right, from 1986 to 1988 and 1993 to 1997. Given the presumed ‘closed’ nature of the French polity, the emphasis on the role of allies as a determinant factor in movement mobilisation has a clear explanatory value, particularly as it potentially allows for greater differentiation between the trajectories of different social movements. Yet this approach is not without its problems. First, because, while social movements have undoubtedly been instrumentalised by the French Left, party response needs to be seen as but one factor in the link between grievances and mobilisation. It is difficult, for instance, to explain the pattern of environmental mobilisation in France noted in Chapter 1 in terms of this variable. Second, this approach has little to say about the nature of policy outcomes; it relegates social movement activity to a basic whistle-blowing and agenda-setting role, and tells us little about the processes of public policy-making. The processes of and reasons for policy change – which is, after all, the central external objective of instrumental SMOs – tend thus to be neglected. Third, this approach inevitably shifts the focus of the political opportunity structure away from its specifically structural elements. Hence, while theoretical developments such as the configuration of power have, according to della Porta (1996, p. 63), ‘enlarged the explanatory capacity of the concept’, they have also ‘reduced its specificity’, to the point where Gamson and Meyer (1996, p. 275) warn against its evolution into ‘an all-encompassing fudge factor for all the conditions and circumstances that form the context for collective action’. Rootes in particular criticises the extent to which analyses of political opportunity have mistaken contingency for structure; decisions taken by potential allies, for instance, frequently have conjunctural explanations which may be related to structural factors, but are by no means inherently determined by them (1997b, pp. 83–4). These warnings are especially apposite in the French case because, if meso-level analysis is predominantly absent from an opportunity structure

Institutional Change and the Fifth Republic 73

model which foregrounds an aggregated view of the policy process, then structural changes in the Fifth Republic’s legal-political institutions over the course of the last two decades have also been neglected. Indeed, conceptualisations of France such as that recently offered by van der Heijden (1999, pp. 213–14), who stresses a centralised state with extensive control of the economy, a bipolar party system articulated around class conflict, and predominantly repressive policing methods as key features of a regime which is ‘closed’ to challenging groups, are now highly problematic. Even if this characterisation was more or less accurate at the time of the first wave of environmental protest in the mid to late 1970s, it is surely much less tenable now. As we shall see, the Fifth Republic’s legal-institutional framework has recently undergone a number of important developments. Structural shifts have increased the political and financial incentives of party formation, and the opportunities for third parties to influence the policy process. For Appleton and Ward, in fact, France ‘provides an excellent example of how institutional, or system, changes have shaped the universe of party competition and contributed to the emergence of a transformed party system’ (1993, p. 74). Negotiating the link between the institutional setting and party competition and organisation, they construct a causal model whereby: Changes in the parameters of the electoral environment […] stimulate change in the nature of party competition; this change in the electoral environment forces political parties, the primary organizations competing in this arena, to react and adapt … The complex and isomorphic properties of political party organization dictate that changes in the environment will stimulate parties to respond to fluctuations through organizational adaptation. (ibid, p. 71) Indeed, the identification of developmental phases such as those describing the emergence of Les Verts (see Chapter 1) is particularly attractive in the French context precisely because such phases are also congruent with a set of narratives explaining the institutional development of the Fifth Republic. The institutionalisation of political ecology in France thus also corresponds to conjunctural and structural shifts in the distribution of power in the French political system, shifts which are generally neglected in applications of the political opportunity model to France. In the early 1990s, Pierre Muller in particular offered a reassessment of the ‘classic’ model of Fifth Republic public policy networks centred on


the definition of a set of meso-corporatist relationships between the state administration and privileged, insider groups. The analysis he developed was designed to show the increasing strains to which this model had been subjected since the mid-1970s, strains which have effectively destabilised the previously dominant chains of interest representation directed towards the central state apparatus, throwing the French pattern of public policy-making into crisis, and diminishing the ability of the central state to control policy choices. These developments, he argued, have three principal causes: the increased withdrawal of the state from direct economic and industrial management; the devolution of power to subnational tiers of government; and the Europeanisation of public policy (Muller, 1992, pp. 289–97). The previous chapter argued that, rather than seeking to frame states in terms of macro-level claims to strength or weakness, we should conceive of policy-making as a meso-level, sectoral process carried out on the basis of negotiation and compromise between interest groups and state representatives. Such, indeed, is the fragmentation of the policy process that we should view the state as inherently disoriented; macrolevel models of state power are by nature illusory; the strong state per se conceptually unattainable. Instead, the state is more or less able to impose its will in contrasting policy sectors, depending on the structural organisation, composition, and relationships between actors, which define the policy networks within these sectors. This chapter continues to question claims to state strength, and to the strength of the French state in particular, but takes a somewhat different tack. Maintaining that developments in the power structure of the state are central to attempts to understand the patterns and trajectories of interactions between states and social movements, developments will therefore be discussed which have transformed public policy-making in France over the last two decades or so. First, three of the more salient changes in the French parliamentary regime which have created incentives to party formation will be summarised, highlighting the effects of cohabitation, the French Constitutional Council, and the funding laws of the late 1980s and 1990s. Second, interrelated dynamics of devolution and the emergence of a multipolar institutional model, or multilevel governance will be looked at. Prominent here will be the decentralisation laws of 1982, the increased importance of European directives and of the European structural funds, and of economic deregulation. The final section will turn to concerns over predictions about social unrest, and confrontational strategies deployed by groups excluded from policy-making in this new institutional framework.


The legislative arena The weakness of the legislature under the Fifth Republic has long been a staple feature of accounts of French state institutions, which have tended to stress the dominance of executive prerogative and the stringent curbing of parliament’s powers after 1958. For Keeler, indeed, the Gaullist constitution creates strong executive government, able to dominate parliament through a combination of its ‘structural assets’ and ‘constitutional weapons’ (1993, p. 521). The president, directly elected by universal suffrage since 1965, enjoys a popular legitimacy denied to the Assemblée Nationale, whose weakness is underlined by the fact that ministers must resign from parliament upon nomination, and that the prime minister, appointed by the president, need not – as was the case with Georges Pompidou in 1962 and Raymond Barre in 1976 – even be a parliamentarian. Indeed, until the mid-1980s, the role of the lower house appeared simply to be to ensure majorities for policies enacted by the government, but defined by the president. Frears thus famously refers to the French parliament as a ‘loyal workhorse’, but ‘poor watchdog’, arguing that its main role is to improve and legitimise legislation. In contrast, parliament is ‘inadequate as an arena for political debate and as a check on the executive’ (1990, p. 32). Nonetheless, the emergence of Les Verts as a political force corresponds to the development of structuring elements within the political system facilitating third party formation. The introduction of proportional representation for regional and European elections has, in some policy areas at least, enabled third parties real decisional power. At national level, successive periods of power-sharing between a president and prime minister of opposing parties has underlined the importance of conjunctural factors within the presumed structural dominance of the president. For nearly 30 years, the primacy of the presidential office was ensured by a combination of the letter and interpretation of the 1958 constitution, the personal authority of the president, and the concordant outcomes of presidential and legislative elections. Since 1986, however, the discordance between the results of these elections has become so frequent as to be normalised. The resultant periods of cohabitation between François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac (1986–88), Mitterrand and Edouard Balladur (1993–95), and latterly Chirac and Lionel Jospin (1997–2002) have subsequently fundamentally altered the balance of power between president and prime minister. Of course, the president remains the head of state and retains policy supremacy in a number of areas, most notably foreign affairs and security


policy. Yet in matters of domestic policy, the president wields influence rather than power, and has come to adopt the (unofficial) role of leader of the opposition. As Elgie and Machin (1991, pp. 74–7) underline in their account of the Chirac–Mitterrand dyarchy, cohabitation has thus produced a pattern of ‘segmented’ decision-making, where president and prime minister divide executive responsibility depending on the policy issue in hand. The experience, argues Parodi, has ultimately favoured the office of the prime minister, who has become the ‘real head of the executive’ (1997, p. 305), while for Colliard (2001, p. 80), the Fifth Republic’s democratic mode has been transformed, as semi-presidential government gives way during periods of cohabitation to a parliamentary regime organised around a head of government legitimised by the party system. Moreover, it is clear, for example, that the legislative programme since 1997 – which has included such polarising measures as the reduction of the working week to 35 hours, the introduction of ‘politics of rights’ reforms such as parité and the PaCS, and the proposed transferral of increased legislative and regulatory powers to the Corsican territorial assembly – responds to a political agenda defined and implemented by the Jospin government. The limitation of the presidential term from seven years to five, a reform made law in September 2000 by means of the Republic’s ninth executive referendum, further appears to accentuate this trend to prime ministerial dominance. Indeed, for Ponceyri (2000), the referendum represents not a turning point in French history so much as la fin de la République gaullienne; in this analysis, the reform – coming on the heels of Chirac’s unhappy 1997 dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale – curtails executive power, responds foremost to a party political agenda, and underscores, through an abstention rate of almost 70 per cent of registered voters, the weakening of presidential authority. Yet somewhat paradoxically, the reform may also represent a re-entrenchment of presidential supremacy. Not only does the measure fail to deliver root and branch reform of French institutions, but the planned future correspondence of presidential and legislative elections from 2002 makes further occurrences of cohabitation rather less likely to happen. Ratified by parliament in December 2000, Jospin’s decision to invert the order of the 2002 elections, so that the presidential contest takes place before the legislative elections, seemingly further re-establishes the primacy of the former over the latter and, indeed, the bipolar dynamic it creates. Moreover, if cohabitation has realigned the relationship between president and prime minister, then as Elgie and Griggs (2000, pp. 33–48) point out, this relationship refers to the conjunctural balance of power


within the executive, and ultimately does little to palliate the structural weakness of the legislature. The constitutional armoury which allows the executive to override parliamentary opposition remains in place, irrespective of whether decision-making is monocratic, segmented or shared. The Constitutional Council Arguably the most significant development in parliamentary power during the time of the Republic has therefore stemmed not from cohabitation, but from the emergence of the French Constitutional Council as a ‘second parliament’ (Pascallon, 1986, p. 3) or ‘specialised’ third legislative chamber (Stone, 1992, pp. 45–7). More precisely, the Council has evolved from its original function of shielding the executive from parliamentary encroachment, to its current role as an important check on executive power and defender of individual liberties. As a consequence, it has exercised a major influence both on the development of modes of political competition, and on the tentative emergence of an État de droit – a state organised around the principles of due process and the respect of law – in France. Jennings even argues that the Council’s extension of judicial review has ‘redressed the imbalance within the political institutions of the Fifth Republic’ (1996, p. 493). Two reforms have been central to this transformation. First, in 1971, the Council chose to impose itself in the political debate with a ruling upholding the constitutional inviolability of the freedom of association. Second, in October 1974, a constitutional amendment extended the right to engage the Council on a matter of legislation to 60 senators or 60 députés; previously, the right of referral had been restricted to the president, prime minister, or the presidents of either parliamentary chamber. The subsequent redefinition of the Council’s role has been remarkable. Prior to the 1971 decision, the Council had essentially concentrated on procedural constitutionality; from that point on it has increasingly sat in judgment on the constitutionality of the content of parliamentary laws. Thus whereas in the 1958–71 period, the Council did not meaningfully alter any of the rare bills referred to it, it is now both systematically invoked by the opposition and is ready to nullify bills in whole or part where it deems necessary, even where these bills are a central part of the government’s legislative programme – a readiness amply demonstrated by the Council’s 1993 abrogation of the lois Pasqua on immigration. Constitutionality is now central to political debate; referral to the Council has ‘modifie[d] the parameters of governmental and parliamentary decision-making’ (Maus, 1989, p. 21) by bringing about the ‘juridicisation’ of the legislative process.


The threat of referral to the Council has resulted in a process of executive autolimitation, or self-restraint. Rather than risking a bill being nullified, governments have preferred to water down their proposals and adopt a more consensual approach to policy-making (Lovecy, 1991, p. 53). Where such a strategy is either unapplied or unsuccessful, the result is often the recourse to corrective revision. In order to enable stalled or partially annulled legislation to make it to the statute books, legislators may simply incorporate the Council’s rulings into the original text (Stone, 1989, p. 18). While Parodi (1997) argues that France remains an essentially majoritarian semi-presidential regime, therefore, Lovecy argues the development of the Council to be ‘intrinsically corrosive of France’s Fifth Republican version of majoritarian democracy’ (1994, p. 227). Further, As the embodiment of a consensual mode of democracy, the Council and its rulings have operated to de-legitimise the policy commitments and mandate to govern that derive from France’s bi-polarising electoral arrangements. Majoritarian presidentialism has thus been muzzled. (Ibid, p. 229) The democratic process has thus, following the typology established by Lijphart (1984), been subject to consensualisation. Moreover, this development needs to be placed within wider trends towards the juridicisation of public policy and the control of governmental autonomy, including such external factors as the limits set by the expansion of European legislation and the jurisprudence laid down by the European Court of Justice (CJEC). Indeed, observers of the European institutions have persuasively argued that the institutional inertia of the European Community has been more than compensated for by the activism and ‘overt judicial policy-making’ of the CJEC, which has extended the limits of Community law into areas previously subject to national sovereignty, particularly in the field of rights, external relations, and economic integration (Volcansek, 1992, p. 115). Of course, in comparison to constitutional courts elsewhere, the French body appears to be formally rather weak. Functionally restricted to a priori abstract review, it cannot judge cases arising from laws already on the statute books, thus restricting its ability to intervene to the time between the final reading of a bill and its promulgation. Moreover, it has a relatively short period of time (one month) in which to declare its findings. Unlike the United States Supreme Court, it cannot choose which cases to judge, nor can it have cases referred to it by members of the public, or, indeed, any other parts of the judicial system (Stone, 1992, pp. 30–2).


Yet despite the French court’s ostensible comparative weaknesses, its development has had an enormous effect on the form and content of public policy-making in France. On the one hand, it is a body of systematic recourse for parliamentary oppositions of whatever political hue, reinforcing by proxy the power of the legislature; on the other, it is a regulatory council engaged in near-permanent review of the constitutional legality of public policy, a defender of the rights and liberties of the people in the face of executive order (Rousseau, 2001). In conjunction with the development of judicial review at European level, the Constitutional Council has thus provided a bulwark against the erosion of citizens’ rights and a further important check on executive action; in doing so, it has effectively broadened the powers of parliament, and consequently created new incentives and opportunities for third party formation, including – as we shall see below – by direct design. Electoral systems, the end of bipolarity, and party system realignment Numerous explanatory analyses stress the centrality of electoral systems to the emergence of Green parties. Both Hay and Hayward (1988, p. 447) and Davidson (1992, pp. 73–5), for example, argue that the electoral system is the prime systemic factor governing the ability of third parties to gain seats in legislatures, and is a key differential when comparing the relative successes of Green lists and parties in western polities. Thus according to Müller-Rommel (1982, p. 72), while In countries with proportional representation, we find ecology parties organised in policy-making institutions at the national parliamentary level, [in] majority electoral systems, ecology parties stand hardly any chance of winning seats in national parliaments. In France, commentators have frequently underlined the constraints on the development of Les Verts imposed by the electoral system and resultant bipolar party system (for example Burchell and Williams, 1996, p. 47). Indeed, almost in defiance of the Inglehart model predicting the emergence of new cleavages in western democracies, at the start of the 1980s French political preferences continued to be defined by the durability of such traditional factors as class, religion, region and ideology. Of course, as Bartolini underlines, such variables are not independent of the context within which they operate; cleavages are also structured by institutional dynamics (1984, pp. 115 ff). The presidential logic of the regime and the two-round majoritarian electoral system are


thus significant explanatory factors in such developments as the rapprochement of the Socialists and the Communists on the Left and the lack of importance of centrist parties in the political spectrum. Lewis-Beck maintains, notably in his study of the 1995 presidential elections, that traditional social cleavages continue to structure the political preferences of a ‘stalled’ French electorate (Lewis-Beck, 1998). Yet it is also the case that the past 20 years have seen a dramatic decline in the share of the vote gained by traditional parties at French legislative elections. So dramatic has this change been that, as Elgie and Griggs (2000, pp. 124–30) point out, sociological models of voting behaviour – which assume voting preferences, based on such factors as class, religion and left/right self-placement, to be relatively stable – have lost their capacity to predict and explain electoral outcomes in France since the late 1970s. Thus, whereas in 1978 the four main parties garnered just under nine-tenths of the total vote in an almost perfect four-way split, the results for the 1993 and 1997 elections show this proportion to have fallen to almost exactly two-thirds (see Table 3.1). By the late 1990s, the almost perfect four-party bipolar split of twenty years earlier had thus given way to a much more heterogeneous political landscape. Indeed, the last two decades have witnessed the decline in support for the principal ‘governmental’ parties, to the point where the fragmented Left and Right are increasingly organised around just two ‘leader’ parties, the PS and the RPR respectively. Smaller parties have tended to proliferate and flourish on both sides of the political spectrum, while the seemingly structural progression of both abstentionism and spoiled ballot papers translates an apparent wider loss of public confidence in political action (Guyomarch, 2001, pp. 24–31). By the end of the 1980s, Machin was already identifying the electoral and institutional Table 3.1 Percentage share of total votes cast gained by the four traditional major party blocs at successive legislative elections, 1978–97

1978 1981 1986 1988 1993 1997

PCF

PS and Radicals

UDF

RPR

Total

20.61 16.12 9.78 11.32 9.18 9.91

24.98 37.77 31.54 35.87 19.2 25.55

20.42 19.16

22.43 20.91

88.44 93.96 82.3 84.86 66.86 66.91

Source: Le Monde.1

40.98 18.49 18.64 14.7

19.18 19.84 16.8


developments at the heart of the ‘reduction of the nationalising, moderating, disciplining, and coalition encouraging pressures’ of the traditional bipolar model (1989, p. 79). In this analysis, the evolution of the party system – evident in the growing dominance of the Socialists over the Communists, the emergence of the Front National, the separation of parliamentary and presidential majorities under cohabitation, and the ouverture of the Socialists to potential coalition partners after Mitterrand’s re-election in 1988 – has been shaped by the introduction of different, and changing, electoral systems, and by institutional modifications such as the introduction of European elections in 1979, the fragmentary pressures of decentralisation, the limitation on multiple office-holding, and the de-phasing of legislative and presidential elections. Clearly, a number of caveats do need to be borne in mind when discussing the link between the electoral system and party system realignment. Structural factors should not be seen as the sole determinants of party system development, but rather as a key element which sets the context for inter-party competition. In cross-national perspective, Rohrschneider’s (1993) analysis of party realignment emphasises not only the electoral system but also public opinion and the responses of political élites. The inability of new political parties in France to penetrate the bipolar system in the 1970s and early 1980s needs therefore to be seen not only in the context of the prevalent systemic structural constraints, but also in terms of the ideological flexibility and (in the eyes of at least one observer), the ‘brilliant strategic response’ of the Parti Socialiste (Schmidt, 1990a, p. 193). Correspondingly, as Rootes argues, focus on systems tends to overshadow the importance of the state of party political competition, and ‘[fails] to explain why Green parties sometimes do surprisingly well even in the least hospitable systems; or why Green parties are more successful in some countries with facilitative political systems than in others with similar political structures’ (1997a, p. 331). Thus while institutional change may be a contributing factor to the emergence of left-libertarian parties, it is not necessarily the decisive factor. The example of the only French legislative elections to be fought so far under proportional representation, when Les Verts gained only 1.2 per cent of the total national vote in 1986, continues to demonstrate the importance of a party’s strategic, programmatic and organisational choices to electoral performance (Kitschelt, 1990, p. 363). Nonetheless, the last decade has seen the PCF continue its seemingly inexorable decline, while the (divided) extreme left has made significant inroads at local and national elections, the Mouvement des Citoyens has established a distinctive voice across the political divide, and Les Verts


have won seats at legislative elections and, in 2001, a seat in the Senate for the first time. On the Right, the UDF appears more fragmented than ever, while right-wing Jacobins dissatisfied with the RPR can now choose between rival formations led by Charles Pasqua and Philippe de Villiers, and the extreme right has split into two parties. Moreover, minor parties in the French political system increasingly contest firstorder elections not merely as a publicity tool, but in order to maintain their presence at subnational and supranational levels, and to weigh their respective strengths against prospective coalition partners and opponents. The French electoral process now resembles, in Parodi’s conception, an accordion (1997, p. 297). On the one hand, minority party representation is restricted by the majoritarian system operating for the legislative and presidential elections; yet on the other, once enabled by proportional representation, minority parties are able to wedge their feet in the door of first-order national elections which had previously been firmly closed to them. Thus the statement of wider political preferences encouraged by proportional representation has not been confined to those elections where it has been in use, but has been paralleled by party system fragmentation at levels fought on a majoritarian basis. From the 1984 European and 1986 regional elections onwards, third parties have been able to gain representatives in subnational and supranational legislatures which have increased their visibility at all levels of the policy process. Les Verts are a striking example of this, using second-order elections to establish themselves as significant political actors, fostering a logic of accommodation enabling them to consolidate power at other levels of the political system. The party’s impressive results at the June 1999 European elections, where it gained 9.72 per cent of the vote and nine MEPs, and subsequently at the municipal elections of March 2001, where an average first round score of 11.8 per cent led to the election of 33 Green mayors, provide dramatic testimony of the way in which such elections can affect the balance of power between the parties of the Left, whether in terms of future electoral agreements, policy enactment, or appointments to office. The salient feature of the French electoral system, despite its Gaullist intentions, is therefore perhaps not its exclusion of third parties but its provision of a dynamic framework for the negotiation of alliances between established parties and hitherto marginalised, challenging forces. Arguably, this process has even been beneficial for the Parti Socialiste: faced with the decline in its core support, the PS entered government in June 1997 on the foundation of bilateral agreements concluded with numerous parties on the Left – including both the PCF and Les Verts.


The importance of party funding Institutional thresholds must also take into account party funding laws as well as the formal features of voting systems. Thus the fifth of the institutional changes identified by Machin in the production of an ‘increasingly hybrid’ party system in France (1990, p. 33) is that governing the funding of political parties. Indeed, the establishment of state funding for political parties through the successive laws of 1988, 1990, 1993 and 1995 has significantly increased the incentives for party formation and provided considerable encouragement to party pluralism. For Les Verts, comparison of the results of the 1997 and 1988 legislative elections is instructive. In 1988, the party called for a boycott of ‘TGV’ elections following Mitterrand’s victory over Chirac, arguing that both the time-frame and the majoritarian electoral system were undemocratic. However it was also the case that the financial demands of a national election campaign only two years after the previous one were beyond the party’s means. Even in October 2001, after four years in government, the party numbered only 8775 members; in 1988, there were only 1600. Given that the party’s statutes rule out corporate financial donations and set a low ceiling on individual donations, and that the party had run up substantial debts during the disastrous 1984 European election campaign (Parkin, 1989, pp. 100–2), such a campaign would certainly have been difficult to sustain. By 1997, the situation was rather different. Essentially introduced as a series of measures to remove corruption from political life, the party funding laws have significantly encouraged small parties to form and contest elections (Dolez, 1995). This has been achieved in two principal ways. First, by basing state funding on the declared affiliation of senators and députés, the 1988 law produced a fragmentation of already existing parties. From 16 parliamentary parties in 1989, of which two had only one member, there were 41 three years later, 22 of which had only one member. Second, and more pertinently for new parties, the subsequent law of 1990 modified the equation so that 50 per cent of state funds were accorded on the basis of the number of votes received in the first round of the legislative elections, providing that candidates were present in at least 75 constituencies (lowered to 50 by the 1992 corruption laws) and at least 30 départements. Moreover, the outlawing of the corporate funding of parties and campaigns in 1995 has favoured parties who had been little able to attract big donors, and the law further levelled the playing field by setting a ceiling on the state reimbursement of election expenses. The 1990 law built on legislation passed at the end of the 1970s to encourage small parties and increase the number of candidates put


forward (Parodi, 1997, p. 297). Indeed, the Constitutional Council’s decision of January 1990 to set no threshold on the qualification for funding per vote was tabled with the explicit intention of encouraging pluralism and the formation of new parties. This incentive proved so attractive that Les Verts, together with their then partners, Génération Écologie, in the Entente Écologiste alliance, were initially the principal losers of the law. The Entente was deprived of potential seats in the 1993 legislative elections, as a proliferation of ‘environmentalist’ candidates, many of them standing solely to profit from the new rules, gained over 3 per cent of the total vote (see Boy, 1994, pp. 169–74; Holliday, 1994, pp. 73–7). Similarly, in the 1997 legislative elections, over a thousand of the record 6359 candidates declared nil campaign expenses. Nonetheless, state funding has ultimately been crucial to the survival of the smaller established Green parties. Thus Génération Écologie’s 406 candidates and 448,287 votes at the 1997 legislative elections secured the party an annual income of 4.8 million francs throughout the course of the legislature, while it is doubtful whether the Mouvement Écologiste Indépendant (established by Antoine Waechter after he split from Les Verts in 1994) would exist today without its annual subsidy of 2 million francs. Even with this income, the party was forced to close down its Paris office and its national secretariat following its poor showing at the 1999 European elections. The funding laws have also cast a long shadow over the strategical choices open to Les Verts. At the 1997 legislative elections, it was important that the party negotiate a number of seats with the PS where the two parties would not stand against each other; yet it was equally important for Les Verts to oppose the PS in over four hundred constituencies, in order to maximise their total share of the national vote and thus their state funding subsidy. The figures for 1997 consequently show Les Verts benefiting from the new laws to the extent of 11.31F per vote per year of the legislature; for 1997 alone the party received state funding amounting to over 11.5 million francs. Ahead of the 2002 presidential and legislative elections, the stakes have been even higher, with a high opinion poll rating for the Green presidential candidate being fundamental to the number and choice of uncontested seats, and thus realistically potential députés, the party could hope to negotiate with the Socialists for the subsequent parliamentary elections. It is thus not so much his controversial remarks over a potential future amnesty for Corsican terrorists as the changed institutional context which therefore explains Alain Lipietz’s enforced resignation as the party’s presidential candidate. Heavily criticised in the press and sinking as low as 2 per cent in the opinion polls, Lipietz gave way in October 2001 to the ‘safer’,


more media-friendly (and less critical of the PS) Noël Mamère, after being put under pressure by almost all the party’s leading figures.

Centralisation, decentralisation, Europe, and regional action Perhaps the most widespread idea about policy-making in France is that it is highly centralised. To a great extent, of course, this is true, at least in comparison with other western industrial states; yet re-evaluations of French politico-administrative practice – originating chiefly from the work of organisational sociologists within Michel Crozier’s Centre de la sociologie des organisations (CSO) from the mid-1960s on – have persuasively underlined both the fragmentation of the central state and the inclusion of local actors in consultation and the implementation of public policy. These accounts – which proceed from the contention that, in France as in most liberal democracies, policy-making is not the preserve of a single actor but a process involving negotiation and bargaining between groups of actors – rest on two principal arguments. First, the relationship between the préfet (the prefect, an official representative of the state) and the local élu was far from one of the subordination of the latter to the will of the former. In its place, there was a network of relations characterised by solidarity, mutual dependency, and even close complicity (Worms, 1966, p. 257). Successive analyses by, inter alia, Crozier (1967), Crozier and Thoenig (1975), Thoenig (1975), and Grémion (1976) formulated a convincing picture in which centralising Jacobin discourses of unity and rigidity were exposed as an ideological tool covering the systematic practise of flexibility. ‘Behind the public rhetoric of centralisation, in short, was the cosy reality of a prefect, along with the representatives of the centre in the periphery, who protected local elected officials’ interests in exchange for their cooperation’, concludes Schmidt (1990b, p. 227). This was especially the case where local élus acquired enough prestige to become notables, able to rely on a power base derived from either the dynamism and economic resources of their constituency (large towns), or from the personalised benefits of the cumul des mandats (multiple officeholding). Combining political office at different levels allows the notable to outflank state officials, by enjoying direct recourse to decision-makers at a point of entry higher up the system; information gained in one capacity can be exploited by the cumulard in another, altering the balance of power in the favour of the élu (Dupuy, 1985, p. 92). Furthermore, the capacity for innovation and policy development enjoyed by mayors of


large cities testifies on its own to the presence of local autonomy in the French system, particularly following the expansion of local government staff in the major urban conurbations in the 1970s. As a result, big cities’ mayors were able to bypass ministerial field services for technical advice and programme elaboration (Mény, 1987, p. 52 ff). Second, the disparity between the formal relationship between préfet and notable and its informal reality has a corollary in the nature of the relationships between different branches of the administration. Rather than forming a closely collaborative, efficient bloc, the administration was highly fragmented and characterised by a culture of evasion and rivalry. Where normative discourses stressed uniformity of purpose and inseparability of deed, actual relationships were based, in Dupuy’s observation, on evasion, intense competition, conflict, mistrust, lack of coordination, and inefficient control (1985, p. 102). Field services, seeking leverage over the préfet (and over other field services), sought allies among mayors and local councillors, who were consequently able to exploit the rivalry and lack of communication within the fragmented administration for their own benefit. Disputes were arbitrated by reference to a third party higher up the system in a model of ‘cross-cutting regulation’; only by enlisting support at a higher level could one player gain the upper hand (Thoenig, 1975, p. 79). Prior to 1980, France was a highly centralised polity, certainly in comparison to other western democracies. Yet the character of centre– periphery relations cannot be reduced to the unidirectional domination of the periphery by the centre. Rather, the relationship was one of interpenetration, affording a significant degree of local autonomy in the decisional process and subsequently varying policy outcomes, especially where a defensive periphery was attempting to resist political change. But this autonomy came at the cost of the concentration of power within traditional élites, a power exercised through access to the centre. Accordingly, transparency and inclusivity were the losers. As Hayward (1978, p. 57) argues, actors aggregating demands not catered for within the bureaucratic–notable nexus were consequently forced to choose between conflict from the margins and conformity to the system (which, inevitably, required them to recast their demands). It is in this context that the first Mitterrand government placed the reform of local government at the centre of its legislative programme with the lois Defferre of March 1982. The Defferre reforms The reforms – constituting some 48 laws and 269 decrees adopted between 1982 and 1986 alone – had three essential aims: to transfer


functions from the administration to locally elected representatives; to increase the formal policy remit of subnational tiers of government; and to render the electoral process more democratic and inclusive (Ashford, 1983, pp. 264–5). Yet, if the reforms have done much to regenerate subnational politics in France, then it is important to stress that they also strengthened the position and powers of traditional élites within the politico-administrative system. Initial analyses of the Defferre reforms therefore tended to cast them as merely the formal legitimisation of prevalent informal practices (Keating and Hainsworth, 1986, p. 72; Mazey, 1990, p. 153). Nonetheless, the formerly reactive and defensive role of local élites has gradually given way to a much more proactive role, particularly at regional level. The reforms of 1982 and 1992 formalised the powers and increased the budgets of the French regions, legitimised since 1986 by direct popular election under proportional representation. By dint of their coordinating role in the formulation and implementation of public policy, regional governments have emerged as local industrial development brokers, able to plot economic development and influence the form and extent of capital investment projects. As a consequence, local politicians have increasingly been able to act as local entrepreneurs, fulfilling a wider role of mediation between state and territorial pressures (Faure, 1994, p. 473). Most observers, as Le Galès (1992) points out, now underline the dynamism of local policy initiatives undertaken by subnational actors. In a policy framework increasingly dominated by European integration, the resulting relationship between the state and subnational authorities is one of increased interdependence, while the development of contractualisation and intercommunal cooperation has significantly reduced the capacity of the state to control and legitimise public policy choices in a new ‘multipolar reality’ (Grénier, 2000, pp. 126–9). Decentralisation – together with the increasing Europeanisation of the policy-making process – has thus significantly modified France’s power structure. Indeed, EC regional development programmes have been a decisive factor in the increased ability of local authorities to attract funds for economic development and to implement regional planning policies of their own, so much so that by the late 1980s, the ability to organise in order to form alliances with other regions, either in France or from other member states, had become a central focus of regional action. The principal goal of such action is to attract European development grants. This has been particularly marked since the reorganisation of the structural funds in 1988 and the subsequent launching of transborder cooperation programmes such as INTERREG I and II


(1990–94 and 1995–99), designed to prepare border regions for the completion of the internal market (Church and Reid, 1996). Such in fact has been the influence of European funding and programmes that we can consider the EC to be an ‘internationalising agent’ at meso-governmental level (Goldsmith, 1993, p. 684). The European structural funds and the ‘new regionalism’ The reform of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) in 1984, and then of the structural funds four years later, has arguably contributed most to mobilising new regional public policy networks at European and regional territorial levels across western Europe (Keating and Hooghe, 1996, pp. 223–4). Even following the creation of the ERDF in January 1975 to reduce regional development imbalances across the Community, the elaboration and implementation of regional policy remained the concern of national governments, with grants allocated through the European structural funds as a function of the national development policies of member states. This arrangement was not substantially modified until, in the wake of the Single European Act, reforms to the structural funds in 1988 reduced the role of the nation state in the identification and definition of projects and areas eligible for support from the structural funds. Bids made to the structural funds now had to demonstrate that aid was additional to, rather than instead of, funds already allocated by the member state, while the new funding mechanism set out a series of five policy objectives (later extended to six) under which regional development assistance could be made available, effectively removing the quota system which had ensured that national governments retained control over the distribution of funds. Furthermore, the reforms doubled the available finance (by 1994, the structural funds had increased to almost one-third of the total Community budget), and created a Community Support Framework to coordinate action between subnational authorities and the European Commission (Mazey and Mitchell, 1993, p. 98). Loughlin (1997, pp. 460–3) argues that the evolution of EC regional policy has had three broad structural consequences. First, power has gradually been ceded from national to supranational policy networks. Second, successive reforms have strengthened the hand of the Commission, both in framing policy objectives and in influencing programme content. Third, EC regional policy-making has undergone a shift from a ‘top–down’ to a ‘bottom–up’ approach, increasing the capacity of subnational (particularly regional) actors to determine the formulation and implementation of policy. Moreover, a further consequence


of the reforms is that where European regional policy had previously centred on attempts to reduce inequalities between the more dynamic and the least developed European regions, the way has now been opened for European regions to develop in an altogether different direction. Rather than as the permanent recipient of institutional grants, the region has benefited from increased political and budgetary powers which have led to the emergence of what Balme (1997, p. 64) qualifies as a ‘new European mode of governance’, characterised by the ‘generalization of multilevel public policies and [the] meso-regulation of governmental activities’. Balme suggests that a ‘new European territoriality’ has been produced, as regional and local authorities have been freed to enter into relationships of competition and exchange exceeding the traditional hierarchies of public action (Balme, 1997, p. 75). Public policy networks, he argues, have developed three central features. First, they are situated at mesogovernment level, often placing the region in a key position; second, they are horizontal, often bringing together different local governments from a range of different levels in cooperation procedures, usually joined by private socio-economic actors; and, finally, they are subject to internationalisation, going beyond state borders. Similarly, Keating (1993, pp. 46–54) argues that dominance of the nation state in western Europe has come under pressure from three directions. Privatisation, globalisation, and the increasingly prominent local and regional context of economic restructuring, he argues, have all spurred the decline of the state’s role in economic management. Keating argues therefore that there is a ‘new conjuncture’ within which local and regional interests formulate policy demands. Where previously territorial pressures were directed towards the central state, regional interests now pursue a ‘new politics of development’ centring on supply-side matters such as infrastructure, interfirm linkages, and labour-force specialisation. According to Keating, these changes amount to the emergence of a modernising, forward-looking, ‘new wave of regionalism’ in western Europe from the late 1980s onwards (1998, p. 72). In fact, Harvie (1994, pp. 54–7) has also identified a significant development in the construction of regionalist consciousness in Europe. Whereas in the 1970s the region was predominantly seen in terms of its cultural-historical heritage, he argues, the dominant paradigm is now that of the bourgeois région centred on basins of economic and social activity and the successful concentration of the structures of market capitalism. Where previously regional policy was designed to correct imbalances, the new regionalism marginalises peripheral regions and enhances those that are


dynamic and economically prosperous (Keating and Hooghe, 1996, p. 217). Rather than opposing region and state in a relation of competition, therefore, the new paradigm sets region against competing region, with stronger regions seeking to loose themselves from weaker regions within the same state. Indeed, the new paradigm is ‘predicated on a link between the region and the international or European order, with regions seeking their own place in the state, Europe and international market’ (Keating, 1998, p. 90), and is central to the construction of the region as a legitimate public policy arena. Europe is thus both source and legitimator of regional action. Within the French context, the region clearly embodies a new methodology of subnational political action with correspondingly new objectives. For Nay (1997, pp. 303–4), where the département is concerned with the promotion of local democracy within the framework of the nation state, regional action is concerned with economic development within a consciously European framework: The reference to Europe represents an important discursive resource for the legitimacy of regional action. It is a real ‘reservoir of arguments’ for regional public authorities, who see the process of European integration as a favourable element for the recognition of intermediary regulatory spaces. In this new context, neither the national nor the departmental spaces appear suited any more to the transformation of the logics of exchange which affect the contemporary world. New regional policy networks: transfrontier and interregional associations The effects of the emergence of the bourgeois region have thus not been restricted to competition within the domestic policy arena alone. In France, the decentralisation reforms formalised the capacity of regional authorities to sign economic and political conventions with subnational authorities in foreign states. Thus although transfrontier regional associations have been a feature of the European policy space since the early 1970s (Mazey and Mitchell, 1993, pp. 106–8), the logic of European construction and the availability of European funding for economic development projects have caused such agreements to proliferate since 1982 (Luchaire, 1993, p. 132), and a European convention providing for crossfrontier cooperation by any subnational governmental unit was ratified by France in 1984. Such practices were in fact already widespread by the time the loi Joxe gave explicit legal status to the de facto process of transfrontier cooperation by French authorities in 1992, and


enabled foreign local authorities to participate in such public–private groupings as sociétés d’économie mixte and groupements d’intérêt public (Dolez, 1992, p. 45). As a result, French regions have increasingly established and participated in European regional associations, often characterised by geographically dispersed memberships but similar socio-economic features and lobbying interests (Mazey, 1995, p. 147). The increased importance of European construction has thus led to the creation of transfrontier cooperation and development networks, as horizontal relationships between regional and other tiers of subnational government have rapidly developed to complement the extant vertical relationships between member states and the Commission (Church and Reid, 1996, p. 1298). The growing policy capacity of subnational authorities within the European framework needs to be seen therefore as part of a wider institutional dynamic characterised by Duchacek (1990, p. 14) as ‘percolated sovereign boundaries’, where subnational units of government engage in ‘paradiplomacy’ with equivalent non-central actors in other states. Chief among these developments within Europe has been the construction of transborder regional working groups, whose primary goal is to ‘facilitate the trans-sovereign movement of commodities, products, data, energy, cultural programmes, and humans’ (ibid, p. 25). By the late 1990s, every border in western Europe was covered by at least one transfrontier programme, typically centring on economic development, infrastructure projects, culture, or the environment, and derived from the existence of complementary assets and available resources (Keating, 1998, p. 181). Yet such agreements have not been constrained to contiguous territories; in 1992, French transfrontier agreements with nonbordering authorities were in fact more common than those concluded between bordering ones (Dolez, 1992, pp. 44–5). As a consequence, French subnational authorities and interests have sought to organise themselves more effectively in order to influence policy formation at the European level, whether through formal representation within European institutional forums or through informal representation in European-level interest groups. Of course, the benefits of lobbying, as observers such as Bennington and Harvey (1994, pp. 947–9) have pointed out, are in fact less concerned with obtaining direct, tangible results than with disseminating and gathering information, and with developing the profile of the territory through symbolic projection. Likewise, Balme and Jouve (1996, p. 250) argue that the role of regional representation offices in Brussels is ‘more decisive in organizing an epistemic community, an administrative milieu, sharing basic


common values and policy procedures, producing and diffusing information, than in permitting direct access of local or regional governments to the European policy process’. Yet the past two decades have undoubtedly witnessed an increasing focus by subnational governments on Brussels, either separately or within joint federations, as regional executives see lobbying and cooperation as key political instruments for increasing the visibility of their financial needs, and underscoring the eligibility of regions for EC funds, while increasing pressure on national governments (Nay, 1997, pp. 300–1).

Multilevel governance All projects assisted by EC structural funds, notably through the ERDF, must be underpinned by joint finance initiatives concluded between national and subnational governmental tiers, and, since 1993, must include private actors in regional decision-making, so as to ensure accurate information-gathering and broad support for policy goals. In this context, observers such as Marks (1993), Hooghe (1995), and Marks and McAdam (1996) plot a course between supranationalist and intergovernmental models of European policy-making by arguing for the emergence of multilevel governance. Here, national policy-making centres coexist uneasily with, on the one hand, supranational and subnational governments, and on the other, with regional, national, and transnational interest groups organised in networks spanning several levels (Hooghe, 1995, pp. 176–9). For Marks (1993, pp. 401–2), structural funds policy can be viewed as the leading edge of a system of multilevel governance in which supranational, national, regional and local governments are enmeshed in territorially overarching policy networks. Instead of a centripetal process where decisionmaking is progressively centralized in Community institutions, in structural policy we see a centrifugal process in which decisionmaking is spun away from member states in two directions: up to supranational institutions, and down to diverse units of subnational government; instead of the unambiguous allocation of decisionmaking responsibility between national and supranational governments, we see the institutionalization of contested spheres of influence across several tiers of government. Two fundamental points need to be stressed, therefore. First, despite the regionalising and Europeanising dynamics of public policy, the central state continues to occupy a pivotal, mediating role in interactions


between supranational and subnational policy centres. In France, regional investment has, since decentralisation, been predominantly carried out within the framework of state–region planning contracts or Contrats de plan état-région (CPER). Due to the obligations of coordination with other local authorities and the demands of contractualisation with the central state, regions have in fact been left with relatively little autonomy in policy formulation (Scargill, 1995, p. 22). Policy design, in fact, tends to remain the preserve of a powerful regionalised tier of the state administration which emerged during the 1980s ( Jouve, 1997, pp. 366–8). Central sectoral control is such that the regions are unable to transcend their essentially functional character, with policy authority predominantly vested in the regional prefect and the Secrétariat général pour les affaires régionales (Balme, 1997, p. 73). By dint of its technical and bureaucratic expertise, greater influence, and control of resources, the state administration thus occupies a ‘gatekeeping role’ between the region and Europe, sometimes even using access to structural funds as a lever over regions, forcing them to accept compromise on CPERs (Balme and Jouve, 1996, pp. 222–36). As Balme (1995, pp. 167–8) reminds us, the French region should not be conceived of as an authentic instance of meso-government; its autonomy is limited by numerous structural factors, including its relationship with departmental and municipal territorial units as well as its contractual relationship with central government. Rather, decentralisation has produced the regionalisation of public policy, ‘the establishment of a regional space of interdependence and collective action among participants taking part in public policy processes’. It is, therefore, less relevant to talk of the development of regional government – connoting sovereignty and political autonomy – than of regional governance, where the region is restricted to a site of social mediation and depends upon institutional interdependence (Balme, 1998, p. 182). Indeed, regional policy networks are characterised not only by close collaboration with public actors, but with private concerns too. Until the end of the 1970s, the regional prefecture remained the centre of the regional negotiating and decision-making process; the regional assembly was not so much a site of confrontation between political adversaries as a forum enabling local élus to gain information on programmes and projects drawn up and implemented by the prefectoral administration. It was only with the progressive growth in the regional budget and regional powers that the regional council became an area for political negotiation and competition, structured around competing bids for finance. From 1983 onwards, given the extension in regional powers,


the regional council – lacking the financial, material, and human resources to implement the programmes it has undertaken – has become obliged to seek sectoral partners capable of executing its projects, strengthening institutional links with representative organisations. Regional planning in particular has thus contributed to the development of contractual relationships between public and private actors. The polycentric model If French regional authorities do not have equivalent policy capacities to similar governmental levels in, for example, Germany and Spain, it is therefore nonetheless the case that their development has significantly modified the policy-making capacity of the central state. Indeed, numerous observers have argued that the development of the European institutions has produced a change in the logic of French policy-making. On the one hand, European directives are adopted, adapted and applied by national governments; on the other, national policy communities have been subjected to increased fragmentation on sectoral and territorial lines (Lequesne, 1996). The position of subnational authorities in the implementation of European legislation on issues such as transport, the environment, and public utilities in particular has resulted in their emergence as key actors within European policy networks (Guyomarch et al., 1998, p. 190). This, then, is the second point to be stressed: where the state formerly intervened according to a centralised organisational model, now it more often does so through what Balme and Jouve (1996, p. 224) refer to as a polycentric model. Although the shift of political responsibilities implied by decentralisation clearly gave local élus and authorities greater powers (compared to prefects), the change was not one of a simple transfer of powers from state to local government-centred policy networks. Instead, as policy networks have expanded, become more complex, and more sectorally fragmented, the joint policy process has moved from a relation of hierarchy to one of cooperation (ibid, p. 231). Such interpenetration has not been confined to the region, state and Europe. The spatial effects of market-driven economic concentration have not only produced disparities between competing regions, but also increasingly led to the production of intraregional disparities. A second dynamic is thus at play, as in addition to its transformation from a symbolic social space to site of economic competition, the regional territory has been subject to a process known as metropolitanisation or métropolarisation. Following the growth polarisation strategy introduced by the state’s regional development arm, the Délégation à l’aménagement du


territoire et à l’action régionale (DATAR) in a November 1986 report known as the rapport Guichard, territorial development has been increasingly based around the identification of poles of growth, or métropoles, and networks of towns in significant geographical areas (Savy, 1991, pp. 281–2). In terms of employment, production and demography, economic development has consequently centred on regional capitals at the expense of the decline or stagnation of their surrounding areas (Le Galès, 1999, pp. 98–9). This trend has been exacerbated by the failure of the lois Defferre to reform local taxation mechanisms, as the continued structural reliance of municipal authorities upon local corporate taxation has encouraged the wealthier municipalities to cut business taxes in order to attract mobile investment (Levy, 2001, pp. 100–2). There thus appears an essential contradiction between the objectives of metropolitanised regional economic development on the one hand, and of the reduction of infraregional disparities on the other (Gold, 1987, pp. 60–1). A resulting phenomenon of localised développement à deux vitesses has been most pronounced in the Midi-Pyrénées, where the social, economic and cultural disparities between Toulouse and its surrounding region have produced a polarising dynamic;2 Jean-Louis Guigou, current head of the DATAR, has even referred to ‘Toulouse et le désert toulousain’, by analogy to Gravier’s landmark post-war critique of Parisian dominance in economic development planning choices. The pattern of road and rail transport infrastructure development through successive CPERs has increased Toulouse’s dominance of the region’s economy, while the municipal council has accentuated the trend towards regional centralisation by concentrating industrial plant on its territory in order to maximise its corporate tax revenue. For Guigou as for others, the Toulouse municipal council must thus share responsibility for the consequences of the ammonium nitrate explosion of 21 September 2001 at a chemical factory sited near the city centre, in which 30 people were killed. Some regions have attempted to counteract centripetal dynamics by stressing intercommunalité within regional development programmes. For example, the Auvergne regional council’s Arvernia programme, launched as part of the third CPER round (1994–99), is designed to promote an ‘economic growth arc’ linking the region’s medium-sized towns outside Clermont-Ferrand through the development of highspeed motorway and rail transport infrastructures. Yet rather than constituting une exception midi-pyrénéenne, Toulouse represents the most developed example of a problem which has been emerging across France since the late 1980s: while European competitiveness has


increasingly structured local planning policy networks, urban centres – and regional capitals in particular – have increasingly become the focus of local economic development strategies. Hence, while the region has provided the framework for the construction of policy communities at subnational level, it is in fact the urban political space which has emerged as the privileged locus of mediation between policy actors (Biarez, 1990, pp. 614–22). The polycentric model is thus not confined to the regional, national, and supranational levels, but must take into account the relationships between municipal, departmental, and regional policy networks operating within the meso-governmental framework. The region is responsible for all areas of economic development under its jurisdiction, including cases where there is overlap with lower tiers; in practice, therefore, departmental and municipal councils cannot gain access to local economic development grants unless the region acts first. This is even the case in such sectors as agriculture, traditionally the preserve of the département. Nonetheless, even though regions do have greater freedom to earmark budgets in comparison with the other subnational governmental tiers, the combined regional budgets are dwarfed by the combined departmental and communal budgets. Moreover, as Jouve (1997, pp. 363–4) points out, while the region has been at the centre of European policy networks in areas such as research and development, in other areas – including the INTERREG programme – it has been eclipsed by existing policy networks structured around the département and/or commune.

European policy-making, privatisation, and group exclusion Kitschelt’s summary of the strong French state highlights the presence of a large nationalised industrial sector as a key enabling factor in the central control of the policy process; the rapid expansion of the French nuclear electricity programme was made possible, he argues, through the state control of public utilities, and the consequent cultural and structural concordance of objectives between EDF and the state administration. Indeed, France’s claim to exceptionalism, at least from the point of view of policy developments in the 1970s, relies heavily on a broad cultural and ideological consensus on the proactive role of a dirigiste state apparatus which had been at the heart of the country’s post-war social and economic modernisation programme. Since the mid-1980s, however – and specifically since Chirac’s privatisation


programme of 1986–88 – the role of the state in France’s economy has been challenged and transformed. Chirac’s adaptation of the neo-liberal, deregulatory agenda prevailing in Britain and the United States was highly successful, at least in its own terms. Although his dramatic programme was curtailed barely a third of the way through by the market crash of autumn 1987 and the impending presidential elections of spring 1988, the privatisations of such industrial giants as Saint-Gobain, Alstom-Alcatel, Matra Hachette, Aérospatiale, and Dassault, and banks such as Suez, Paribas, and Société Générale were popular and oversubscribed; the number of private shareholders in France rose from 1.2 million in 1986 to over 7 million two years later (Maclean, 1997, pp. 216–17). Returned to power in 1993, the Right continued to deregulate, privatising Rhône-Poulenc, Elf Aquitaine, Péchiney and Renault, among others. Moreover, the Left has also pursued an industrial policy structured around the disengagement of the state from direct economic management, first under the ni-ni policy of the 1988–93 government, which sought a status quo between nationalisation and privatisation, and latterly under Jospin. Indeed, since 1997 the Left has privatised as a strategy of strengthening French industry in global markets: part-privatisations have enabled major companies such as France Télécom to engage in cross-national mergers and acquisitions, though the French state retains a majority shareholding (Cole, 2000, pp. 174–8). Beyond the ideological tenets of the Chirac programme, the main stimulus for deregulation has come from the increased internationalisation of French markets, and particularly from European integration and the creation of the European single market. The influence of European construction on the French government’s capacity to dictate industrial choices has been both direct and indirect. On the one hand, since 1983 successive governments of Left and Right have pursued European integration as a key policy objective; Mitterrand’s landmark decision to maintain France’s membership within the European Monetary System and the politique du franc fort pursued under Rocard, where the exchange value of the franc was tied to the deutschmark, exposed French business to increased international competitiveness and demanded structural reorganisation (Hall, 2000, pp. 176–7). Similarly, the convergence criteria set by the Maastricht Treaty for membership of the single European currency obliged France to reduce its national budgetary deficit, leading the Balladur and Juppé governments to implement vigorous privatisation programmes (Maclean, 1997, pp. 223–4). On the other hand, the free market agenda pursued by the European Commission during the 1990s in particular has forced deregulatory measures in a number of


policy sectors, some despite the resistance of the French government: thus telecommunications, air transport, energy, and postal services have all been, or are imminently to become, opened up to increased market competition. The control of industrial policy-making and implementation which nationalisation enabled the state to exercise has been apparent in the development of TGV high-speed rail technology, the modernisation of France’s telecommunications system, and the nuclear energy programme. Yet, as Cole points out, one of the reasons why the French government has so strongly resisted the European Commission’s 1996 directive to open up domestic energy markets to competition is precisely that EDF was the ‘final bastion of technocratic state capitalism’ (Cole, 2000, p. 173). The exposure of the domestic economy to international, and particularly European, market competitivity has both reduced France’s economic sovereignty and fundamentally altered the relationship between the state and business and, beyond, civil society. For Schmidt, indeed, the Europeanisation of public policy-making represents a ‘crisis of democracy for France’s traditional statist pattern of policy-making’ (Schmidt, 1996, pp. 248–9). Where the French administrative model of policy-making enabled accommodation with societal (and particularly business) interests at the final stage of policy-making, the European regulatory model proscribes such flexibility. Instead, interest groups are consulted during policy formulation, benefiting from access to the policy process at European Commission level. As a consequence, the role of the state is diminished; the centrality of European policy networks in domestic policy choices has transformed the relationship of business interests to the state from subservience to partnership (Schmidt, 2000, p. 241). Moreover, in Schmidt’s analysis, those groups excluded from the initial phase of the policy process can no longer be accommodated during implementation, thus increasing the risk of confrontation and social unrest. Access and protest Schmidt’s analysis is, on this level at least, a pessimistic one. It is interesting to note that, by linking exclusion and confrontation, her analysis draws on similar arguments to the macro-level conceptualisations of the political opportunity model. Duyvendak’s analysis of the French political opportunity structure, though much less sophisticated in its understanding of the policy process, demonstrates this relationship succinctly; given the strength of the state, he argues, societal groups can be easily excluded from policy formulation, and are forced to resort to


confrontational practices: In a highly centralized country such as France, where one city seems to represent the entire country – outside of Paris, everything is labelled as ‘provincial’ – it is not surprising that farmers’ mobilization is strong and that the methods used by them are remarkably radical: in order to be heard in Paris, the nerve must be struck. Blockades of highways and frontiers indeed served as powerful instruments of mobilization for the farmers who in fact felt extremely neglected by the government, irrespective of its political colour. (Duyvendak, 1995, p. 99) Schmitter, meanwhile, concludes that France is the ‘unruliest’ of western industrial democracies, a state of affairs he ascribes to an absence of societal corporatism, as corporatism succeeds in ‘structuring, containing, inhibiting, and controlling conflicts among classes, sectors, and professions’ (1981, p. 318). Yet as we have already seen in the previous chapter, confrontation is not always as confrontational as it might at first appear, and can disguise a variety of more or less complicitous relationships. Moreover, if societal corporatism is weak in France, then sectoral corporatism is prevalent among many types of relationship found in public policy-making. The existence of such relationships therefore calls for the reappraisal of the link between group exclusion and confrontational tactics. Fillieule’s examination of the police handling of protest in France found that, despite the central role of agricultural interest groups in policy formulation, farmers’ demonstrations accounted for some 39 per cent of all violent protest events during the 1982–90 period (1997, p. 150). Even accounting for the FNSEA mobilisation against the first Mitterrand government’s attempt to accord privileged status to competing sectoral interest groups, it is clear that a lack of access to the policy-making process is a poor explanatory variable for the violence which is seemingly endemic to farmers’ mobilisation. Indeed, while the balance of strategies deployed by the FNSEA at the height of its collaborative links with preceding right-wing governments tended towards bureaucratic participation, it is also clear that the full range of strategies – from negotiation and consultation to violent protest – was deployed concurrently (Sokoloff, 1985, p. 256). Further evidence from this period suggests outbreaks of violent protest by farmers to be a result not of a lack of access to decision-making structures, but of the failure of such access to meet the expectations of union members suffering acute economic hardship (Keeler, 1981, p. 187). Even in the more competitive policy


networks which have characterised agricultural policy-making since 1981, the FNSEA retains considerable political access, and its consent remains vital to the government’s policy choices at both national and European levels. We need therefore to be cautious when gauging the ability of nationspecific macro-level analysis to predict repression and violence, in terms of both élite responses and movement strategies. As discussed in the previous chapter, criticism of the opportunity structure model has highlighted the need for an investigation of group identity and diachronic analysis. Responses to the perceived structural determinism of the opportunity structure model have similarly emphasised the dangers of reading off movement strategies from the extent of regime closure. Thus Rucht (1990b, pp. 207–14), exploring the anti-nuclear power movement in France, West Germany, and the USA, found that both confrontational and assimilative protest strategies were deployed in all three countries, often in conjunction. In France, anti-nuclear activists exploited all channels open to them, including petitions, campaigning for local referendums, litigation, participation in advisory committees and standing for elections; moreover, there was not much more violent action in France than in West Germany, and more people were arrested for civil disobedience in the much more assimilative USA than in either France or Germany. Similar conclusions were drawn by Rochon (1990, p. 112) for the action repertoire of the French peace movement, while Diani and van der Heijden (1994, pp. 356–7) emphasise that anti-nuclear movements in states with contrasting opportunity structures adopted, to a greater or lesser extent, a mix of assimilative and confrontational strategies. It should be underlined therefore that, despite the perceived exclusive character of the Fifth Republic within much of the opportunity structure literature, Favre and Fillieule (1994) found that only 5 per cent of demonstrations could be classified as violent in terms of damage or destruction to property, or physical attacks. While some groups are more likely to resort to violence than others, this violence appears to be a response not to a lack of political allies or access, but to economic factors. Instead of emphasising exclusion from the policy process therefore, Fillieule offers an explanation based on socio-economic status (rural decline, economic marginalisation, material demands, and increasing international competition), success chances, and the traditions of protest groups, arguing that there is a cultural propensity to violent action among certain movements (1997, pp. 149–61). ‘We are as far as we can be from the received wisdom on protest action,’ observe Favre


and Fillieule (1994, p. 134). Furthermore, demonstrating has become a usual and peaceful process in France, which therefore places it among the broad range of conventional political practices. Thus, the common image of the police battling with demonstrators has become rather misleading. Disorder is rare, even in the biggest and most problematic protest events. (Fillieule and Jobard, 1998, p. 70) The study of protest violence and policing thus produces a number of important points. Della Porta argues the police handling of protest behaviour to be ‘an important barometer of the political opportunities available for social movements … [it should] represent a general expression of the state’s degree of openness or receptivity’ (1996, p. 62, p. 64). The institutional features of a given polity set the general context for the police management of protest, and the configuration of power is a central factor in policing strategies. Principally, this includes the availability of allies for challenging groups, the general government recommendations for the police handling of protest, and media presence and event construction (Della Porta and Reiter, 1998, p. 9). However, these factors in themselves are insufficient predictors of group–state interactions. While policing behaviour is a key determinant in the dynamic production of concrete opportunities for challenging groups, the way such groups perceive the state, and the tactics that they adopt, two further elements must be taken into account. First, protest should not be seen as a confrontation between two blocs; the police are not subject to a ‘logic of pure instrumentality’, and neither protesters nor police operate as a single unified unit, but are subject to diffusion and fragmentation (Fillieule and Jobard, 1998, p. 89). Second, the evidence produced by cross-national research into policing styles reveals that police protest management has evolved towards softer, more tolerant forms throughout Western democracies since the 1970s and 1980s. Protest management may thus be less a result of national specifities than of general trends within police styles. What is true of Western democracies as a whole is also true of France; protest policing in France is increasingly characterised by prevention, de-escalation, negotiation, and compromise. A sectoral, multilevel approach to political opportunities There is, of course, a fundamental difference between the types of account of the French state discussed in this chapter and the disoriented


model of the state proposed in the previous one. For observers such as Muller and Schmidt, Europeanisation, privatisation and decentralisation are complementary dynamics which have curtailed the ability of the formerly powerful central French state to dictate policy choices. Their narratives are thus of the loss of state strength, in which it is little consolation that the state has disengaged through dirigiste measures such as the Defferre reforms and the Chirac privatisations. Different as these accounts are, though, they both point to fundamental changes in the way that we should approach the policy-making process in France, and consequently the relationship between the state and protest groups. The two case studies that follow over the course of the next four chapters deal, axiomatically, with outsider groups. As we have seen from the definitions of social movements discussed in the previous chapter, these groups operate at the margins of the policy process, having formed in order to challenge the implementation of previously elaborated public policy. Focus on individual conflicts will therefore enable analysis of the specific policy formulation and implementation processes for each project, conditioned by the structure and operation of the individual policy sector. Further, it is expected that the decentralisation and Europeanisation of the policy process will have significant effects on the organisational and strategical choices of EMOs through the increased prominence of supranational and subnational territorial authorities in policy-making. The case studies will therefore enable us to engage specifically with the dynamic reshaping or reconsolidation of established policy-making patterns, focusing on the interplay between arenas of governance at separate territorial levels. Although both studies deal with environmental protest, therefore, they deal with policy issues in separate policy sectors, and where territorial dynamics may lead to a reconfiguration of existing policy networks.

4 Water Resource Management and the Loire Development Programme

The next two chapters focus on the successful fight led by two environmental associations, Loire Vivante and SOS Loire Vivante, against the 1986 EPALA proposals to construct four dams on the Loire river basin, most notably at Serre de la Fare, near Le Puy, in the gorges of the upper Loire (for a brief overview of the protest, see the Introduction). Yet in order to explain how and why these groups were able to stop the dam construction plan, we must start our discussion not in 1986, but in the late 1950s, when the Loire development programme was first placed on the national policy agenda by one of the EPALA’s forerunners, a grouping of regional political and economic actors known as the Association nationale pour l’étude de la communauté de la Loire et de ses affluents, or ANECLA. Moreover, it was also at this time that the first steps were being taken in France to structure water resource management as part of regional development policy, as Prime Minister Michel Debré set up a working party under the aegis of the National Planning Commissariat (Commissariat général du plan, CGP) in February 1959. An interministerial water mission was subsequently established for the preparation of what was to become the 5th national plan (1966–70); the first legislation on water management was passed with the 1964 water law. As we have seen, the ‘classic’ model of the Fifth Republic policy process stresses above all the concentration of decisional power at the centre, and the clarity and effectiveness of policy implementation. In this context, the evolution of water resource management over the past forty years proves to be instructive, and also somewhat paradoxical. Initially subject to high degrees of both horizontal and vertical fragmentation, water 103


policy has, over the course of the Republic’s life, become increasingly more cohesively structured, emerging in its own right by the 1990s as the focus for a meso-corporatist policy community at three distinct levels (national, subnational, and European). Buller (one of the few AngloSaxon observers to have studied French water management extensively) in fact identifies ‘the search for appropriate spatial units and institutional scales’ as one of the defining features of French water policy (1996a, p. 289). Yet the paradox is this: as policy-making has become more highly structured, so has it correspondingly become more open to the influence of challenging groups. This dynamic character of sectoral policy organisation is crucial to the account provided in this chapter of the overall trajectory of the Loire development project in this period, and to the next chapter’s identification of the opportunities which protest groups have been able to exploit in order to prevent the implementation of the policy choices agreed in 1986. This chapter’s two main sections therefore reflect its two principal tasks. The first section sets the sectoral context for the Loire development project, addressing the emergence of a sectoral policy community for water resource management, starting with the first (1964) water law, and culminating with a new statutory framework laid down by the revised water law of 1992. As we shall see, the initial steps were dependent on the introduction in the early 1960s of regional indicative planning measures designed to enable the French state to coordinate its economic development initiatives more effectively. These measures centred on the creation at the national level of the DATAR, an interministerial delegation for regional action and development, and at the subnational level of a new layer of regional prefects flanked by regional economic development commissions (Commissions de développement économique régional, CODER). As water resource distribution problems began to emerge, this new administrative framework made it possible for water basin agencies to be established as decentralised sectoral decisional structures incorporating subnational political and economic élites. As the numerous ministries laying claim to water policy-making at central level were essentially concerned with water as a distributive problem, it was only with the emergence of the environment as a qualitative issue at the end of the 1960s that a new element of policy cohesion could be introduced in this sector through the establishment of the environment ministry. The power of this ministry to coordinate and impose policy decisions was in turn to be significantly enhanced by the development of European legislation, and the subsequent redrafting of the water law in

French Water Resource Management 105

environment minister Brice Lalonde’s 1992 bill. The second part of the chapter will consequently consider the opportunities which these new sectoral structures opened up to local and regional élites lobbying for the Loire development programme, particularly at the subnational level. As we shall see, successive phases of policy immobilism, policy reframing, and policy community reconstitution are central factors in the programme’s passage through the policy process.

The development of water resource management in France Long before the 1992 water policy reforms, the management of water resources in France bore little relation to macro-structural models emphasising dirigisme, public control, centralisation, and overriding state prerogatives. On the contrary, water policy relates uneasily to the traditional view of the French policy process as state domination fuelled by the Jacobin conception of the general interest. Indeed, both vertical and horizontal fragmentation have long characterised French water resource management, a pattern accentuated by recent institutional developments. Buller (1996b, pp. 463–6) thus identifies a ‘French model’ of the ‘partial or delegated privatisation’ of water supply and treatment, where supply is geographically and institutionally fragmented, and increasingly delegated to the private sector. Local political control is predominant, and public investment costs are covered by significant state subsidies. Since the decentralisation measures of 1982, the role of the state in domestic water provision has been chiefly reduced to water law enforcement (specifically, withdrawal and discharge authorisations) and the ensurance of public health and safety, with national authorities retaining only general powers of regulation, supervision and funding (Valiron, 1992). Moreover, the Europeanisation of water policy (the consequences of which are discussed in greater detail below) has been at least partly responsible for the increasing privatisation of French water distribution networks over the past two decades, designed as a pragmatic response to the investment demands of EC directives (Buller, 1998, p. 73). The consequent organisation of private companies within territorial zones has lent water distribution an oligopolistic structure, leading to the creation of private monopolies in many areas (CGP, 1997, pp. 136–7). Indeed, although notionally a public good, water has been supplied by private companies for more than a century; and by the mid-1990s, according to one observer, the provision of drinking water was a public service in name only (Gouverne, 1994, p. 168).


Neither the privatisation nor the decentralisation of water delivery are thus recent phenomena. Municipal authorities have historically been responsible for domestic waste disposal, and water supply, treatment, and waste collection in France, functions which are typically carried out on a highly localised, fragmented basis. Indeed, major towns and small rural communes have long supplied drinking water through a system known as gestion directe en régie, or the direct management of distribution and infrastructure investment. The Office international de l’eau, a public data collection agency established in 1992, calculates that there are currently some 11,992 different sanitation services for France’s 36,763 communes, and the supply of drinking water is organised within some 15,244 different distribution services, approximately 2000 of which are intercommunal syndicates (OIE, 2000). Water, indeed, forms one of the primary grounds for the establishment of cooperation agreements between local authorities (Barraqué et al., 1995, p. 116). Yet the proportion of drinking water supplied under these arrangements has steadily dwindled during the Fifth Republic, a period that has correspondingly seen the increasing involvement of private companies in water supply (Lorrain, 1992, pp. 83–9). For while in 1995 local authorities controlled 43 per cent of water distribution services (down from 49 per cent in 1985), this accounted for only approximately 22 per cent of the population and 19 per cent of total volume supplied. The rest is supplied by private companies under a system of delegated management (gestion déléguée), on the basis of long-term contracts. Municipal authorities can thus continue to meet investment costs while delegating supply to the private sector through a lease agreement of up to 20 years (affermage), or concede both investment and supply on the basis of agreements which can last up to 50 years (concession). Four companies share this market: the Compagnie générale des eaux (CGE) and Lyonnaise des Eaux-Dumez, both of which were established in the nineteenth century, followed to a much lesser extent by the Société d’aménagement urbain et rural (SAUR) and the Compagnie de services et d’environnement (CISE). Typically, these companies have used water supply as a platform for diversification into other subsectors of water delivery (engineering, construction, manufacturing), and other sectors of local public utility provision, including energy supply and local transport (Lorrain, 1991, pp. 95–7). Given this context, it is therefore unsurprising that these companies are also all branches of multinationals: CGE, which supplies drinking water to 26 million and sanitation services to 19 million people in France, is part of the Vivendi telecommunications and utilities group; the Lyonnaise, along with, inter alia,


Northumbrian Water and Essex and Suffolk Water in the UK, and United Water in the USA, is part of Ondeo, which supplies water and wastewater services in 130 countries, and is itself part of the Suez (formerly Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux) utilities group; and both CISE (which until 1997 was part of the Saint Gobain glass and construction materials conglomerate) and SAUR are part of the Bouygues construction, telecommunications, real estate and utilities group. If horizontal segmentation has continued to structure the pattern of water resource management under the Fifth Republic, then attempts to overcome the problems caused by vertical fragmentation have also largely shaped the development of water policy during this period. At the end of the Fourth Republic, water remained very much a trans-sectoral issue at national level rather than a policy sector in its own right, with regulatory issues and policy operationalisation subject to negotiation between rival administrative branches. Prior to the 1964 law establishing the framework of water legislation in France, the diversity and breadth of water policy and legislation had been reflected in the number of ministries involved in policy formulation and implementation: seven separate ministries, plus the prime minister, claimed administrative jurisdiction over different aspects of water policy. ‘It was obvious’, argued Le Monde’s correspondent in 1967, ‘that the elaboration of coherent policy, rendered necessary by the emergence of water problems, was not helped by such administrative fragmentation.’1 It was only with the 1964 legislation that the first steps towards greater vertical cohesion in water policy-making were taken. As noted above, the context for these steps was provided by the regionalisation of France’s indicative planning procedures. State planning initiatives The creation of the CGP in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War had marked the starting point for successive national plans, beginning with the First (Monnet) Plan of 1947–52, conceived to facilitate and direct the country’s economic reconstruction. Yet it was not until the advent of the Fifth Republic that the national plan began to address the spatial, economic and social inequalities highlighted by Gravier’s polemical text of 1947, Paris et le désert français, and exacerbated by the Monnet plan’s emphasis on the international competitiveness of French capitalism. Thus it was only in the 4th, and especially 5th plans, that an explicit regional development strategy first emerged within the indicative planning programme. The 4th national plan (1962–65) was the first to state aims and discuss means designed to tackle the regional aspects of economic development, drawing attention to the under-industrialised west


in particular. But though regional sections were introduced into the 4th plan, it was with the preparation of the 5th plan that decentralised planning measures were undertaken for the first time with the full cooperation of each of the 21 programming regions that had originally been designated in 1956 (Hansen, 1968, pp. 87–95). The emphasis on regional economic development within national planning was further increased by the creation in 1964 of the CODER, which brought together socio-professional and political élites. Although these regionalised consultative bodies enjoyed few formal powers, they operated as functional and territorial arenas of intermediation between central and local actors, providing much of the focus and impetus for the elaboration of the 5th plan (Grémion and Worms, 1975, pp. 218–19). The previous year, the creation of the DATAR had marked an explicit attempt to unify regional planning and policy, avoid interministerial rivalries, and ensure that strategic imperatives were taken into account throughout the state apparatus (Allen and MacLennan, 1970, pp. 226–8). It is significant, then, that the DATAR’s interministerial coordinating role included the establishment of a permanent secretariat for the study of water problems under its control. The 1964 law further added responsibility for water resources to the existing permanent interministerial committee for the problems of regional action and development, while the overall supervision of water policy now lay with the planning minister, who reported directly to the prime minister. The water law also established a more broadly based national water committee, which from 1965 grouped together representatives from the different ministries, subnational authorities and interest groups concerned by water policy. This latter body was therefore a precursor of the structures which have come to characterise water resource management in the Fifth Republic. The creation of water basin agencies was catalysed by the marked decline in water quality in France registered during the 1950s, as the imperatives of post-war reconstruction produced increases in pollution which exceeded the natural filtering capacity of water courses (CGP, 1997, pp. 28–9). But the interest of the 1964 law, and the basin agencies themselves, lies not simply in their ostensible objectives. Indeed, if the planning process thus provided a framework for securing greater vertical cohesion, other planning-related developments in this period also significantly increased the horizontal cohesion of policy. The water basin agencies Moves to create an intermediate regional tier of coordination for water policy were now translated in the major innovation of the 1964 law, the


basin agencies. Designed to provide a devolved administrative structure capable of coordinating water policy, the six basin agencies were created as financially autonomous public administrative bodies charged with the study, research and development, and funding of common interest water resource works, especially water quality improvement schemes (Barraqué et al., 1995, pp. 132–7). The approach to water management embodied by the agencies is thus resource-based, economic, and decentralised. Above all, this is because the geohydrographic basin – rather than the Napoleonic politico-administrative constituencies – is recognised as the key territorial unit for policy development, but two other factors are also crucial. First, resource management is established through a consultative process involving not only the state and the local authorities, but also representatives from industrial and professional groups, and from other interested organisations. Within the framework of national water policy, each basin agency defines and implements its own five-year intervention programme elaborated in consultation with its legislative body, le comité de bassin (basin committee), which acts both as a planning group and arbiter of competing projects. The agency’s executive function is fulfilled by the conseil d’administration, or administrative council. Second, rather than aiming to secure water quality improvement objectives through nationally imposed regulatory mechanisms, the agencies aim to meet quality targets by setting economic incentives to control pollution. Through the application of the ‘polluter-pays’ principle (PPP), monies raised (by means of a basin-wide redevance, or tax, included in water rates) are redistributed through grants or interest-free loans to improve water quality and remedy supply problems (such as the construction of water purification plants, or the development of programmes to reduce the use of nitrates in fertilisers). The agencies are far from autonomous bodies, however. Water monitoring, surveillance, and pollution control – known as la police des eaux – remains the prerogative of the state, undertaken at departmental level by the administrative field services. Moreover, because the agencies were accorded neither regulatory capacity nor powers of water policy implementation, they cannot directly carry out construction projects, water quality or environmental improvement measures, or set norms. Despite their status as public bodies, they are therefore more correctly financial mutuals, enabling industrial and agricultural concerns, local authorities, and private water suppliers to coordinate and negotiate their activities. Project conception, construction and management are instead carried out by contracted partners, be they public bodies or private groups.


Observers have thus consistently pointed out the relative lack of scope and power enjoyed by basin agencies. Despite the openness of the basin committees in terms of their devolved structure and the representation of water users’ associations, the opinions given by basin committees serve frequently to legitimise decisions taken at national level rather than to elaborate policy itself (Burchi, 1985, pp. 295–6; Feldman, 1991, pp. 199–201). Nonetheless, agencies are forums for negotiation and arbitration between different users represented within the basin committees, integrating interest groups and local authorities into the decisional process. In the assessment of the CGP, they therefore organise consensus through negotiation and partnership, and enable the avoidance of immobilism and conflict in the application of water policy (CGP, 1997, p. 147). In Szarka’s (1999) analysis, basin committees have essentially served as decentralised neo-corporatist bodies, providing industrial interest groups in particular with a second route to influence policy-making alongside their access at national level to politicians and bureaucrats. Moreover, at basin level, only the economic and institutional actors – the local élus and industrial representatives appointed to reflect the dominance of sectoral concerns in each basin – can decide which projects need to be pursued in order to meet the provisions of national targets. These actors therefore define the priority projects and authorise the necessary funding and, at least until the power was appropriated by the Assemblée Nationale by an amendment to the December 2001 finance bill, set the redevance. In fact, the strong regionalised structures for water resource management have enabled the French state to increasingly disengage itself financially from this policy area from the mid-1970s onwards, a withdrawal reflected in the changing composition of the basin committees and their administrative councils. Initially composed of three equal colleges (state, users, local political actors), successive decrees during the 1970s and 1980s reinforced local authority representation (and, at the same time, the strength of users’ representatives) at the expense of the central ministries, which now account for only 20 per cent of all basin committee members (CGP, 1997, pp. 86–92). Similarly, where the composition of administrative councils was initially set at 16 members by a September 1966 decree, half of which were representatives of the state, a September 1986 decree reset the composition to reflect the tripartite nature of the basin committee, with each college having eight representatives (see Figure 4.1). The creation of the basin agencies, then, should be seen as a further phase of the integration of regional economic and political actors into


Administrative council 1 representative from agency personnel

8 water users’ representatives

8 representatives from subnational authorities

8 representatives from state administration

Basin committee Representatives of central state ministries

Water users: industrial, agricultural, associational, consumers

Subnational authorities: regional, departmental, communal

Designated qualified persons

Figure 4.1

The structure and composition of the water basin agencies.

national planning structures. Yet even after the administrative reorganisation brought about by the establishment of the basin agencies, the absence of a lead ministry at national level continued to render policy coordination highly problematic. This function was eventually to be fulfilled by the environment ministry. Policy sectorisation If indicative planning constitutes what we might term the first phase in the ‘sectorisation’ of water policy, the second is a consequence of the growing public perception of water as a problem in the late 1960s. In common with widespread concern in other Western industrial democracies, growing awareness in France over environmental degradation, coupled with a number of serious environmental disasters such as the wrecking of the Torrey Canyon oil tanker off the Brittany coast in March 1967, stimulated more concerted governmental attempts to prevent


pollution. But initially tentative governmental responses – a series of ‘one hundred measures’ to combat environmental destruction announced by President Georges Pompidou in June 1970, and the creation of the Haut comité de l’environnement later that year – were soon overtaken by the appointment of Robert Poujade as France’s first environment minister in January 1971. Certainly, the French environment ministry has suffered throughout its existence from a lack of status; Buller (1998, p. 77) argues that it ‘often appears more as an internal government pressure group than a central focus of a major sectoral policy domain’. Until 1982, the ministry was only a secrétariat d’état dependent on the prime minister’s office or other competing ministries, and has consistently been characterised by very weak funding, the lack of its own specialist field services or technical corps, and from frequent treatment as a poor relation in interministerial negotiations (Brénac, 1988, pp. 139–40; Lascoumes, 1994, p. 16). Yet its constitution as an administration de mission with the twin concerns of regional planning and nature protection has gradually created a stronger, more coherent basis for policy coordination, definition, and implementation. In particular, its initial interdepartmental coordinating role with responsibility for water management and supply projects of national relevance, and authority over the basin agencies and the interministerial and national water committees (Larrue and Chabason, 1998, p. 61), has enabled the development of a water management policy community with a defined sectoral remit. This is not to say that water management has not remained a crossministerial issue, of course. Alongside the environment ministry, numerous ministries, including finance, agriculture, industry, infrastructure, transport, health, and housing and urbanism, continue to influence water policy at national level. Representatives of these ministries are also typically members of the basin committees. At departmental level, water surveillance and pollution control is carried out by the field services of the ministries of agriculture (DDAF), infrastructure (DDE), health (DDASS), and industry (DRIRE). Nonetheless, the environment ministry has developed its role as coordinating ministry for water policy, particularly since the expansion of its four directorates (nature protection, pollution, quality of life, information and research) to five with the creation of the Direction de l’eau. Now separated from its former role within the Direction de la prévention des pollutions, the Direction de l’eau thus coordinates action against pollution and flooding (in addition to its responsibilities for regional planning, programming and action; water quality supervision; the tutelle of the basin


agencies; and the international and interministerial coordination of juridical questions). Its role has been further reinforced by the establishment under its aegis of the interagency water mission (MISE) in 1993 (CGP, 1997, p. 34). The creation of the Direction de l’eau was one of the measures outlined by the new 1992 legislation. Drawn up following a national consultation process held in 1990–91, the reforms recognise the influence of the environment ministry in two important areas. The ministry’s hand is visible firstly in the introduction of integrated planning documents (see below), and secondly in the prioritisation of ecosystem protection over resource distribution (Gazzaniga, 1992, p. 29). The institutional reorganisation of water policy under the wing of the environment ministry, along with earlier legislation on classified industrial establishments (1976), natural catastrophes (especially flooding) in 1982 and 1987, and angling (1984), has served to emphasise the importance of environmental protection and water quality maintenance (Barraqué et al., 1995, pp. 137–8). Yet perhaps the greatest contributory factor to such policyreframing has originated from what we might consider to represent a reduction of the influence of national policy-makers. As the next section will discuss, the European Commission’s role in setting the domestic water policy agenda and legislation of its member states has been central to the changing basis of resource planning, and to the reframing of water policy in terms of quality rather than of quantitative distribution. European policy-making The influence of French water management structures on European policy-making is clear in the European water directive of September 2000, which establishes the hydrographic basin system on a Europewide basis. Yet the relationship of influence between national and supranational concerns has more frequently been apparent in the opposite direction, as European policy-making has had a determinant effect on the agenda, formulation, and dominant policy frame of water resource management in France and, indeed, in the EC’s member states as a whole. Water policy is one of the prime sectors covered by EC environmental legislation, which at supranational level has become ‘a classic example of how the [European] Commission has successfully extended and expanded its area of competence’ (Richardson, 1994, p. 144). The same increase in public concern for environmental issues which produced changes in the administrative structures of individual states was therefore met, from the early 1970s, by a growth in environmental policy-making at EC level (Vogel, 1993, p. 183). Moreover, the


reliance of the Commission’s relatively small bureaucracy on partner organisations to provide scientific and technical information has been successfully exploited by numerous interest groups. Thus sectoral associations such as the Union of European Associations of Water Suppliers (EUREAU), have formed in order to develop common policy positions and shape European policy formulation (Maloney, 1995, pp. 144 ff). Nevertheless, this process has not been restricted to business representatives alone. Environmental groups, exploiting their ability to set the political agenda and, crucially, ‘structure the content of issues in ways which place other interests at a disadvantage’ (Mazey and Richardson, 1992, p. 117), have succeeded in developing close – even, Richardson (1994, pp. 151–5) argues, symbiotic – links with DGXI (the Commission directorate charged with the environment, consumer protection, and nuclear safety). However, if environmental groups are central sensitising actors at European level, it should also be underlined that developments at the supranational are also a vital sensitising force at national level. The very fact that legislation exists at EC level is frequently enough to influence the direction of policy in member states (Richardson, 1994, p. 146). Under the instigation of the so-called ‘leader’ states (predominantly, the ‘green troika’ of Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands), European environmental legislation has consistently imposed more stringent norms and standards for air, noise, and water pollution, chemical substances and industrial hazards, and indeed nature conservation, than those that were previously to be found on the statute books of, for example, France. Yet it is not only the direct transposition of European into domestic law which is significant, but also the indirect effects of EC legislation. Indeed, EC directives tend to strengthen the hand of the French environment ministry when negotiating with industrial partners or rival national ministries such as industry, agriculture, or finance (Larrue and Prud’homme, 1993, pp. 74–8). What is true of environmental policy as a whole is acutely so in the case of water resource management. Water policy was the first sector of environmental policy to be developed by the European Commission and has developed into the most comprehensive, in terms of both the breadth and the stringency of the norms set. Quality standards set by the EC are frequently more demanding than those set by other governmental, quasi-governmental, or advisory bodies. The concentration of the pesticide atrazine in drinking water allowed by the World Health Organisation is, for example, 20 times higher than permitted by European standards, and whereas in 1962 the analysis of drinking water quality in France was based on 12 parameters, European directives have ensured that there are now five times as many


(Gouverne, 1994, pp. 94–5; Ward, 1998, p. 254). Indeed, as in other European member states, French domestic water policy has increasingly been determined by European directives. The budgets, extent, and rhythm of the sixth and seventh basin agency investment programmes (1992–96 and 1997–2001) have thus been largely dictated by the need to implement two 1991 directives, covering the treatment of urban waste water, and the enforcement of tough standards on nitrate levels in the water supply respectively. The massive investment necessitated by these two directives – the application of the urban waste water directive alone requires an estimated outlay of 100 MdF by the year 2005, while the sixth basin agency programme almost doubled the financial size of the fifth programme – has perhaps unsurprisingly been the source of much controversy in France, not least because of the knock-on effects to consumers in water rate increases. The specific form that the development of European legislation has taken has not only affected the extent of domestic policy in the field, but has dictated the definition of the sector; the construction of the environment as a national public policy domain has, in many states, been created by the requirements of European integration and the nature of the EC legislative regime (Buller, 1998, p. 69). This process has been particularly marked in the case of water policy where, as Kaczmarek (1997) points out, the EC has not so much developed policy in water resource management as in water quality protection. Thus following the surface water directive of June 1975, further key directives have laid down reference norms for bathing, drinking, marine and shellfish water, and pollutant discharges. Yet European legislation has failed to address quantitative issues such as water resource distribution, basin management, recycling, irrigation, flood control or drought response. Three factors, institutional and geographical, have played a determinant role here. First, as has already been noted, the leader states in the development of EC environmental legislation are northern European countries that do not generally suffer from significant water supply problems. Until the 1980s, Italy was the Community’s only southern European state; even after the accession of Greece (1981), and Spain and Portugal (1986), the European balance has remained northern, accentuated by the 1995 entry of Austria, Sweden and Finland, themselves also leader states (Butt Philip, 1998, p. 262). Second, even though environmental protection was endorsed as an integral part of the remit of the EC institutions by the 1987 Single European Act, the majority of EC directives were passed before this date. Water management, having been successfully integrated into environmental policy, could not therefore be sustained as a distributive


resource issue in other policy domains (such as agriculture, industry or transport). Third, and perhaps most importantly, the basis on which the Commission was able to develop environmental policy was highly constrained by the provisions of the Treaty of Rome. Given that the environment was absent as an issue from the 1957 treaty, legislators were able to issue directives only by arguing their inclusion under articles providing for the harmonisation of regulations affecting the operation or establishment of the Common Market (Vogel, 1993, pp. 182–6). As a consequence, environmental policy has necessarily been constructed around the definition of norms and standards. At EC level, therefore, institutional factors have constructed water as a sector in its own right, and as a qualitative rather than quantitative issue. The revised water law of 1992 These concerns are directly treated in article 2 of the revised French water law of 1992, which aimed to integrate the changes brought about by decentralisation and the European directives into the national regulatory structure. The law introduced three principle reforms. These are the establishment of resource management as a function of ecosystem protection and sustainable development programmes; the clarification of the regulatory structure for different classifications of water course; and the introduction of a common strategy document, negotiated by representatives of the state, users’ groups, and subnational authorities, to improve the coordination of basin-level planning. Indeed, in contrast to the initial fragmentation of water resource management in the Fifth Republic, the new law has laid the base for the further extension of the environment ministry’s role in water policy-making. From 1996, each of the six basin agencies has been obliged to draft an agreed strategy document in consultation with their basin committee and the 22 Directions régionales de l’environnement (DIREN), themselves created in 1991 to increase the coordination of environmental policy implementation. The resultant integrated planning document, or Schéma directeur d’aménagement et gestion des eaux (SDAGE), sets out the priorities and financial regime for water policy in each basin for a 15-year period, in accordance with European directives and nationally defined regulations. The five-year intervention programmes of the agencies must therefore conform to the dispositions set out in the SDAGE. The process has two tiers: the localised planning and implementation of the strategic objectives set out in the SDAGE is carried out on the basis of negotiated catchment plans based on local hydrographical structures, known as Schémas d’aménagement et gestion des eaux (SAGE).


In response to the lack of dialogue between users and local authorities at local level (Godard, 1992, p. 29), the SAGE are drawn up in each basin by a number of local water commissions (Commissions locales de l’eau) composed of local élus (50 per cent), water users (25 per cent), and the state (25 per cent). The central point of the 1992 law, therefore, governs resource planning. In a climate of tension between state-centred and decentralised approaches to water management, the integrated planning documents significantly increase the coherence of policy-making in both horizontal and vertical terms (Barraqué et al., 1995, p. 139). In tandem with the reorganisation of the environment ministry, the SDAGE and SAGE are specifically designed, in Buller’s terms, to bring together the ‘formerly disparate state water planning functions under a single administrative roof’ (1996a, p. 292). At basin level, public policy coordination is therefore increased through the establishment of a sectorised consultation process which essentially reproduces the corporatist structures of the basin committees. This is a ‘new territoriality’ (Buller, 1996a, p. 296), preserving the localised character of water policy while reinforcing the role of the state in policy definition and coordination. Despite the decentralised decisional form of the SDAGE and SAGE, the new law reasserts the role of central state actors, addressing the environment ministry’s concern at the propensity of local political actors to pursue short-term initiatives at the expense of sustainable development programmes. Indeed, SDAGE have to be submitted by the basin committee to the regional prefect for ratification, and it is significant that the first article of the law asserts that Water belongs to the nation’s common heritage. Its protection, its status, and its development as a usable resource are defined by the general interest, within the respect of natural equilibria. The use of water is shared by all within the guidelines set down by laws and regulations, as well as by previously established rights.2 Despite the creation of the DIREN, regional coordination of environmental policy has nonetheless remained weak, particularly when compared to the organisation and longstanding legitimacy enjoyed by the field services of the agriculture, industry and infrastructure ministries. According to Larrue and Chabason (1998, p. 78), ‘because local implementation actors belong to various administrations, and because no environmental “corps” has been created, there is no common cultural background shared by, and integrating, those engaged in local implementation.’ As a consequence,


policy delivery is highly compartmentalised, and not necessarily linked with environment policy in other subsectors. Lascoumes (1994, pp. 16–22), indeed, argues that the reformed water law is a classic example of the problems experienced by the environment ministry. Unlike more established policy sectors, the lack of a dominant, clearly identifiable client group pursuing its own ultimate policy objective has produced a law based on procedural rather than substantive norms, with decision-making centring on local compromises between different user groups with varying claims over the resource. Even given these continuing problems, the Fifth Republic has witnessed the growing definition of water resource management as a policy sector under the direction of the environment ministry, concerned above all with qualitative issues. Although water was initially constructed at national level as an essentially technocratic exercise in economic decision-making, it should not be forgotten that the deterioration in water quality was at the heart of the development of policy-making in this domain at national, subnational, and European levels. Moreover, a principal feature of the new integrated planning documents is that they marry distributive and qualitative concerns within the definition of basin-wide priorities, including – in the case of the 1996 Loire-Bretagne SDAGE – the protection of wetland areas and coastal eco-systems. It is within this specific context, then, that the evolution of the Loire development programme should be situated, not least because the concerns raised by environmental groups have significantly and directly influenced water policy-making in France since the early 1990s. The following sections will now examine how each of the factors identified above – planning, corporatist policy-making, the development of the environment ministry, decentralisation, issue reframing – have structured the emergence and character of that programme.

Regional planning and the Loire development project As underlined in the introduction to this chapter, neither EPALA nor the Serre de la Fare dam project originated in the early 1980s, but owe their ancestry to successive development programmes stretching back three decades. These programmes were initially formulated by EDF, but from the 1960s onwards the principal proponents of the scheme were to be found in the ANECLA regional lobby which grew out of the Comité de défense du bassin de la Loire, itself established in the early 1950s as an act of regional resistance to national construction schemes. Jill Lovecy has described how, in the last years of the Fourth Republic, the


development of indicative planning enabled the integration of regional political and economic élites into a national programme of economic expansion founded on the model of a ‘concerted economy’ and the rational use of resources (Lovecy, 1981; 1982). In Brittany, initially resistant, defensive élites were thus able to transform themselves into agents of economic modernisation through the preparation of regional plans, echoed by the development of formal consultative structures. Much the same dynamic is evident along the Loire. The Loire Basin Defence Committee – created under the presidency of a cumulard grandee named Dr Pierre Dezarnaulds, and boasting nine former or current government ministers – had formed as a ‘parliamentary action group’ in 1952 to oppose two separate schemes designed to divert the Loire basin’s water resources. The beneficiaries of the mooted projects were to be Paris, as part of a water supply scheme dating back to 1931, and the Rhône basin between Lyon and Marseille, supplied by EDF’s proposed Montpézat C industrial complex. Through the Committee, politicians from across the Loire basin were able to use parliamentary procedures to pursue regional opposition to these projects, and in May 1957 they succeeded in revoking the Paris scheme’s public utility certificate, or déclaration d’utilité publique (DUP), despite the opposition of the government. In a parallel initiative, regional socioprofessional élites obtained a further prorogation of the French capital’s rights over the river Loire one month later, and in May 1959 both projects were finally laid to rest by a government communiqué. The Defence Committee was wound up in September 1956, effectively fusing with economic and industrial actors from the region’s CCIs to form the ANECLA. Like the original defence groups therefore, the ANECLA was based around local political and economic élites. Yet whereas the objectives of the former had been purely oppositional, the new structure was conceived as a lobbying organisation to promote the industrial and agricultural development of the Loire basin within the expansionist framework set by the national planning agenda. Indeed, it was at the explicit behest of Pierre Massé, the then planning commissar, that by November 1960 the ANECLA had submitted an economic and financial study for a preliminary dam construction programme with a view to inclusion within the then operative 4th national plan. Believing that ‘it is now generally accepted that waterways are the key to industrial development’,3 the ANECLA originally proposed a comprehensive plan to ‘domesticate’ the Loire through the construction of some 37 separate dams on the Vienne, Cher, Allier and upper Loire, with individual reservoir capacities of between 6 and 200 million cubic metres.


The dams would regularise the river debit by maintaining water flow levels during the summer months. In turn, this would enable the completion of a number of major projects, most ambitiously the construction of a navigable waterway from Nantes to Basle. Further work constructing dykes would allow barge traffic up the Loire from the Atlantic as far as Tours, and from there to the Rhine–Rhône axis via the Saone, Cher, and canal du Centre. To this would be added road and rail routes breaking the ‘spider’s web’ around Paris, linking Nantes with Lyon by a parallel motorway and electrified main line railway. Further, these projects would enable the decongestion of the Paris region and massive urban and industrial expansion along the Loire valley.4 Finally, the preliminary study envisaged petrochemical complexes and iron and steel works at Donges on the Atlantic coast, and the regularisation of agricultural production through the creation of networks capable of irrigating over a million hectares. The ANECLA’s view of itself as orchestrating a modernising, dynamic plan for regional prosperity is underlined by its mission statement to ‘define, develop and promote regional action’. Its project was not merely for the benefit of a strictly regional economy but ‘for the greater good of a better-balanced national economy’.5 Taking as its inspiration the ‘economic miracle’ prompted by the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, in 1962 the ANECLA set up the SEMECLA (Société d’économie mixte pour l’étude de la communauté de la Loire et de ses affluents), a sister company designed to undertake preliminary geographical and economic feasibility studies necessary to the development programme. The SEMECLA’s first task was to identify a first tranche of works for completion before 1970, with construction to begin by 1965 at the latest. That the context for such regional development was clearly set by the national planning process is underlined by the appointment of Jean Vergeot, president of the Regional Planning Committee and a former planning commissar, as the SEMECLA’s first Directeur général. Not surprisingly, the ANECLA was particularly careful to frame the development project within the objectives set by successive national plans. The 4th plan, for instance, stated Because of the employment disequilibrium which is present there, the West of France is the first rank of regions where a policy of inducement must be carried out … Public authorities will take all necessary measures to encourage and to orient new industrial implantations in this direction, as well as to promote the concomitant development of the tertiary sector. The industrialisation of the West


is one of the great tasks which the Fourth Plan proposes to the ambition of the nation. (Quoted in Hansen, 1968, p. 205) Both the 4th and 5th national plans (the latter entering formal preparation from 1964) prioritised the development of the French centre and west, areas which – in contrast to Paris and the industrialised north, east and south-east of the country – suffered from low incomes, the structural decline of agriculture, and population loss. By 1956, the ‘west’ – in fact covering some 56 per cent of total national surface area – accounted for only 37 per cent of the total French population. Moreover, interregional disparities and centrifugal tendencies in the economy were actually exacerbated in the 1950s; while total employment increased in France as a whole between 1954 and 1962, France’s western regions registered a net decline, accounting for only 23.7 per cent of total industrial employment in 1962. Consequently, a key feature of the 5th plan’s regional economic development proposals was its commitment that 35–40 per cent of new industrial jobs created between 1962 and 1970 would be located in the French west. This effectively committed the government to creating some 145,000 new jobs over five years, or almost double the proportion of industrial jobs that had been created in these regions in the preceding eight-year period (Allen and MacLennan, 1970, pp. 125 ff; Prud’homme, 1974, pp. 36–8). The limits of planning ‘This was the era’, write Balme and Jouve (1996, p. 225) of the regionalised planning initiatives of the 1950s and the 1960s, ‘of major infrastructure projects, which were expected to have positive effects on national development.’ It was also the era of widespread dam construction. Indeed, between 1955 and 1985, 250 dams were constructed in mainland France, second only to Spain among western European states. In the late 1970s, one observer was so moved by the inspirational qualities of the major infrastructural project devised for the development of the Loire basin as to offer the following encomium: Such dreams may be grand – some would even say utopian – but they have already brought a number of happy achievements in their wake. The Villerest dam is being constructed; the negotiations for Naussac are well under way … A future of almost limitless promise, of prosperous industries and high-quality agricultural produce, of commercial profits and increased leisure choices, would thus be available to the people of the Pays de la Loire, in a stunning renaissance of


regions formerly reputed – albeit incorrectly – for their nonchalant acceptance of the slow passage of time. (Fénélon, 1978, p. 387) Yet in 1978, the ANECLA’s ‘grand dreams’ were in fact little nearer fruition than they had been 20 years earlier. Foremost among the goals of the regional planning process had been better horizontal coordination of investment programmes between ministries, the rationalisation of resource allocation, and greater responsiveness to economic criteria in administrative decision-making (Grémion and Worms, 1975, pp. 227–8). Yet as French plans became increasingly ambitious, technical and complex in the 1960s, they also became increasingly ineffective, as the reinforcement of departmental solidarities on the one hand, and the strengthening of intrasectoral vertical communications on the other, obstructed horizontal policy coordination between competing ministries. Bureaucratic conflict was endemic. Particularly marked was the hostility from the finance ministry, which even established its own parallel forecasting body (Wright, 1989, p. 102). Annual government expenditure on regional aid in France for the early 1970s was less than one tenth that spent for the same purpose in the UK. Despite planning objectives, those regions recognised as having the most serious employment problems received relatively few jobs under the 3rd, 4th and 5th plans, and France’s western regions were not systematically favoured (Clout, 1975, p. 127). Even allowing for some notable successes such as the economic ‘growth boom’ in Brittany after 1962, the results of regional planning were generally disappointing. Indeed, in vivid contrast to official discourses stressing the need for large infrastructural projects, the information bulletin published by the ANECLA from July 1961 onwards testifies to the organisation’s mounting frustration at the non-realisation of its plans. Most of all, it highlights the immobilism of the decisional process as successive committees approved and then referred the programme, failing to authorise the construction of the dams or even designate a project managing body. At regional level, policy approval was easily achieved, given the institutional configuration of the basin agencies, where decisionmaking, under the influence of strongly integrated industrial and employers’ interest groups, tended to be depoliticised, highly technical, and dominated by short-term economic criteria (Brénac, 1988, pp. 129–36). Successive pronouncements from the basin committee demonstrating the regional consensus behind the programme were far from surprising given that the initial 21 members of the committee’s local authorities college were elected unopposed on a joint list brokered


by the ANECLA with the Association des présidents des Conseils généraux. When Pierre de Villoutreys was elected president of the LoireBretagne water basin committee in January 1968, he was briefly at the head not only of the committee but also of the ANECLA and of the SEMECLA, and when in May 1969 the basin committee gave a favourable response to an initial demand for a programme of five dams, stating its ‘vigorous desire that a dam programme large enough to guarantee a sufficient minimum river debit in all conditions on the basin’s principal water courses should be considered for the 6th national plan’, it was thus promoting an agenda which was also its own.6 Nevertheless, the committee’s influence on national policy-making proved to be negligible. Although its unanimous approval in December 1969 of the six dams submitted to it by the ANECLA necessarily included the positive votes cast by the members of the mission déléguée who were present as representatives of the state, and although the basin agency’s administrative council agreed that dams at Serre de la Fare and Chambonchard should be constructed by the end of the 7th national plan (1976–80), these decisions could not be (and were not) implemented without the approval of the national interministerial committee. Indicative planning procedures thus afforded local élites access to regional policy-making structures and gave them a role in setting the regional development agenda; yet if these actors were now policy insiders, they were only partially so. Progress beyond the first phase of the policy process proved to be extremely difficult to attain in the absence of a national policy community grouped around a lead ministry. One response of the ANECLA to this state of affairs was to consistently downsize the project in order to make it more acceptable to the different administrations concerned. Downsizing and reframing In July 1963, the SEMECLA submitted the 37 identified sites to an ad hoc technical committee which had been set up three months earlier by the DATAR to investigate the problems of water quality and provision on the Loire basin. Although this programme was claimed by the ANECLA to be constitutive of only an initial series of works, by April 1964 the submission had already been reduced twice, to a total of 23 dams.7 In order to enable work to begin immediately, this total was reduced to an emergency ‘first tranche’ of five – Serre de la Fare, Cublaise, Chizeneuve, Naussac, and Chambonchard – in the preparatory period for the implementation of the 5th national plan. Such was the extent of the administrative fracture that in March 1965 the SEMECLA was obliged to lodge


a pre-demand for site concession with each of the six ministries directly concerned. This, however, was only the beginning. In 1966, the Mission de l’Eau concluded that two or three dams – from Serre de la Fare, Cublaise, and Naussac – could be built on the Loire basin during the period of the 5th plan. Then Prime Minister Georges Pompidou called an interministerial committee for July 1967 to consider the site concession, and successive ministerial declarations and institutional recommendations envisaged the start of construction on various dams within successive national plan timetables.8 Yet the interministerial committee was postponed first until September 1967 and then indefinitely. In 1971, the ANECLA wrote: There was a time when civil servants prepared projects, elected representatives took decisions on them, and civil servants ensured that they were carried out. Yet we now seem to be at the service of those we think are at ours.9 A year later, when infrastructure minister Albin Chalandon had formally excluded any consideration of a transversal waterway due to excessive cost, the association commented bitterly that Even when they publish a planning blue-print, […] those responsible for our policies only let themselves be influenced by short-term considerations; they do not set out a policy: they simply undergo the influence of events that they have been able neither to foresee nor control.10 By May 1973, no response had been forthcoming to the SEMECLA’s initial demand for site concession. When it renewed its request, but no response had again materialised by 3 July 1975, the organisation voluntarily instigated its own dissolution, having no further resources or role given the absence of state authorisation to proceed. By the end of the 7th plan, work on only the Villerest and Naussac dams, neither of which, as we shall see, were integral to the ANECLA programme, had commenced. Little wonder, then, that when Jean Royer – mayor of Tours and (see Chapter 5) the man who was to become the central figure in the EPALA – launched his 1974 presidential campaign, he identified the power of financial technocracy to be one of the twin perils facing the French economy.11 The blockage of the ANECLA project thus reflected the general breakdown of the planning process within interministerial immobilism


during the late 1960s. The successive downward revision of the programme was not the only response of the ANECLA to this situation, however. As will become clear, the organisation’s lobbying of central government throughout the 1960s and 1970s focused on the identification of prospective institutional partners with which it could establish a definite sectoral relationship, and whose emergence would allow the authorisation of the programme. One example of this procedure is provided by the inclusion of flood protection measures into the development programme, following the events of 21 September 1980, when eight people lost their lives and a further 21 were seriously injured in a flood in Brives-Charensac, a suburb of Le Puy. This event was ultimately to prove a catalyst for the implementation of the Loire programme, with Serre de la Fare consequently emerging as the priority installation of the 1986 protocol. Flood protection had, however, been far from the forefront of the development project during the 1960s. Neither the ANECLA nor the SEMECLA carried out more than preliminary studies in flood protection when drawing up the programme, being concerned only with construction work which would bring tangible economic benefits.12 Moreover, it is clear that public safety measures were, in the eyes of the association, not its concern but that of the state; the SEMECLA’s 1965 pre-request for site concession concentrated uniquely on the possibilities of river flow maintenance, leaving to the public authorities the responsibility of amending the plans if necessary in order to reserve capacity for flood control.13 With the disappearance of the Rhine–Rhône canal from the national planning agenda, however, public safety issues began to be prioritised within the ANECLA’s rationale. This was particularly the case following the announcement in 1969 by the planning commissariat’s Mission technique déléguée that flood protection should be the primary objective of any construction which could be contemplated within the auspices of the 6th plan. When the Seine flooded five months later, André Labarrière, the association’s general secretary, was to argue that ‘what is in doubt is not the scale of work to be undertaken, but the safety and the very lives of (the Loire’s) inhabitants’.14 As growing emphasis on the need to provide flood protection came to dominate the planning agenda in the 1970s, both the state and regional élites focused on the areas of the Loire historically affected by serious flooding, and where – rather less than coincidentally, as the next chapter will argue – the industrial and economic development plans for the basin were also concentrated. Thus the Institution interdépartementale pour la protection des vals de Loire contre les inondations, a cross-département


flood protection lobby, was created in 1975 to provide a project management body for the construction of Villerest. But if the new grouping provided interdepartmental solidarity (with eight départements participating) then this solidarity was very much based, as the name suggests, on the mid and lower sections of the river basin. The départements of the upper basin such as the Haute-Loire were not included. In successive ANECLA submissions, Serre de la Fare is rarely cited as one of the dams needed to protect the people from the river; flood control was clearly intended for the protection of the urban conurbations of the Loire valley, whose industrial expansion required the exploitation of areas prone to flooding. This emphasis is present throughout the arguments of local élites lobbying for the Loire dam scheme. Even in 1978, Royer was still contending that, should the type of serious flooding which had beset the river in the mid-nineteenth century return, it would be the inhabitants of the Val-de-Loire who would be unable to forgive their elected representatives.15 The five dams proposed in the initial programme were each designed to fulfil the role of maintaining the river debit, with only Villerest being earmarked by the ANECLA as a possible flood barrier. Moreover, while the ANECLA had argued that only a comprehensive series of dams upstream could adequately protect the mid and lower Loire, the capacity of 160 million cubic metres it had proposed for Serre de la Fare in 1970 was nonetheless designed for water stockage only, with no additional flood control facility.16 Likewise, the 1979 Rapport Chapon – the reference document which served as a template for the 1986 protocol and the subsequent Plan Loire Grandeur Nature – endorsed Serre de la Fare as a river flow maintenance facility only.17 Indeed, it was on this basis that the Haute-Loire departmental council had opposed the scheme in the early 1970s, although it was to vote its approval of Serre de la Fare unanimously in April 1988 (Courtet et al., 1991, p. 114). Nuclear energy and the environment Further developments in France’s national nuclear energy programme similarly induced the ANECLA to reframe its proposals. The Loire, which boasts the title of the most nuclearised river in Europe, is home to France’s first nuclear reactors, built at Chinon in the mid-1960s and Saint Laurent-des-Eaux in 1969. From even the very early stages of the nuclear programme, pre-dating its massive expansion under the 1974 Plan Messmer, regional élites sought to reformulate demands in order to attract EDF’s interest, either by justifying the construction of dams in order to maintain water flows for nuclear reactors or, for sites such as


Cublaise, by presenting the project in such a way that EDF would benefit from additional hydroelectric production capacity.18 Moreover, when Olivier Guichard (also a Loire notable, and the first director of the DATAR) ruled out the construction of refrigeration towers for nuclear power stations on the Loire at a meeting in Tours in June 1973, the ANECLA viewed this decision as further justification for the need for a comprehensive dam construction programme.19 EDF, however, showed little enthusiasm for any aspect of the ANECLA programme, obtaining instead the authorisation for and construction of two dams, Villerest and Naussac, in the late 1970s. Although the ANECLA had been pressing for major construction work on the Loire long before the acceleration of the nuclear programme therefore, the overriding concern behind Villerest and Naussac was the maintenance of river flow rates at a sufficient level (60 m3/s at Gien) to meet the needs of the new nuclear reactors planned at Dampierre-en-Burly, Belleville, and Le Pellerin. Built at the behest of EDF, Villerest and Naussac preceded any integrated attempts to conceive of the economic development of the Loire. Although regional political and economic élites originally lobbied for their construction (Boddaert, 1990, pp. 22 ff), this support turned rapidly to opposition in the mid-1970s as the limited scope of the construction became clear. The Roanne section of the PS adopted a position of opposition to Villerest in November 1975, a stance which the PCF was to duplicate in January 1977. In June 1977, an anti-dam demonstration in Roanne led by the PS and the CFDT labour union attracted about one thousand protesters. Numerous notables argued that Villerest in particular provided only a piecemeal palliative rather than a comprehensive solution to water distribution problems, and did not meet the real needs of the river basin population. Jean Auroux, Socialist mayor of Roanne and future signatory of the EPALA protocol on behalf of the government, argued for instance that Villerest was ‘sadly typical’ of regional development planning in France, while Royer argued that neither dam should have been undertaken before an integrated development plan had been finalised.20 It is rather ironic, therefore, that Villerest had originally been proposed as part of the 1931 Paris supply scheme, and that the Naussac site had originally been prospected by EDF for the Montpézat C project which regional élites had originally come together to oppose. The ANECLA’s willingness to modify its programme demonstrates its pragmatism towards the decisional process, but also its opportunism as it incorporated diverse justifications for the project into a discourse centred on industrial expansion. Thus despite the emergence of the corporatist basin agencies, the trans-sectoral nature of water policy issues


continued to impede the development of a state-level policy community during this primary phase of the Loire project, and thus condemned the project to a no man’s land between the decisional and implementation stages of the policy process. That the 1986 protocol was eventually signed, however, is a consequence of two structural factors. The first of these is the emergence of the environment ministry as the lead ministry for water policy. In fact, the creation of the environment ministry in the early 1970s had been quickly seized upon by the ANECLA in its search for a possible lead policy actor for water. Initially claiming a synergy between the aims of the new ministry and its own development programme, the organisation argued as early as 1971 that, Committees for the Environment and the Protection of Nature have been established in every administrative region. In the Loire basin, these Committees cannot fail to be confronted by the same problems that we are … The massive support of river flow levels is vital so that industry can develop, agriculture can regularise its output through systematic irrigation; it is even more necessary to significantly reduce pollution during the summer months when its effects on the environment are most devastating.21 The first concrete signs of a positive response to regional lobbying came from an interministerial committee on environmental action held in February 1978, and subsequently from then environment minister Michel d’Ornano, who presented a number of detailed proposals in spring 1980. These proposals, in keeping with the Chapon report which had been commissioned by the ministry the previous year, included the possibility of an interdepartmental project management body, but recommended the construction of dams within the next 15 years at Le Veurdre and Chambonchard only, with Serre de la Fare to be delayed until 1995 at the earliest. The flood of September 1980 thus provided the scheme with impetus, justification and emotional resonance, and the growing sectorisation of water policy within the environment ministry enabled the identification of a lead actor at state level for the negotiation of the programme. However, its adoption and implementation were only made possible once the Mauroy government of 1981–84 had set its decentralisation measures in place. This, then, is the second structural factor enabling policy implementation.


Decentralisation Given that the legal framework within which the basin agencies have operated did not enable them to act as a project managing or contracting body, the SEMECLA positioned itself from the beginning to play such a role. It is significant that not only was the SEMECLA created with the specific goal (as stipulated in article two of its statutes and approved by interministerial decree) of transformation into a Compagnie nationale de la Loire or Compagnie d’aménagement du bassin de la Loire (CABAL) equivalent to that formed for the development of the Rhône, but also that successive preliminary programmes were drawn up on the basis of strict financial independence from the state. Yet only with the Defferre reforms of 1982, some 20 years after the creation of the SEMECLA, did this possibility become a reality. As we have seen in the previous chapter, decentralisation has done much to regenerate subnational politics in France. Yet it is important to stress that, rather than providing a democratic challenge to a highly conservative system, the reforms also strengthened the position and powers of traditional élites within the politico-administrative system. The initial promises of the Socialists to introduce initiatives such as local citizens’ referendums were not fulfilled. Moreover, as Gontcharoff (1991) points out, even measures proposed by the Socialists once in government never saw the light of day, such as their pledge to introduce participative democratic structures at local level. The mooted major bill on citizen participation in local democracy remained unproposed; the Henry bill promoting associational involvement in local decision-making was quietly shelved. Measures such as the extension of the powers of the conseils d’arrondissement of Paris, Lyon and Marseille could only have a minor impact without fundamental electoral reform. And with the exception of the introduction of proportional representation for regional elections, other voting system reforms failed to provide the opportunity for minor parties to mount significant challenges to France’s major parties. With no direct provision for citizen participation, the reforms, far from increasing the powers of the ‘ordinary citizens’, thus served essentially to secure those of elected and representative élites (Kesselman, 1985, p. 182). Indeed, far from democratising access to local politics, decentralisation produced strong subnational executives in the most presidential of modes (Grénier, 2000, p. 126). The way in which the sectoral water policy community came to be reconstituted as a result of the decentralisation reforms centres therefore not on the introduction of a pluralist system of representation into the policy-making process, but on a wider dynamic strengthening the


interests of established élites. It is in this context, as well as that of the fruition of a long process of lobbying undertaken by regional economic and political élites, that the birth of the EPALA should be considered. Created in November 1983 by decree of the interior ministry (the ministry responsible for the decentralisation reforms), the EPALA federates six regions, 16 départements, and 19 town councils throughout the Loire basin, plus a further ten intradepartmental syndicates regrouping municipal authorities of less than 30,000 inhabitants (known as SICALA). Officially an établissement public, the EPALA in fact offers no place in its decision-making structures either for representatives of the various administrations of the state, or for those of any of the interested consumers’, industrial, environmental, or agricultural organisations operating within the Loire basin. Thus although the EPALA has relied on the technical services of the state (the DDE in particular) in order to ensure policy delivery, and is placed under prefectoral tutelle, it is composed entirely of local élus at municipal, departmental, and regional level. Such developments therefore place the Loire programme within a new institutional context, one shaped by a decentralising dynamic long advocated by regional élites. As outlined in Chapter 2, sectoral policy arenas are generally stable under the influence of entrenched interest representatives, but may periodically be subject to policy paradigm shifts, policy community recomposition, and dependency reconfiguration. That the dam programme should have eventually emerged from the policy logjam with the signing of the protocol in 1986 testifies to the way in which resource dependencies had been restructured as a result of a macro-level reorganisation of the public policy arena. Whereas the regionalisation of planning and the conversion of resistant local élites into modernising public policy actors, and the subsequent immobilism of the policy process, were both roughly co-temporal with the first two decades of the Fifth Republic, the third and fourth decades of the Republic can be identified with two further stages in the transformation of water resource management in France. The emergence in the first of these stages of a policy sector capable of coordinating water resource management at national level, allied to the further disengagement of the state from this sector allowed for a crossadministrative allocation of funding for the Loire project, and for the constitution of the EPALA as a decentralised project management body. Indeed, it is significant that the announcement in Roanne in July 1982 of government approval for the creation of the EPALA was made jointly by environment minister Michel Crépeau and Michel Rocard who, as minister for the national plan, specifically placed the programme


within the context not only of water resource management but of all aspects of regional development (Boddaert, 1990, p. 35; Courtet et al., 1991, pp. 61–2). However, in the second of these two stages, the policy community has been subject to further change as a continuing part of the same dynamic, but this time producing the opposite result: the dam project is once more ensnared in administrative renegotiation and downwards revision. The role that environmental protest played in securing this outcome will be explored at length in the next chapter.

5 Vive la Loire Sauvage! Serre de la Fare and the Political Opportunity Structure of Protest

The previous chapter has established the importance of two developments – decentralisation, and the emergence of water resource management as a discrete policy sector under the aegis of the environment ministry – for the progress from proposal to execution of the Loire development programme. Yet, as we shall see, if these developments contributed to the authorisation of the programme, then these same structural factors would also ultimately be central to the successful organisation of dissent against the scheme. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to situate the strategies deployed by the main challenging groups, Loire Vivante and SOS Loire Vivante, in terms of these elements of the political opportunity structure. Naturally, institutional factors alone were not responsible for the dramatic series of revisions which the programme has undergone since 1986; yet, in common with the argument developed in the next case study, explaining the Somport road tunnel protest, it is contended here that such factors structure the terrain on which protest is carried out, creating or restricting the availability and success chances of challenger actions and discourses. Accordingly, this chapter is divided into two main sections. The first establishes the organisation of dissent, discussing such factors as the importance of allies, the degree of openness of the political and public inquiry systems, and the use of contrasting confrontational and consensual actions. The second examines the relationship between the different actors within the policy sector, and particularly the evolution of a mutual relationship between the central state and protest groups, ultimately resulting in the reclamation of policy responsibility by the 132

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centre within new policy structures enabling the integration of previously outsider groups.

The organisation of dissent The organisation of dissent to the EPALA programme was initially dictated by the rhythm of the formal authorisation process. Resistance to the protocol was rapidly established by Loire Vivante, with SOS Loire Vivante organising localised resistance to Serre de la Fare, which – at an estimated cost of 460 MF, and with a projected capacity of 74 million cubic metres – was scheduled to be the first of the dams. The first task of SOS Loire Vivante was to mobilise protest at the scheme’s spring 1988 public inquiry; it organised the first substantial public demonstration against the dam in Le Puy in October 1988. On 11 February 1989, construction work was authorised to begin when the Haute-Loire departmental prefect signed the dam’s public utility certificate (DUP); six days later, activists from SOS Loire Vivante occupied the construction site, an occupation which was ultimately to last 1825 days. This was not the association’s only response to the DUP, however: SOS Loire Vivante’s Martin Arnould, Régine Linossier, and Gilles Brun were elected onto Le Puy’s town council in March 1989 on a platform of opposition to the dam; the association lodged a legal appeal against the DUP; and a mass rally was organised in Le Puy for the last weekend in April. Likening the campaign to one of the great environmentalist causes of the 1970s, Le Monde greeted the demonstration with the front-page headline ‘Larzac sur Loire’;1 10,000 protesters marched through the town to show their disapproval of the scheme. From this point on, the authorisation procedure began to be dictated by the pace and extent of the protest movement. On 28 April 1989, the day before the demonstration, environment minister Brice Lalonde wrote to Christine Jean, coordinator of Loire Vivante, to tell her: ‘as you know, I’ve always wanted this development programme to be accompanied by broad consultation, and proper information for the public and environmental associations in particular.’ In the letter, Lalonde announced the temporary suspension of construction work on the dam, pending further studies.2 On 7 February 1990, the government announced that it was considering a number of alternative options for Serre de la Fare; exactly one year later, the Clermont-Ferrand administrative tribunal upheld the appeal against the project’s DUP. On 31 July 1991, Edith Cresson’s government confirmed the cancellation of Serre de la Fare. ‘We will simply sign with the next government what we’ve not been able to get with this one,’ claimed EPALA president Jean Royer


at the time.3 Subsequent changes in government were ultimately to be of little avail to Royer, however. Following the defeat of the Socialists at the 1993 legislative elections, Edouard Balladur’s government definitively laid the prospect of a dam in the Haute-Loire to rest with the Plan Loire Grandeur Nature (PLGN) of 4 January 1994. Confrontation and litigation, moderation and consensus As underlined in Chapter 2, the political opportunity structure literature emphasises the confrontational nature of social protest in France. Given the minimal opportunities for challenging groups to set or influence the policy agenda, protest will tend to radicalise, calling into question not simply the specific project but, beyond that, the very legitimacy of the state to make policy. Certainly, many of these traits are to be found in the Serre de la Fare protest, particularly in confrontational incidents such as the vandalism of construction vehicles in spring 1988, while EPALA officials and representatives frequently attempted to argue that protest was caused by a few trouble-makers, both violent and foreign.4 SOS Loire Vivante – which benefited from technical and organisational support from the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and its German wetlands research unit, the Auen-Institut, and one of whose leading figures, Roberto Epple, is a Swiss national – was later to argue that: In a country which accords ridiculously little importance to the protection of its natural heritage, we must learn how to produce public shocks: we must, in France, discover the virtues of civil disobedience.5 The goal of action such as the occupation of the construction site was clear: beyond the symbolic presence and media attention, protesters aimed to enforce lengthy delays and impose escalating costs. ‘Construction will be difficult, very long, and very expensive: the price of each cubic metre of water stored will go through the roof!’, claimed the association;6 by late 1992, the estimated cost of the dam had spiralled to 700 MF. SOS Loire Vivante and allied groups systematically challenged administrative approval through the courts, thus reinforcing the tactic of open, public, confrontational resistance; by summer 1991, SOS Loire Vivante estimated it had read 40,000 pages of legal documents. EPALA meetings were, again systematically, picketed by protesters, with technical as well as political staff being chased by placard-waving environmentalists. Scuffles were common. Despite these tactics, however, it would be far from accurate to characterise the campaign led by SOS Loire Vivante as confrontational.


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In response to the vandalism of construction vehicles, the group immediately issued a press communiqué condemning the action. The association consciously drew on protests against dams elsewhere in Europe, forging links with groups in other countries in order to establish effective peaceful campaigning methods. After a visit by two members of the association to Hungary and Austria, the non-violent resistance tactics used by protesters against the Hainburg and Nagymaros dam schemes were directly copied by SOS Loire Vivante.7 Moreover, as will become clear, the relationship between protesters and the state was far from conflictual. According to Martin Arnould, SOS Loire Vivante’s campaign has never been a fight against the institutions, the state […] we also wanted to take things such as they were, and to recognise that the environment ministry is a priori more our ally than our adversary, or in any case more our ally than the agriculture and industry ministries … Overthrowing the state doesn’t interest us at all.8 The organisation avoided wider anti-regime arguments and presented itself as apolitical. Indeed, when Arnould, Brun, and Linossier were elected to the municipal council running on the Les Verts list, SOS Loire Vivante amended its statutes such that anyone standing for political office could not also be a member of the group’s committee; the association ‘never aspired to organise on a narrowly political basis’, according to one supporter.9 The scheme, according to SOS Loire Vivante, did not call into question the legitimacy of the state to decide and implement construction projects, but the legitimacy of the EPALA to represent the popular will or to aggregate interests along the whole of the Loire basin. ‘At Naussac,’ asserted Jean-François Arnould of a dam scheme which (as we have seen in Chapter 1) attracted concerted opposition in the mid1970s, ‘they called Giscard a fascist. Here, it’s different. If the dam is built, we’ll resist without violence’ (in Boddaert, 1990, p. 119). Both the local and national press emphasised the moderate tendencies of protesters, while L’Éveil highlighted the non-violent nature of the site occupation,10 and devoted large spaces to articles from opponents virtually from the beginning of the campaign; in fact, the local press throughout the Loire basin acted as important relay points for protesters (Rodier, 1993, pp. 155–7). The EPALA, by contrast, was obliged to add 300,000 F to its communications budget in autumn 1988 in order to counteract the effectiveness of the protest campaign, a situation exacerbated by the widespread attention attracted to the protest by the then Honorary


President of the WWF the Duke of Edinburgh’s cry of ‘Vive la Loire sauvage!’, the slogan adopted by protesters, at the confluence of the Loire and the Allier in October 1988. The use of confrontational strategies needs to be contextualised, therefore. First, it should be emphasised that SOS Loire Vivante deployed a range of strategies, including such consensual actions as the circulation of petitions against the scheme. By the end of 1989, 45,000 signatures had been collected and sent to President Mitterrand; four years later, the petition had been signed by a further 115,000 people. Similarly, the association organised the participation of the local population in the 1988 public inquiry, where nearly 4000 comments were registered against the scheme. Membership of the organisation doubled between June 1989 and January 1990; and stood at 3000 at the end of that year.11 The ‘European demonstration’ of spring 1989 was overwhelmingly composed of local people; Le Monde registered only several Swiss and a hundred or so Germans mobilised by WWF and Robin Wood.12 The second-round vote of 21.87 per cent gained by Arnould, Brun, and Linossier was Les Verts’ best performance in any town of over 30,000 inhabitants at the 1989 municipal elections, and compares favourably with results of national figures such as Antoine Waechter (12.7 per cent in Alsace), Etienne Tête (19 per cent in Lyon) and Christian Brodhag (7 per cent in St Etienne). The defining aspect of this local protest is rather its pursuit of legalism and construction of responsibility, as challenging groups sought to construct as wide a coalition as possible by presenting themselves as legitimate representatives of mainstream local opinion. Furthermore, the association’s organisation of local information meetings and numerous trips to remove rubbish from the river bed and clear pathways along the banks of the Loire had both practical and symbolic effects, highlighting the constructive nature of the anti-dam protest.13 The association viewed physical obstruction as a last but necessary resort, and as a specific response to the practice of the fait accompli which has traditionally characterised construction projects in France, most notably the Ile de Ré bridge.14 Indeed, numerous different avenues of protest were pursued, including, as will become apparent, intensive lobbying of the state administration. The importance of political allies Although success in the 1989 local elections did not enable environmentalists to affect directly the decision-making of the municipal council or of the EPALA, it did demonstrate the legitimacy of the organised


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dissent and provoked concessions at a national level seemingly influenced by medium-term electoral considerations. The way in which national political considerations affect local struggles, in fact, can be seen from the position of the Parti Socialiste on the Loire project. The EPALA, it should not be forgotten, was established under the auspices of the commitment to decentralisation of a Socialist government prominently featuring ministers from the Loire basin. Yet the performance of Les Verts at the Le Puy municipal elections had all but enabled a PS–PCF coalition to take the town hall, as the joint Left list gained only 31 votes fewer than the right-wing RPR–UDF coalition; a remarkable result in a traditional conservative stronghold like Le Puy. It is thus perhaps not surprising that, in the wake of the results of the municipal elections, the contrast between different imperatives at national and local level initially produced a state of confusion within the departmental Socialist party. Roland Casanova, the leader of the PS list, pushed for a moratorium; Louis Valentin, the departmental party secretary, argued that the party was not against a dam at Serre de la Fare per se, but rather against the project such as it was designed. Jean-Pierre Brossier, the Socialist mayor of Cussac and departmental councillor for Solignac, declared himself opposed to the project as an individual, but in favour of a flood-breaking dam in his capacity as an élu. In the HauteLoire, the PS endorsed the April 1989 demonstration, requested that the government study other alternatives, and supported the appeal lodged by SOS Loire Vivante against the DUP, and Casanova publicly reaffirmed his opposition to the dam following the government decision of 7 February 1990. Nonetheless, the signals from national politicians were decidedly mixed. Thus Pierre Bérégovoy, mayor of Nevers and then Chancellor in Rocard’s government, would only be drawn into saying that ‘some dams must be built, but others are not indispensable’.15 By 1991, the Haute-Loire federation remained the only PS branch to have taken an explicit stance against the EPALA programme. Yet two blocs were beginning to emerge out of the 72 local élus sitting on the EPALA’s deliberative assembly, or comité syndical. Thus one bloc supporting the dam programme chiefly united communists and conservatives. Since the cancellation of Serre de la Fare, in fact, the PCF and CGT have, in alliance with the FNSEA agricultural union, emerged as the main sponsors of the remaining elements of the dam programme. Indeed, despite the removal of the Chambonchard dam from the development programme by Cresson’s decision of July 1991, the following year the dam was reapproved by her successor, Pierre Bérégovoy, in a reported deal whereby the PCF would support the government in a


parliamentary vote of confidence.16 In the run-up to the following year’s legislative elections, alliances between Communists and Socialists at local level were less easily detectable, however. Against a background of governmental ouverture, Prime Minister Rocard had appointed former ecologist presidential candidate Brice Lalonde as environment minister in 1988; in 1990, Lalonde established his own Green formation, Génération Écologie, with the apparent benediction of President Mitterrand. Such manoeuvrings were translated within the EPALA comité syndical as Socialists started to ally with Greens within a bloc critical of the original programme. The twelve Socialist and ecologist EPALA representatives abstained on a vote in December 1989, called to authorise EPALA president Jean Royer to demand a firm go-ahead from the government for the programme, thus marking the first time that division had clearly manifested itself within the organisation. Further, in January 1991, approximately 150 Socialist and Green élus from across the basin formed the CABLE, Comité pour l’avenir du bassin de la Loire, to act as a political lobbying organisation for the revision of the protocol and implementation of a sustainable development scheme for the basin. Jean-Claude Demaure of Génération Écologie, assistant mayor of Nantes and vice-president of the EPALA, summed up the specificity of the CABLE: ‘For the EPALA, it’s always: more. For us, it’s always: better.’17 At national level, the growing political importance of environmental questions and progressive loss of popular support experienced by successive governments during the second Mitterrand presidency was reflected in the spectacular decline of the Socialists in the 1989 European and 1992 regional elections, matched by the equally spectacular emergence of the Greens (see Table 5.1).

Table 5.1 Performance of PS and Greens at 1989 European and 1992 regional elections, nationally, in the Haute-Loire and the five cantons of Le Puy (where available). Génération Écologie did not present a list in the Haute-Loire in 1992. June 1989 European elections (%)

Parti Socialiste Les Verts Génération Écologie Source: L’Éveil.

National

HauteLoire

23.69 10.61

22.46 11.08

February 1992 regional elections (%)

Le Puy

National

14.28

18.3 6.8 7.1

Haute- Le Puy Loire

10.2

13.74


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In Le Puy, the overtures of the Left towards the Greens almost paid off at the 1995 municipal elections. At the second round, the joint PS–PCF–Green list led by Casanova gained 49.84 per cent of the vote, losing out to the RPR–UDF list by the barest of margins – 27 votes – for the second time in succession. Across the basin, the effects of the formation of the CABLE are less easily quantifiable, as attempts to influence the direction of the EPALA from within have generally proved negligible. Yet the formation of the CABLE has been significant to the extent that it has countered the EPALA’s claims to cross-political legitimacy. Legitimacy, indeed, proved to be one of the main points of dispute in the Serre de la Fare campaign.

Reframing the policy paradigm In Chapter 2, it was argued that the potential of protest groups to integrate policy networks was a function of their legitimacy, as defined by their representativity and resources. As we have already seen, the ability of protest groups and allied political parties to represent public opinion in Le Puy was apparent from the extent of its mobilising capacity at the public inquiry and in street demonstrations, and by the results of successive elections. Further, the demonstration of legitimacy was also a key element in the discourses of groups opposed to the project. As already discussed in Chapter 1, the nimby label is frequently used in local planning conflicts by project proponents in order to highlight the lack of legitimacy of residents opposed to such schemes, underlining the presumed selfishness of protesters. Yet the Serre de la Fare conflict produced a rather different dynamic. Here, protest organisations identified regional élites as illegitimate actors, contrasting their own implantation in and understanding of the local community with what they presented as the EPALA’s promotion of wealthier downstream areas of the Loire. Such discourses run counter to established expectations of nimby conflicts; that they were possible is principally the result of institutional factors, notably decentralisation and sectoral fragmentation. From the early stages of the protest, the arguments put forward against the dam were heavily flavoured with the defence of local customs, traditions, and economies in the face of the unwelcome imposition of outside authority. Yet unlike the discourses which had typically dominated the protests of the 1970s discussed in Chapter 1, such arguments here were not levelled at the state but at the EPALA. ‘We must not allow this choice to be appropriated by the blinkered and biased technocrats of the EPALA: they don’t live in the Haute-Loire and won’t have


to live with the dam!’ argued SOS Loire Vivante.18 Technocratic decisionmaking was not perceived by opponents to the dam as a tool of the repressive central state, but rather as a characteristic intended to benefit the economic interests of the towns situated on the lower and midsections of the Loire. Local economic development and the north–south divide SOS Loire Vivante’s campaign against Serre de la Fare therefore aimed not just to protect a site which it argued to be of great natural beauty, but also to reorient the economic development of the area. Indeed, much of the association’s work following the decision to cancel the dam scheme has consequently centred on the promotion of local sustainable development projects. The primary goal of the EPALA, the association argued, was to stock water in the poor regions of the Massif Central to meet two objectives: the irrigation of the plains of the mid-Loire, which had been converted over the previous 20 years to water-intensive maize growing, and the economic development of the major urban centres of the Loire valley, by protecting their expansion into flood-risk areas. Furthermore, the departmental council’s proposal to create an integrated tourist resort with swimming pools, a golf course and a hotel on the banks of the future reservoir, was exploitative of and irrelevant to the needs of the area, as This logic of [mass] development means importing, for a hypothetical period of time, economic models put forward by interests based outside our département, and which benefit the rich pressure groups whose custom and habit it is to pillage the natural resources of economically disadvantaged areas … Let’s not forget that, according to the criteria laid down by [French forecasting organisation] the INSEE (Le Point 1989), the Haute-Loire is considered to be the poorest département in France! (SOS Loire Vivante, 1989, p. 9) Such arguments became a familiar refrain for the association, especially as these concerns were widely shared by other groups participating in the coalition against the dam. For Jean-Louis Courriol, president of L’Association de remise en valeur et de défense de la Loire, the tourist development project was nonsensical, given that the fluctuating water levels of the reservoir would only enable bathing on a handful of days per year. In summer, when tourist demand was highest, the water would be lowest, thus forcing prospective bathers to negotiate several metres of stinking mud before reaching the water. Moreover, use of the reservoir


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would only be possible for other water sports for between a month and six weeks per year. As a consequence, of course, according to even the prefect, the purpose of maintaining the river debit essentially concerns areas far downstream, outside our département. Those communes bordering the reservoir will gain no direct advantage from it, and the département as a whole will only receive very secondary benefits.19 Camille Solelhac, president of the Fédération de pêche de la Haute-Loire (the departmental angling association), agreed: Maintaining the river debit will bring us absolutely nothing in the Haute-Loire, it’s not being done for us; the work will primarily benefit big business; as for safety, which is the only real issue in our eyes, there are other methods, particularly when it comes to prevention.20 The seemingly inexorable post-war decline of the French centre and west has already been outlined in the previous chapter. As Clout notes, the Massif Central has long been referred to as France’s pôle répulsif, the region from which natural, economic and human resources have always flowed away. While between 1851 and 1982 the total French population increased by 52 per cent, the Massif Central as a whole experienced a net population decrease of 10 per cent. For the Haute-Loire, the figures are even more dramatic: against a backdrop of declining traditional economies, the département’s population fell by 32 per cent over the same period, continuing to fall in the 1960s and 1970s despite government regional development action (Clout, 1983, pp. 9–11). In contrast, the Centre and Pays de la Loire regions downstream of the Haute-Loire enjoyed (along with Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur) the strongest demographic increase of all French regions during the 1965–90 period. It is in this context that Courtet et al. (1991), in their detailed account of the initial stages of the protest, argue that the dam project needs to be seen: rather than a plan designed to benefit the disadvantaged areas of the upper Loire, the EPALA programme aimed to create a twospeed development plan for the Loire basin. Thus the ‘protective’ function assigned to projects upstream of the river basin’s major urban connurbations – Nantes, Tours, Blois, Orléans, Angers, Poitiers – should properly be understood as a pretext for the urban and agricultural development of these towns at the expense of the basin’s less affluent areas. Even L’Express agreed that flood control was only a secondary


function of a dam principally intended to benefit the lower Loire valley.21 Differences in the agricultural production of the upper and lower Loire provide a further contrast: while the northern Loire départements, based on water-intensive cereal farming, account for 16 per cent of total national agricultural production, the predominantly cattle and sheep rearing southern départements account for only 7 per cent. Agriculture, along with patterns of energy production, urbanism, communications and transport infrastructure, and tourist development, thus represents one of five economic, social, and cultural ‘fault lines’ opposing the northern and southern sections of the basin (Courtet et al., 1991, pp. 167–93). It is thus significant that, beyond the identification of a number of consequences for the upper Loire considered to be inimical to its cultural and economic development, challenging groups specifically highlighted the towns of the lower and mid-Loire as the principal beneficiaries of the scheme. The most prominent of these adversaries was Tours, of which Royer was the long-serving mayor. Indeed, the reinforcement of the position of traditional political élites brought about by the manner and timing of the 1982 decentralisation reforms is well exemplified by Jean Royer’s dominance of the EPALA. Royer, indeed, appears the very model of the cumulard notable identified in the CSO analyses of centre–periphery power relations discussed in Chapter 3. In fact, his career corresponds almost exactly to the ideal-type multiple office-holding, conservative, ‘apolitical’ grandee whose power is based on the vigorous promotion of local interests through access to the centre. Elected as a right-wing independent to the Assemblée Nationale in 1958, and as mayor of Tours a year later (the two conditions for membership of his list were that candidates should lead irreproachable private lives, and have not at any time been a member of any political party), Royer was to remain leader of the municipal council until 1995, when he also forfeited the presidency of the EPALA, a position he had occupied since its creation. His career as a député was even longer: lasting until 1997, his spell was broken only by a twelve-month period in government under Georges Pompidou in 1973–74, initially as minister for commerce and craft industries, where he gave his name to an influential bill protecting small shopkeepers from the competition of giant retail outlets. The 1973 loi Royer’s promotion of small businesses consolidated its author’s growing reputation as a vigorous defender of a poujadiste, reactionary, petty bourgeoisie (see Birnbaum, 1982, pp. 93–8; Keeler, 1985), and enabled Royer to run, albeit unsuccessfully, for the French presidency on Pompidou’s death the following year.


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Royer’s autocratic style, and particularly his outspoken defence of conservative sexual mores, was to make him a prime target for the derision of protest groups; the cover of all but three of the first 27 editions of SOS Loire Vivante Infos bore less than flattering caricatures of Royer. But more than the evident ideological differences between protesters and proponents, it was the identification of Royer, and through him the EPALA, with Tours and the Loire valley which lay at the heart of the arguments put forward against the dam programme. Royer’s plans to develop a technological park in Tours to rival similar schemes in Metz and Nice, announced in November 1988, were symptomatic of the growing fracture between different areas of the Loire; the technopole’s proposed site lay on 60 hectares of land prone to flooding by the Cher, thus requiring construction works, including dams, to control the river flow. Not only did such plans seemingly justify protest groups’ critique of the effects of decentralisation, but brought into relief the quantitative and qualitative conceptions of the water resource management which fundamentally opposed the conceptions of river development proposed by the social and institutional actors involved. Beyond concerns with representativity, the ability of protest groups to integrate policy networks also depends on their capacity to challenge the sectoral référentiel, or policy paradigm; legitimacy is thus also a function of competing ideologies and the resources of the groups which articulate them within the sectoral opportunity structure. In the Serre de la Fare protest, questions of political legitimacy were thus also constructed in terms of the technical command of water resource management. Faced with the Loire programme’s overwhelmingly quantitative, redistributive rationale, protesters therefore not only sought to identify the EPALA as an adversary embodying a set of interests perceived to be private and therefore illegitimate, but sought also to reframe the policy problematic. Changing the policy paradigm: water quality and the salmon As discussed in the previous chapter, water policy in France has been increasingly preoccupied with preserving and improving water quality; indeed, the introduction of catchment plans in the 1992 reform establishes qualitative objectives as the cornerstone of French water resource management (Buller, 1996a, pp. 300–1). Yet what is arguably most striking about the Loire dam programme is its exclusively quantitative conception of water resources. The objectives of the ANECLA programme had concentrated on distribution problems, lamenting the underexploitation of a water resource ‘most of which disappears into the ocean to nobody’s benefit’, while advocating the ‘total use of water


resources and meeting the priority needs of the inhabitants’.22 Thirty years later, little had changed. According to Royer, By the development of the Loire, we mean the correction by man of the excesses of nature in general and of the river in particular … More specifically, excessive water shortages on the one hand, and catastrophic flooding on the other.23 The EPALA programme was therefore designed to address problems of resource distribution through a construction and development programme. In contrast to this quantitative paradigm, protest groups sought above all to underline the importance of water quality to the development of the basin. Citing methodologies applied in Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria, and supported by the European Parliament, Loire Vivante stressed from the start the backwardness of the EPALA programme in comparison with more modern, environmentally sensitive projects implemented outside France. Symbolic acts such as the Marcheurs de l’eau of August and September 1989, when protesters walked from the source of the Loire to the estuary, collecting water samples at each stage of the route, and the construction of two pyramids of pure and polluted water from the river at the 1991 Fête de l’eau in Orléans, not only stressed the unity of water resources across the hydrographic basin but highlighted the deterioration in quality produced by damming and urban and agricultural development. According to Loire Vivante, changing the agenda to water quality was its ‘objectif no. 1’.24 For Christine Jean, we mustn’t limit ourselves to incantatory speeches on flood protection and maintaining the river debit; we need to problematise the very basis of this approach. The conservation of those zones at risk from flooding is a key element. More generally, we need to turn the current problematic on its head. Instead of running after the satisfaction of emerging needs without any economic justification, instead of limiting ourselves to the purely quantitative management of water, we need to problematise water quality, which is compromised by the exclusive concern with quantity.25 A potent symbol of this qualitative agenda was provided by the emphasis placed by protest groups on the migratory patterns of salmon on the Loire river basin. The upper Allier is the last major European river where large salmon (in this case, the Atlantic salmon, or salmo salar) breed, after their disappearance from the Thames, Rhine and Elbe. Yet from a


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population of between 50,000 and 100,000 at the start of the twentieth century, salmon numbers on the Loire river basin have declined to between only 500 and 3000. In 1997, only 389 salmon were recorded upstream of Vichy on the mid-Allier, the primary spawning ground for the fish. According to SOS Loire Vivante, one of the principal reasons for the decline in the salmon population is that a series of 19 construction works on the river, from the mouth of the Loire to an EDF hydroelectric dam at Poutes, has created a set of barriers which the fish cannot properly negotiate on their way to their breeding grounds.26 Consequently adopted as its symbol by SOS Loire Vivante, the salmon functioned as a metonymic signifier for opposition to the Serre de la Fare dam on two counts. First, in contrast to a conception of river basin solidarity promoted by the EPALA which required construction upstream to protect the development of areas downstream, the emphasis placed by protest groups on water quality worked towards creating solidarity in the opposite direction. Thus, while the mayor of Villerest argued that though he personally was against dams, Serre de la Fare had to be built because ‘in an integrated river development programme, Villerest shouldn’t have to pick up the pieces alone’,27 protest organisations attempted to reverse the direction of basin solidarity by stressing the damage done to upstream areas by poor water quality and physical obstacles in downstream areas. Second, the maintenance of the fish population on the Allier and Loire was central to the alternative economic development strategies proposed by the association. Instead of accepting the proposed dam as the key to economic regeneration therefore, SOS Loire Vivante has emphasised the ‘natural’ Loire gorges as a major resource for developing green tourism in the region, comparing the potential of the upper Loire and Allier to the estimated 30,000 people employed in fishing tourism in Scotland. Departmental and national angling associations were to form significant allies for protest groups, and in December 1990, SOS Loire Vivante helped establish the Fondation Saumon, an association based in Brioude with the specific objective of promoting the salmon population of the Loire. Most importantly, the emphasis on quality provided protesters with a viable alternative paradigm for challenging the established sectoral dependencies, relationships and basis of water resource management policy-making. In conjunction with the position of a decentralised political class as the project managing body, the promotion of this paradigm, crucially sustained by developments in policy-making at the European level, was subsequently critical to the development of a mutually productive relationship between protesters and the state administration.


Despite the commitment to protect the environment laid down in article 7 of the 1986 protocol, and the general programme for river ecosystem protection proposed in the Chapon report, for Courtet et al. the EPALA’s ‘elected representatives and engineers have curiously forgotten its environmental recommendations’ (1991, p. 67); indeed, Lalonde’s initial guarded criticisms of the project were that it ‘privileged hydraulic aspects, relegating what I would call ecological engineering to the background’.28 The absence of environmental protection measures was a key element in Lalonde’s decision to suspend the programme in 1989; the organisation of a local referendum in Le Puy in late 1990 was further proof of the growing influence of challenging groups in policy-making. The local referendum The opportunity structure literature, in its accounts of the formal closure of the French state to challenging groups, typically stresses the absence of the kind of direct democratic procedures commonly found in Switzerland (and, since the early 1990s, Italy). Yet instances of local public consultations over infrastructure projects in fact abound in France. Local referendums held at Lire, Golfech, and Port-la-Nouvelle in 1975, for example, each produced large majorities opposing the construction of nuclear reactors, while earlier that year the inhabitants of Flamanville had, in contrast, voted (by 425 votes to 248) in favour of a nuclear power station. More recently, a consultation publique was held in Alsace and FrancheComté in 1996 over the long-running Rhine–Rhône canal project, and in August 2001 the municipal councils of Chamonix, Les Houches, and Servoz jointly organised a local referendum over the planned reopening of the Mont Blanc tunnel, closed in March 1999 following the fire in which 39 people died. Despite wide criticism of this most recent exercise (the phrasing of the question was held in some quarters to be so leading, indeed, that the local PCF federation likened it to consulting people if they wanted to get cancer), the referendum was nonetheless hailed as a success by Les Verts, with over 97 per cent of votes cast maintaining that the tunnel should remain inaccessible to international road-freight. While during the 1970s such procedures had been carried out on a more or less unofficial basis, article 21 of the 1992 decentralisation laws bestowed official status on local consultative referendums. According to the new law, if 20 per cent of registered electors so demand, the municipal council is obliged to organise a public consultative referendum on any matters of territorial planning under its jurisdiction. For all this, however, French local public consultation procedures remain rather toothless. They have never been binding, and electors are restricted under


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the new dispositions to a maximum of one referendum demand per year, which, additionally, cannot be held during electoral periods or prior to the announcement of a court ruling on the project (Piechaczyk, 1997, p. 9). Further, a ruling of the Conseil d’État of December 1994 established that such procedures can only be invoked for projects within the competence of the municipal authority; infrastructural projects which may encroach upon the territory of a commune, but for which the relevant decisional authority is the state or other superior subnational authority, remain outside the remit of the procedure (Morand-Deviller, 1996, pp. 37–9). Thus the Mont Blanc referendum was in fact a consultation pour avis only, and furthermore declared invalid before it even went ahead, as the Grenoble administrative tribunal ruled (following a complaint lodged by the departmental prefect) that the conditions affecting the tunnel did not lie within the competence of the municipal councils in question. The public consultation on the Rhine–Rhône canal was similarly limited in scope and function: held merely to disseminate information and gauge public reaction to the project’s relaunch, it concerned neither the funding nor the public utility of the project, and was in any case carried out after the political decision to proceed had already been taken (see Loridan, 1997, p. 86). While creating a space for openness to societal pressures, therefore, the local consultation as practised in the Fifth Republic simultaneously sets clear limits to the state’s openness. Against this background, then, how should we interpret the Serre de la Fare referendum of winter 1990–91? Diani and Van der Heijden argue that the willingness to experiment with new participatory forms of democracy is a key element of the action repertoires used by élites to limit and contain protest, subsequently creating possibilities for policy pre-emption and/or the cooptation of protest groups or actors (1994, pp. 370–1). Yet the logic of Lalonde’s decision to consult the population of Le Puy on the dam project appears to be altogether different. Indeed, the salient element of the procedure is its indication of the developing mutual relationship between protest groups and the sectoral state administration. Thus if the interest of the Serre de la Fare referendum – officially a consultation pour avis on the issue of security only – lies in its stature as a barometer of the access afforded by the state to challenging groups, then this importance lies not so much in the level of formal as informal access to policy-making arenas. Following Lalonde’s decision of the previous April to postpone the start of construction work on Serre de la Fare, the government issued a statement on 7 February 1990 announcing the re-examination of both the Chambonchard and Serre de la Fare dams. For the former, the proposed


capacity of 125 million cubic metres was to be re-evaluated in the light of revised future projected needs, and the possibility of modifying the EDF hydroelectric dam at Rochebut to supply Montluçon. For the latter, the government proposed a seven-month period to consider alternative proposals to the water-stocking reservoir sought by the EPALA, in the light both of the spiralling cost of the project and of its negative impact upon the environment. Two alternative solutions were to be studied. These were, first, a ‘dry’ dam, without a reservoir, to be activated in extremis to contain rising flood waters. The second alternative solution was a system of dykes along the river bank, primarily in Brives-Charensac. The government statement ended with a rather vague commitment to take local opinion into account, although Lalonde had suggested in the days leading up to the cabinet meeting that a referendum could be organised.29 Vague though this commitment was, it clearly points to Lalonde’s influence within interministerial negotiations, and of the environment ministry’s capacity to reclaim decisional power at the centre despite the supposed decentralisation of the policy process. Indeed, the organisation of a local referendum was duly formally announced by the Haute-Loire prefect in late November 1990, but with an additional solution added to the three alternatives already discussed. This solution proposed the improvement of flood forecasting and warning systems, the strict enforcement of the legislation governing construction in flood-risk zones, the completion of small-scale protection work, the broadening of the river bed and the removal of obstacles hindering the flow of the river (such as the remodelling of road bridges in Brives to provide a wider arch), and perhaps most importantly, the creation of a local surveillance and study network bringing together political, economic, administrative, associational, and civil actors (see SOS Loire Vivante, 1992). Proposed by SOS Loire Vivante, this alternative (known as the Quatrième solution, or fourth solution) did not include a dam. Its inclusion in the referendum testifies to the extent of the fracture between local political élites and the central ministry, a fracture which ultimately led to the proposed referendum being definitively aborted at the end of January 1991. Where anti-dam protesters had initially mobilised to obstruct the EPALA programme, now regional political actors mobilised to block a state initiative. Citing procedural grounds – chiefly, objections to the time-frame (too short) and geographical extent (too broad) of the referendum, but also insisting that the fourth solution should not be admissible because, unlike the others, it was not a ‘technical’ solution – local élus, primarily the Association des maires de la Haute-Loire, succeeded in repeatedly delaying the consultation.30 Two further events hardened the resolve


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of the local representatives. First, over 900 of the 1000 or so comments made at the public display illustrating the different proposals favoured the fourth solution.31 Second, to the evident anger of the EPALA, an opinion poll sponsored by the environment ministry was published in L’Éveil on 30 December 1990. The poll, carried out over the whole département, found consistent majority support for SOS Loire Vivante and the fourth solution, but little confidence in the EPALA; in the communes most at risk, 60 per cent of those interviewed preferred SOS Loire Vivante’s proposal compared to only 16 per cent for the dam with reservoir. Moreover, the poll also pointed to the greater trust enjoyed by the opponents in the locality. Asked in whom they had most confidence to decide on the scheme, 41 per cent of respondents in the Haute-Loire, rising to 47 per cent in Le Puy and 52 per cent in those communes at risk, named the environmental associations as the most competent. In contrast, the EPALA enjoyed the confidence of only 5 per cent of those questioned.32 If the local opinion poll and cancelled referendum denote a decisive state in the construction of a mutually supportive relationship between environment ministry and protest groups, then the reaction of local political élites to this procedure is equally instructive. Local notable Jacques Barrot, the president of the Haute-Loire departmental council, centreright député for Le Puy and former minister under Giscard, having already issued a communiqué deploring that ‘un pouvoir parisien’ had imposed the form of the public consultation without any prior discussion with local politicians,33 reacted to the publication of the opinion poll by arguing that the government had let the environment ministry use ‘methods unacceptable in decentralised France’.34 For Jean Proriol, Gaullist député for Le Puy’s other constituency, president of the Maires de la Haute-Loire, and vice-president of the Auvergne regional council, the decision to hold the local consultation represented ‘a crisis of the state’s authority’.35 The departmental branch of the PCF reacted similarly, denouncing the ‘sudden, bureaucratic and authoritarian’ manner in which it felt the decision to consult the inhabitants directly had been taken.36 ‘Under pressure from which lobby’, wondered aloud Georges Evrard, mayor of Brignon and president of pro-dam organisation Serre de la Fare Loire Avenir, ‘has a third solution been added when the [government] communiqué spoke only of two?’37 In fact, the inclusion of the fourth solution can perhaps best be understood as part of the development of dialogue between the environment ministry and environmental associations, resulting in the latter’s participation in informal policy-making discussions. A delegation from Loire Vivante first met with Lalonde in Paris in September 1988; having been persuaded of the necessity of concertation


with environmental groups by Rocard in November 1988, Royer subsequently agreed to a first tripartite meeting between the state, the EPALA and Loire Vivante, presided over by coordinating prefect Paul Bernard, in January 1989. As a consequence Loire Vivante was invited to participate in two EPALA working groups, the first on flood protection, the second on eutrophication. Lalonde’s statement of December 1990 that ‘too often in the past, important decisions have been taken without those most directly concerned being properly informed and consulted’,38 is not only in keeping with numerous pronouncements on democratic decision-making but with a well-established pattern of ministerial ouverture to protest groups. The GRRM report Indeed, the fourth solution was the result of a study funded by a 350,000 F grant from the environment ministry to Loire Vivante. The study – carried out at the request of Loire Vivante by Groupe de recherche sur les risques majeurs (GRRM), an independent research group based at the University of Grenoble – was commissioned with the objective of demonstrating the technical and financial feasibility of an alternative solution to the EPALA proposals. It had two principal lines of enquiry: the events of the 1980 flood and the effectiveness of the institutional arrangements then in place, and an analysis of the local cultural construction of the river and the reactions to the flood which eventually led to the Serre de la Fare construction project. Delivered in June 1990, the report underlined throughout the importance of the river in cultural constructions of local identity, particularly the affective nature of the relationship between the river and the riverains (GRRM, 1990, p. 7). On the other, it highlighted the insufficiency of the application of planning regulations, with local élus adopting a pragmatic approach to the granting of planning permission following a ‘doctrine’ established by the DDE. The study found that, among other things, the elaboration of plans d’occupation des sols (POS), or urban planning documents, had not been systematic practice in the smaller communes of the Haute-Loire in 1980, and that there had been no comprehensive approach to planning on the Loire as a whole, with individual cases being considered piecemeal (ibid, pp. 12–20). Furthermore, the report argued that the conversion of the local political class to the dam scheme in the early 1980s, having been opponents of the project when it was initially proposed in the 1970s, could be ascribed to a progressive refusal on their part to accept responsibility for the consequences of a possible future flood (ibid, p. 90). The GRRM report had a double effect. First, by underlining the reluctance of local political actors to take reponsibility for flood control, it served to undermine their legitimacy to take decisions on the type and


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future of the project, an attitude reinforced by the refusal of prominent local politicians – and, ultimately of the EPALA – to have anything to do with a solution which did not include the construction of a protective dam. Second, the report made it possible for protest groups to put forward constructive counter-proposals for the first time. Thus whereas in January 1990 Jean-François Arnould had argued that ‘we aren’t here to propose alternative solutions … we’re posing problems, asking questions’,39 the report’s findings enabled the organisation to draw up the fourth solution’s five-point programme. It is to this point, therefore, that the development of the protest group into a policy actor and project managing body can ultimately be traced. Indeed, the alternatives proposed by SOS Loire Vivante were subsequently to form, after further study in the Pierron report, the basis of the solution retained by the government in July 1991 and authorised three years later by the PLGN. On one level, therefore, the ultimate implementation of the PLGN in the Haute-Loire can be firmly situated within a strategy of the inclusion of associational actors within the decisional process, a dynamic which proved to be mutually reinforcing. The inclusion of protest groups within national and subnational consultations and the financing of counterproposals are consistent with Lalonde’s much repeated will to open decisional structures to non-institutional actors. Moreover, such inclusion not only contributed to the construction of the legitimacy of the associations as responsible actors, but further produced the complementary effect of weakening the legitimacy of established élites. Indeed, it is a measure of the extent of the legitimacy enjoyed by the protesters that Michel Barnier, environment minister under the 1993–95 Balladur government, not only continued this process but also formally visited the Indiens of SOS Loire Vivante camped on the construction site, and obliging almost the entire local political class to do so at the same time. For Martin Arnould, Barnier completed our legitimacy by coming, by visiting all the sites, by putting discussions with the [environmental] associations on the same level as those with the local politicians, by validating Loire Vivante’s arguments, by keeping discussions open. [… His visit] was the public recognition of a relationship which had been well established since 1991.40 The Plan Loire Grandeur Nature ‘After a few difficult years’, wrote Royer following the announcement of the PLGN, ‘the EPALA is once again the state’s privileged partner.’41 These ‘difficult years’ had witnessed a major breakdown in the relationship between the EPALA and an administration insisting on the renegotiation of the 1986 protocol in order to take into account new developments in


approaches to water management; an administration which, furthermore, was fostering links with groups which were themselves openly and, by occupying the construction site, illegally opposing the implementation of its own programme. Such was the breakdown in established dependency relationships that a parliamentary commission of inquiry was held in late 1992, again extending dialogue to environmental groups, in order to break the deadlock between the state and its ‘privileged partner’. Moreover, despite the insistence on the renewed partnership between state and the EPALA, it is clear that the relationship between the participants has fundamentally changed. The emphasis on quality and recalculating quantitative needs in the PLGN represents an important stage in the application of the principles of integrated water resource management established by the water reforms of two years before. A ten-year sustainable development programme, the PLGN applies to the whole river basin many of the principles outlined in the fourth solution. Arguably the most notable of these are the improvement of the CRISTAL flood warning system operated by the EPALA, the prohibition of further construction work in high floodrisk zones, and the publication of detailed maps of areas prone to flooding. Yet the PLGN is also remarkable for the manner of its elaboration and the principles of partnership it establishes. Its production was the result of a wide consultation exercise including associative as well as established political and economic actors, reproducing the process conducted at national and regional level by the environment ministry in 1990–91. In similar fashion to the renegotiated 1992 water law, the ministry has used the PLGN to reaffirm the dominant role of the state in water resource management. ‘For the major water courses’, argued Lalonde, ‘the state was wrong to disengage.’42 For Royer, the role of Lalonde was clearly determinant; yet the dual principles of state direction and openness to environmentalist associations were also central to the procedures implemented and imposed by each of his successors, Ségolène Royal and Barnier. ‘La Loire’, announced Barnier when presenting the Plan in January 1994, ‘est une affaire d’État.’43 Highly critical of the lack of state representation on the EPALA’s comité syndical, the all-party parliamentary commission clearly agreed, concluding that the institutional management of the basin should be developed with a greater, more integrated role for both economic and environmental partner organisations.44 For SOS Loire Vivante, the recognition of the role to be played by environmental associations in eco-system protection represents ‘une petite révolution’, as the Plan’s emphasis on concertation establishes challenging groups as legitimised, semi-institutional actors, in partnership with


153

the state administration, the basin agencies, and the EPALA.45 In the words of Ségolène Royal, we have established an interesting dialogue with a constructive association. In a case as difficult as this, it’s good to be able to count on responsible associations, as well as on politicians who are mindful of the importance of environmental issues.46 To this effect, SOS Loire Vivante has entered into partnership with the DDE in the implementation of the proposals originally made in the fourth solution, and environmental associations have participated in numerous study groups on river system management and protection. ‘The association, until now organised as an oppositional force, is recognised as a responsible organisation participating in local decision-making,’ celebrated SOS Loire Vivante.47 The PLGN also ordered the ‘decommissioning’ of two dams with the specific goal of reintroducing 6000 salmon into the river basin within ten years. In late 1994, the state therefore declined to renew the operating licences of two EDF-managed hydroelectric dams constructed between the wars, at St Etienne du Vigan on the upper Allier and Maisons-Rouges on the Vienne. Despite the continued resistance of local political actors (including Royer and René Monory), the dams were subsequently demolished in June and October 1998 respectively. Initial assessments by the Conseil supérieur de la pêche of the effect of this action have been positive, with significant numbers of Atlantic salmon, lamprey and shad able to recolonise the river Vienne upstream of MaisonsRouges (Chapon, 2000). The modification of two further dams on the Vienne basin, at Châtellerault and Descartes, has subsequently been set as a central element of the renegotiated PLGN. Such dam decommissioning testifies to the involvement of associations in decision-making and the application of a new methodology of resource management. SOS Loire Vivante formed part of the pilot committee for St Etienne du Vigan; a working party for Maisons-Rouges included the basin agency, state field services (DDE, DDAF, DIREN) and environmental and angling associations. The desire of the environment ministry firstly to reassert its authority, and secondly to establish a methodology of partnership, is also present in the PLGN’s commitment to a 170 MF programme of environmental works, and the creation of an interministerial ‘Plan Loire’ coordinating body presided over by the basin prefect. Environmental associations and the EPALA are both included in the implementation of the European LIFE programme.


In the wider sectoral context, these two chapters have stressed that the Loire development programme should not be considered in isolation from developments in the decision-making structures and procedures which characterise water policy as a whole. The negotiation and renegotiation of the dam programme must be seen as part of a trend to greater openness and democratisation of decision-making in the water policy sector, fundamentally altering both the composition of the policy community and the definition of the water problematic. According to Buller (1996a, p. 302), in addition to the increasing investment of policy responsibility in the hands of local actors, the new territorialization of water policy enshrined in the SAGE and the potential new powers implicitly given to environmental pressure groups by the definition of water quality objectives reveal a second shift away from state responsibility towards civil responsibility in achieving and maintaining environmental standards. In contrast, although the EPALA was specifically invited to participate in the implementation of the alternative proposals for the Haute-Loire, it ultimately declined this invitation. For the EPALA, the purely local character of the project effectively prevented the involvement of subnational authorities from other parts of the basin.48 The implementation of the 220 MF project was therefore wholly financed by the environment ministry, with neither the basin agency nor the EPALA contributing financially. Furthermore, in a seeming repetition of the relationship between the state and local political élites which characterised the Serre de la Fare protest, the EPALA reacted vociferously to the reluctance of the government to authorise the beginning of construction work on Chambonchard despite the signature of the DUP on 12 December 1996. In July 1998, the EPALA’s comité syndical voted to suspend its financial contribution to the PLGN, and in September of the same year refused a 4 MF EC grant for the restoration of the salmon on the upper Allier. In November 1999, the conseil d’administration of the Loire-Bretagne basin agency voted to accept the July 1999 government decision to withhold state funding for Chambonchard. The basin agency therefore also withdrew from funding arrangements for the dam, and to work with the environment ministry and associations in the implementation of an alternative sustainable development plan for the Cher. In autumn 2001, the EPALA took the decision to rename itself EPL (Établissement Public Loire), aiming to draw a line under the saga.

6 Roads Policy and Multilevel Decision-Making

In common with the previous chapters, the present investigation aims to develop our understanding of state–group relationships in contemporary France. This case study, like the last, will pay detailed attention to the evolution and elaboration of policy through successive policy stages. As the discussion of the Loire dam programme demonstrates, sectorisation and policy networks provide a useful counterpoint to conceptualisations of the state which stress its unity. Indeed, we need to conceive of the French state not as a single entity but as a vertically and horizontally fragmented organisation of policy responsibilities, developing, authorising, and implementing policy through diverse forums and relationships. Moreover, our conceptualisation of these relationships should not be restricted merely to the interplay of institutional centres; as Keating (1992, p. 56) reminds us, ‘[p]olicy-making capacity is not merely a matter of possessing defined competences and legislating norms but of mobilizing social and economic interests in a project for development.’ It is with these issues in mind that this chapter will address roads policy-making in France in general, and the Somport road tunnel in particular. As we shall see, roads policy – historically highly regulated, technocratic, and quantitively important as a social and economic activity throughout western European states – provides a strong contrast with the analysis of water resource management set out in the previous two chapters. The argument is set out here in three principal sections. The first will establish the sectoral architecture of transport infrastructure provision in France, before discussing the influence of European regional policy on the development of policy networks; in fact, it will be seen that the development of policy through European institutional structures is central to the Somport policy process in terms of transport as well as 155


regional policy. The second section will therefore examine the elaboration of a common European transport policy. Bearing in mind the consequences of the policy process for the subsequent pattern of state– group relations, this section will investigate the existence, structure, and membership of transport policy networks, before the third section – mindful of the strength of the French state in this sector – will address the continuing role of the nation state within the policy process, and the specific origin and formulation of the project. Here, it will be argued that multilevel governance, as discussed in Chapter 3, is crucial to our understanding of the project’s promotion and consequently to the pattern of relationships between protesters and developers. And as the next chapter will go on to argue, this process is central to the basis on which the campaign against the tunnel has been fought and, indeed, the ability of protesters to challenge the scheme through institutional arenas. It is with the French state that we will begin, however.

Transport infrastructure: a stable policy community and a ‘strong’ national policy sector Where the development of water policy was dominated by the process of sectorisation and the evolution of the policy network, the established dependencies within the strongly vertically-integrated policy sector of transport infrastructure correspond much more closely to archetypal models of the French state. France has had a centralised national state authority concerned with the regulation and planning of transport since the ancien régime; the Corps des Ingénieurs des Ponts et Chaussées was established in the seventeenth century, and institutionalised in 1740. The sector has long been characterised by bureaucratic interventionism designed to protect the state’s interests in economic development, military defence, and internal control. State officials have traditionally exercised strong control over the sector, employing diverse and extensive means – such as tarification, quotas, and subsidies – to impose centrally-determined policy preferences (Thoenig and Despicht, 1975, pp. 390–4). Indeed, the configuration of the sector corresponds closely to the fourpoint typology of meso-level state strength constructed by Atkinson and Coleman (1989, p. 52). Thus the Direction des routes within the transport and infrastructure ministry provides the hierarchical reference point for the elaboration and implementation of centralised policy intiatives. The DDE, the ministry’s departmental field services, are almost exclusively constituted of members of the élite Ponts et Chaussées technical corps,

Roads Policy and Multilevel Decision-Making 157

creating a strong esprit de corps and unity of purpose. Due to the extent of its technical expertise and local contacts, and its consequent unique ability to control all stages of the civil engineering policy process, the Ponts et Chaussées emerges as the strongest of all the state administrative corps (Grémion, 1976, pp. 190–3). Institutional permanence, allied to the size, technical scope, and prestige of the corps, has been the bedrock of its ability to act autonomously (Dupuy and Thoenig, 1983, p. 63). The control of the state bureaucracy over the policy sector is further extended in two ways. First, pantouflage has been a major feature of the relationship between the Ponts et Chaussées and private motorway construction companies. Second, the alliance of engineers and economists within the state agencies has enabled them, through the legitimacy of their technical expertise, to enforce decisions on local interests and reduce the importance of public debate in policy decisions (Thoenig and Despicht, 1975, p. 395). Indeed, in matters of road infrastructure provision and exploitation, the French state continues to be able to marginalise or exclude challenging interests (Dunn, 1995, p. 290), an ability which has contributed to the perception of the DDE by environmentalists, liberal intellectuals and consumers’ groups (among others) as the embodiment of the undemocratic, secretive, arrogant, technocratic state, practising the politics of the fait accompli and colluding with the roads lobby. It is important therefore to emphasise that the engineers of the DDE are far from the neutral executors of centrally determined policy choices, but have a vested interest in the execution of construction projects, as the DDE is differentiated from the other state technical services through its capacity to act as a private enterprise, functioning as clients for local authorities (typically, state engineers cultivate local contacts). The financial rewards gained by the state agents from the exercise of their functions are supplemented by those they can make from the private contracts negotiated with their client groups. Furthermore, the same agents represent the state when a tender is put out, verifying the opportunity and technical feasibility of prospective projects, and even acting as a lobbying group at central ministry level; the DDE is therefore in a position to cumulate the roles of conception, control, and implementation (Dupuy and Thoenig, 1983, pp. 67–79; Grémion, 1976, p. 190). The finance and development of France’s motorway network Since the 1960s, horizontal coordination of sectoral policy has been assured by the DATAR, whose creation served to highlight the centrality


of transport infrastructure to the promotion and more even distribution of economic development within France. Since this period in particular, the extension and modernisation of France’s road transport network has been a vital feature of regionalised planning programmes. Road infrastructure development was, for example, a principal tool of the national plan’s goals to encourage the location of industrial employment in the French west (see Chapter 4). And where previously subjected to fluctuating pressures, the inclusion of road provision within the planning process enabled it to receive more sustained attention and, particularly, greater state expenditure commitment. Indeed, by the time of the 5th national plan (1966–70), total state expenditure for roads had reached 26 billion francs, while under the 6th national plan (1971–75), road and motorway construction was prioritised as key programme areas alongside tourism, industrial reconversion, and rural support (CNAT, 1971). The subsequent development of France’s motorway network has certainly been impressive, yet the budgetary constraints on central funding in particular have also ensured fluctuations in the rhythm of construction work. Indeed, although motorway construction reached a peak of 350 km/year in the mid-1970s, this was to fall back to an average of only 150 km per year by the late 1980s. Nonetheless, the diversification of funding mechanisms for motorway construction coupled with a series of political initiatives undertaken in the context of the preparation of the European single market have ensured successive programme relaunches; the increase in the rhythm of construction during the first part of the 1990s, indeed, was little short of spectacular, as construction increased every year save one during the early and mid-1990s, from the 156 km of work started in 1990 to the 412 km started in 1997. The resultant SDRN (Schéma directeur routier national) reference document of April 1988 aimed to relaunch motorway construction at an average of 280 km/year over the succeeding ten-year period, in order to prepare France’s road transport infrastructure for the Single European Market. The justification and context given by Jacques Chirac for the Plan Mehaignerie are, indeed, firmly European; according to the then prime minister, it was imperative to ‘enable France to be competitive when Europe’s borders open up […] to open the regions up to each other as well as to the Community’, as infrastructural planning was ‘necessary once more in the perspective of the construction of the great European single market in 1993’.1 Subsequently modified and extended by a new SDRN drawn up in April 1992, and accelerated in November 1993 by Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, the construction programme

Roads Policy and Multilevel Decision-Making 159 Table 6.1

The re-launched motorway construction programme 1988 SDRN (km)

Autoroutes de liaison LACRA Autoroutes de liaison and LACRA GLAT Total national highways network

8,590 2,740 11,330 4,850 36,800

1992 SDRN (km) 9,540 2,580 12,120 4,410 37,700

Source: Direction des Routes, 2001.

is designed to create a national motorway network of some 12,120 km by 2003 (see Table 6.1). By January 2000, some 11,000 km had been completed. The programme differentiates between two main categories of motorway link, known as interurban Autoroutes de liaison, the quasi-totality of which are péage toll-motorways, and LACRA, Liaisons assurant la continuité du réseau autoroutier. Classified as motorways even though they are non-toll routes, LACRA are either new highways or sections of already existing highway upgraded to motorway standard to fill in the missing links in the interurban network, typically as four-lane dual carriageways. The 1992 SDRN further envisages the extension of the GLAT (Grandes liaisons d’aménagement du territoire) network; these are not new highways, but non-motorway routes whose maintenance and modernisation are prioritised because of their strategic importance within the national network. The vast majority of the motorway programme is not funded directly by the state, therefore, but rather through a debt-financing mechanism managed by the six regional motorway-operating companies grouped within the SEMCA (Sociétés d’économie mixte de concessionnaires d’autoroutes). Responsible for construction and maintenance, these semi-public companies are granted a concession by the state for each specific motorway link, negotiated since 1994 within five-year planning programmes. The SEMCA recoup their investment, funded by borrowing, through the péage user tolls system. It is important to underline that Balladur’s acceleration of the programme was therefore achieved not by pledging extra government funds, but rather by authorising increases in the debt envelope available to the SEMCA (from 11 to 14 MdF per year), allowing them to borrow more money and thus finance more construction work per year. The mechanism thus allows for considerable increase in infrastructure investment in the face of national budgetary constraints.


Nonetheless, the state continues to wholly or partly fund LACRA projects, the vast majority of which – in common with GLAT projects – are financed through the state–region planning contracts (CPER), which were introduced in 1984 to coincide with the 9th national plan. The importance accorded to transport in national plans stretching back to the plan directeur of 1960 has thus been maintained since the postDefferre contractualisation of regional planning, with the state committing 23.3 thousand million francs to roads infrastructure for the second CPER (1989–93), 27.5 MdF for the third CPER (1994–98, subsequently extended to 1999), and a further 33.5 MdF for the period of the fourth CPER (2000–06). The Somport project and multilevel funding As the funding of the Somport tunnel testifies, the central French administration is far from the only institutional actor involved in this particular policy process, however. Indeed, although the French state’s contribution to the cost of the French part of the tunnel is (according to initial official projections) 136 MF, it is but one of four governmental actors participating in the total outlay of 370 MF. Alongside central state funding, as Table 6.2 shows, European Community grants and the budgets of the Aquitaine regional and Pyrénées-Atlantiques departmental authorities are major funding sources for the project. It should be noted, however, that these figures refer only to the funds allocated for the construction of the French part of the tunnel. In fact, 68 per cent of the cost of the tunnel is borne by the Spanish authorities, again with a contribution from the ERDF; the multilevel funding arrangement for the French side covers the remaining 32 per cent of the total projected cost of 1150 MF. Moreover, even on the French side of the border, the project is divided into three separate funding operations: the construction of the tunnel; the modernisation of the RN134 highway through the Aspe valley, between Oloron Ste Marie and the Table 6.2

Funding sources for the Somport tunnel (France)

Governmental tier

French state European Community (ERDF) Aquitaine regional council Pyrénées Atlantiques departmental council

Contribution (million francs)

Percentage of total cost of project

136 98 81.6 54.4

36.7 26.5 22.1 15.7


tunnel; and the construction of the A650 motorway between Pau and Oloron. Funding for the RN134, officially inscribed as a GLAT highway, is similar to the multilevel mechanism introduced for the tunnel. Thus the arrangements, which enabled the region to apply for support from EC structural funds, also required financial investment from the regional budget, negotiated within successive state–region planning contracts. Community funding thus comprised 9 MF allocated through the ERDF in 1988, and a further 42 MF allocated to the project in December 1989 as part of a support package distributed to Aquitaine through the EC’s Integrated Mediterranean Programme (in fact the first instalment of an eventual grant of 84 million francs). The majority of funds, however, were to be allocated through state–region planning programmes: 27 MF were set aside between 1986 and 1988 under the first CPER, while construction work in the Aspe valley on the Bedous bypass, and for the section between Urdos and Forges d’Abel leading directly to the tunnel entrance, was financed under the second CPER, where total state and regional funding for the RN134 exceeded 200 MF. By the end of the second CPER in 1993, 42.7 of the 91.8 kilometres separating Pau and the tunnel entrance were scheduled to have already been completed under these arrangements. It is thus important to stress that while the project as a whole comes under the guise of a European road transport network, the road development on the French side of the border is specifically funded by the EC as a regional development project, and is but one part of an arrangement linking actors at national, subnational and supranational levels. As Robert (1996, p. 34) argues, it is ever more difficult for aménagement policies to be carried out on the basis of the nation state alone; rather, it is the spatial relationships between French regions and European markets which increasingly dictate French road infrastructural policy. Moreover, state and European programme contractualisation is seen by regional authorities and business interests as the key to regional economic development within the single market. As we shall see in the next chapter, the splitting up of the project into constituent parts has not only been one of the central concerns of the campaign against the tunnel, but has also been a key structuring factor in the creation of protest opportunities.

European transport policy Despite the unity, strength, closure and centralisation of transport infrastructure policy-making in France, therefore, the national state is but


one actor within a policy framework characterised by multilevel governance, involving national, supranational, and decentralised policy centres in complex decisional interrelationships. Yet, when identifying the construction of and relationships between policy communities at different governmental tiers, it is also important not to lose sight of the synchronic aspects of policy formulation. Indeed, as was argued of the Loire dam programme, concentration on the existence of the horizontal and vertical segmentation of policy is not in itself sufficient for understanding protest trajectories. Rather, the involvement of different actors at successive policy process phases is crucial to the construction of state and group actions and discourses. It is in this context therefore that we should approach the decisionmaking process which authorised the Trans-European road network (TEN) programme, and the Somport tunnel project in particular. Indeed, the development of European transport policy through successive multi-annual action programmes from the mid-1980s onwards has explicitly been carried out with the involvement of private, public, regional, and state-level actors. In a December 1990 communication to the European Council and the European Parliament, Towards TransEuropean Networks: for a Community action programme, the Commission argued that national and regional representatives must be integrated into a wider European framework to enable greater coordination between all levels of decision-making, and to avoid the fragmentation of traditional levels of competence for the planning and implementation of infrastructure projects. At European level, therefore, we need to investigate not merely the existence of infrastructural policy but also the establishment of policy communities at the agenda-setting and policy elaboration phases. As we shall see, the salient aspect of this process is the construction of an initial policy community at the primary policy phase featuring supranational governmental and business group actors, before widening at the second phase to include national governments as part of the development of policy between the European Commission and the Council of Ministers. The contribution of two groups has been crucial: first, the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), and, second, the Motorway Working Group (MWG), of which the ERT was a prominent member. Before we discuss their input, however, some background is necessary. The basis of European transport policy Although the Treaty of Rome expressly provided for a common European transport policy, it was not until the mid-1980s that the initial


steps towards its establishment were made concrete (Gwilliam, 1990, pp. 230–2). Even though the Council of Ministers had set up a Transport Infrastructure Committee in 1978 to ensure coordination between member states, action was to prove difficult to achieve during the 1980s. Only in 1982 did the Council accept a regulation providing for the financing of transport infrastructure projects, and then only on an annually renewable basis, effectively blocking medium- and long-term planning projects. Indeed, such was the inability of the Council to reach a cross-national consensus over a common transport policy, that in 1983 the European Parliament, with the support of the Commission, took it to the European Court of Justice over its non-observance of the Treaty. The resultant May 1985 ruling that the Council of Ministers was indeed obliged to produce legislation proved to be a turning point for European transport policy, particularly in the light of Lord Cockfield’s White Paper on the completion of the internal market (Papaioannou and Stasinopoulos, 1991, pp. 203–4). The paper, which formed the basis of the subsequent Single European Act, stressed that without a coherent pan-European policy enabling the free movement of goods, services and persons within and between member states, the single market would not be realisable. That there is a direct link between the level of economic development in peripheral areas of the Community and the accessibility and availability of transport infrastructure has, in fact, long been a key assumption underpinning EC policy-making for both transport and regional policy. Such, for example, was the rationale of the proposal submitted to the Council by the Commission in October 1986 for a European transport infrastructure programme. The Commission particularly underlined the importance of transport infrastructure to regional economic development, arguing that Major infrastructure projects […] contribute to the consolidation of the internal market and the integration of the peripheral regions; as a result of the snowball effect they have on the development of those regions, they also help to make the Community more cohesive.2 The need to provide a physical structure to integrate the newly joined ‘peripheral’ regions of Spain, Portugal and Greece into a European transport system so that they may ‘participate fully in the economic and social activity of the Community’ was further highlighted.3 In 1990, therefore, the Council finally provided for a three-year European transport infrastructure programme, with a total budget of 328 million euros,


producing a regulation which was subsequently incorporated into the road transport section of the trans-European networks, the guidelines for which were subsequently laid out in the 1991 Maastricht Treaty (CECMWG, 1993, pp. 2–3). Alongside networks for vocational training, energy, and telecommunications, the Maastricht Treaty specifically established trans-European transport networks, again with the goal of increasing economic and social cohesion within the Community. A supranational policy community: business representation and the TEN Particularly since the extension of the EC’s policy formulation powers by the SEA, corporate interest groups have organised formally to lobby European institutional actors on national, sectoral, and international bases. Indeed, since the mid-1980s, large firms – often multi-nationals – have increasingly tended to group together in European Federations (more commonly referred to as Euro-groups) as a supplement (rather than as an alternative) to affiliation-based sectoral groups; Nugent, in fact, ranks this among the most significant developments in the European policy process (1994, pp. 253–9). By definition aggregating the interests of member organisations spanning more than one member state, such groups are generally welcomed by the Commission because they enable it to deal with an already established, coherent position transcending the national ideological differences which complicate the formulation of European legislation. Euro-groups, approximately half of which represent industrial and commercial producer associations, have privileged status within the European policy process and are officially recognised by the EC as representative bodies with the right to be consulted over policy (Gorges, 1993, p. 78). Arguably the most powerful and influential of all Euro-groups is the ERT. Established in 1983 with the encouragement of the Commission, the ERT groups together the Chief Executive Officers of just under fifty of Europe’s leading multinational companies. The group retains close contacts with nearly all the DGs of the Commission, as well as the other EC institutions, by whom it is regarded as representative of the needs of European industry (Cowles, 1995a, p. 515). Principally active in the promotion and strengthening of the internal market and increasing the international competitiveness of European industry, the ERT is a ‘strategic player’ (Greenwood, 1997, p. 112), an ‘idea generator and agenda-setter for specific issues of importance to its membership’ (Cowles, 1995b, p. 225). Although these ‘specific issues of importance’ fall into several action areas, the ERT has been arguably most prominent


in developing proposals for trans-European transport infrastructure networks. Indeed, the inclusion of the TENs in the Maastricht Treaty was a direct result of the proposals of the ERT, particularly the recommendations made in a report submitted to the Commission in December 1994 entitled The missing links: upgrading Europe’s trans-border ground transport infrastructure. Along with a second ERT report of March 1989 (Need for renewing transport infrastructure in Europe), and two further reports from automobile interest groups, the first from European Community Constructors and the second compiled by the International Road Federation (IRF), this report in particular is cited in Commission communications to the Council of Ministers as proof of the ‘need to do something about transport demand’, providing a source of statistical information facilitating the estimation of public funding for the action programmes. The information provided by peak and sectoral business groups served to strengthen the arguments of the Commission when repeatedly requesting action on transport infrastructure from the Council of Ministers. More directly, such groups were central to the elaboration of the programme masterplan. This second phase of the Europeanlevel policy process was essentially completed through the composition of a specially formed working party, the MWG. The group met six times before producing its final report in February 1992 (CECMWG, 1993). This report, like the interim report produced by the MWG in November 1991, was endorsed and forwarded by the Commission to the Council. Established within the Transport Infrastructure Committee in January 1991, the MWG comprised representatives of all of the (at that time) 12 member states, of Commission Directorates DGII, III, VII, XI, XIII, and XVI (responsible for economic and financial affairs, industrial affairs and the internal market, transport, environment, telecommunications, and regional policy, respectively), and of representatives of industrial and commercial interest groups in the road transport sector (CECMWG, 1993, pp. 117–19). It is worth highlighting the exact composition of this last component group. Along with the ERT and the IRF (established in 1948 to promote the planning, construction, improvement and maintenance of national and international road systems), the MWG featured representatives of a relatively homogeneous set of organisations. Thus alongside the Secrétariat européen des concessionnaires d’autoroutes à péage, the MWG comprised the Permanent International Association of Road Congresses (PIARC), the Association des constructeurs européens d’automobiles, the International Road Transport Union (IRU), and the International Touring Alliance.


Not surprisingly, these groups share numerous common aims and procedural approaches. The main aim of the IRU is ‘to co-ordinate and support efforts made in different countries with a view to developing transport of passengers and goods by road’, while for the PIARC, the promotion of the ‘provision and interconnection of road systems necessary to the social and economic progress of the respective countries’ is the principal objective (UIA, 1994, p. 1012, p. 1287). While the Commission looked to the MWG as its primary source of information and when assessing reaction to its interim proposal to the Council in July 1990 for a work programme leading to trans-European networks, it also held an extended consultation period with European business organisations representative of the industrial and service sectors affected by the networks. In particular, the Commission organised an informal hearing for such interests in the presence of its officials and the national coordinators of the respective member states in October 1990. The possibilities for sectoral interest groups to participate in policy formulation are thus well documented and numerous. Yet, despite the presence of environmental Euro-groups and, indeed, of national and multinational pressure groups organised within member states, environmental interest groups remained outsider groups in the transport infrastructure policy process. The composition and proposals of the MWG clearly place environmental concerns behind the requirements of the mobility considered to be necessary to the effective functioning of the internal market in goods and services. Indeed, among the points listed in the final text of the proposal sent to the Council by the Commission as necessary to the continuation of the work on transport infrastructure already underway is the need to ‘evaluate the impact of the trans-European network on the environment, so that it does not adversely affect the economic efficiency of the transport system and the freedom of choice of the users’ (my italics).4 Whitelegg (1994a, p. 1) reports that at no time during the policy elaboration process was there any consultation with environmental groups. Moreover, EC environmental policy has clearly taken second place to single market policies. The publication of grandiose road construction plans and associated funding mechanisms in 1992 before the transport policy White Paper demonstrates the primacy of transport infrastructure arguments and the relative insignificance of both environmental arguments and a balanced transport policy. (Whitelegg, 1993, p. 147)


Whitelegg himself played a central role in the construction of the arguments against the TEN put forward by Greenpeace (see Whitelegg, 1994a,b,c), to which – along with those put forward by the other protest groups organising against the Somport tunnel – the next chapter will return. Given that dissenting voices to the TEN were not consulted during the second, formulation stage of the policy process, the next chapter will investigate whether such voices remain excluded at all stages and all levels of the process. Indeed, it would be misleading to suggest that the TEN policy process was either a matter of purely supranationalist policy-making or that the lobbying procedure for local or sectoral interests has undergone a total shift from the national to the European level.

The polycentric model of the European public policy process National governments, in fact, exerted considerable influence in the elaboration of the TEN in their respective countries. In a general context, the development of intra- and inter-urban transport infrastructure is perceived by national governments as one of the few remaining avenues available to them to promote the competitiveness of their cities within an international market economy (Bruinsma and Rietveld, 1993, pp. 919–20). Not surprisingly, therefore, national administrations have sought to play central roles in the translation of European policy initiatives into infrastructural realities. Thus, in common with other European states, three officials from the French transport and infrastructure ministry sat on the MWG (CECMWG, 1993, p. 118). Moreover, although the transport masterplan is drawn up at EC level, it is the relevant national authorities of respective member states who have been responsible for implementational decisions. Specifically, this includes the carrying out of impact and feasibility studies, and the choice of routing. In the case of the Somport tunnel, the former were carried out by the DATAR and its Spanish equivalent MOPU, and the latter undertaken, for the French section, by the DDE. More generally, although the national governments of France and Spain drew up the road masterplans for their respective countries on the same basis – that of increased regional accessibility to existing motorway networks – they used different criteria. In Spain, studies were undertaken to quantify time savings to the motorway network from different regions, and to ensure the provision of a broadly uniform territorial coverage. In France, the masterplan concentrates on the west


of the country, aiming to place most average-sized towns in that area within an hour of the motorway network (ECMT, 1995, pp. 91–2). Moreover, national administrations remain important allies for interest groups in the European policy process, as European integration has enhanced tendencies for national policy communities to form between domestic client groups and national administrations. As national strategies tend to centre on the minimisation of disadvantages in the initial policy drafting stages, interest groups lobby national administrations early in the process (McLaughlin and Jordan, 1993, pp. 140–1). The Council of Ministers remains the most important decision-making European institution; it is thus crucial for interest groups to convince national governments to defend their interests (Grant, 1993, p. 28). Further, the state also supports and organises subnational authorities at the European level. Thus the French permanent representation in Brussels includes a sous-préfet responsible for regional affairs, the DATAR holds training sessions on the EC structural funds for local government administrators, and transfrontier associations such as the Grand Sud and Grand Est were established with the support of the DATAR and the French government, anxious to bolster the French regions in the face of the larger, better organised German Länder (Mazey, 1995, pp. 151–2). The relevance of the evolution of these European-wide transport policies for the case study in hand is demonstrated by the key position of the Somport tunnel among the priority action projects enumerated in successive documents produced by the Commission and Council of Ministers. Thus the 1988 proposal for a transport infrastructure action programme lists the ‘modernization of the Pyrenean crossings’ as one of its 33 major schemes. The 1990 Commission communication calling for an action programme for TENs prioritises the Somport tunnel, the Brenner route, and the trans-Pyrenean Puymorens route between Toulouse and Barcelona as its three most important road transport infrastructure projects, as do various Council regulations and decisions set out in 1993. Such documents do not, however, tend to show the pattern of negotiations which led to their publication. In April 1989, four CCIs from each side of the mountains formed an Association pour la promotion de l’axe autoroutier Bordeaux-Valence to lobby the European Commission for funds for transfrontier infrastructure development. At the same time, the Aquitaine regional CCI began to lobby the state for a Bordeaux-Pau motorway to be financed by the péage system of user tolls, thus potentially freeing the project from state financial control. Although these efforts did not ultimately bear fruit, the regional lobby was to have greater success at European level. Despite


being excluded from the Commission’s initial six priority action projects, the Somport tunnel was included as the seventh priority scheme in 1990. Yet this process was emphatically not carried out within a policy community uniting actors at only regional and European levels. First, this is because both the DATAR and MOPU took a strategic role in preparing and organising regional lobbying initiatives of the Commission. Second, this is because direct central state intervention at European level was a key feature of the Somport lobbying process. In fact, with the French government (along with those of Denmark, Great Britain, and West Germany) resisting further Commission attempts to draw up an integrated (and costly) European transport policy, the principal impetus behind the inscription of the Somport tunnel as a priority European project came from the insistence of the Spanish government. The French government initially restricted itself to simply supporting the Spanish demand in the Council of Ministers, before adopting a somewhat more proactive approach in spring 1990, accepting the increased budgetary requirements of the TEN in exchange for a Commission guarantee of the application of strict financial guidelines. With the regional political, socio-economic, and administrative class in attendance, the tunnel was formally authorised by a bilateral Franco-Spanish treaty signed in Paris by each state’s infrastructure ministers in April 1991. The treaty, drawn up by the foreign ministries of each state, was subsequently ratified by the French Assemblée Nationale and the Spanish Cortes respectively. The Somport tunnel project thus needs to be seen as the result of a multilevel policy process allying public and private actors within local, regional, national, and European policy networks. Indeed, as the following chapter discusses, arguably the most significant element which needs to be taken into account when analysing the subsequent protest movement is that the project originated not from a geographically remote, technocratic decision-making structure, but from the region itself. The first group to place the link on the policy agenda, and which claims paternity of the project, is in fact the Communauté de Travail des Pyrénées (CTP), a ‘paradiplomatic’ transfrontier regional lobbying organisation federating eight local authorities on either side of the border. Established with the encouragement of the Commission in 1983, the CTP defines itself as ‘a think tank committed to dynamising crossborder exchanges and creating a strong regional profile within both national and European contexts’.5 With Pau seeking solutions to counter the employment losses caused by the decline of the Lacq petrochemical complex, the CTP met at Jaca in Aragon in 1987 to discuss transfrontier links and economic development. Attended by a delegation from the


Pyrénées-Atlantiques which included the directeur of the DDE, it was this meeting that prioritised the Somport tunnel project, following a proposal by Firmin Molina, the infrastructure minister in the Aragon regional administration. The beneficiaries of regional economic development Beyond the Aspe valley, one of the principal beneficiaries of the development is the greater Pau region, from Orthez and Lacq on the west of the departmental capital to Tarbes and Lourdes on the east, promoting the ‘technopolisation’ of the Pau economy within the framework of the reconversion of Lacq, and generalised transfrontier cooperation.6 Thus the construction of the Somport tunnel was the priority project outlined in the intermunicipal development contract agreed by Pau, Tarbes, and Lourdes in spring 1991, enabling such ‘intermediary towns’ to compete with Toulouse and Bordeaux through improved transport connections with European markets, Figure 6.1. According to Georges

Langon-Bordeaux Mont de Marsan Auch

Aire sur Adour

Bayonne Biarritz

Orthez Pau Tarbes

San Sebastian

Oloron Lourdes

Montréjeau

RN 134 inter-town network Pau–Tarbes–Lourdes

Somport Pamp lona

motorways Iaca

Sabiñánigo Huesca-Zaragoza

Figure 6.1 The Somport tunnel project and roads infrastructure servicing the Pau–Tarbes–Lourdes inter-town network. Reproduced from CAP (1993, p. 72), by kind permission.


Lanta, president of the Pau CCI, Without the Somport tunnel, we will never have the north–south highway which we need so badly, and whose absence stops the Béarn from developing into a commercial centre able to maximise all its advantages, attracting economic and socio-cultural activity and, for the generations yet to come, benefitting from a true range of opportunities to develop and live with dignity.7 Many of the aims of the proponents of the project have a specifically European dimension. The completion of better communication infrastructures would not just enable Pau and Tarbes to flourish as regional ‘motors’ of industrial development, but open new markets for cooperation and development to the south, particularly given the location of General Motors in Zaragoza, Ford in Valencia, and Seat and Lucas-Guling in Pamplona. Economic development would not be structured solely around industrial complementarity, but also upon technological and scientific cooperation between the universities of Pau, Zaragoza, and Madrid, and the development of the tourism opportunities provided by ski centres in France and Spain. In similar vein, the tunnel’s first public inquiry stressed the promising complementarity between the Béarn and Aragon economies, particularly in the agro-alimentary sector, and the interest expressed in a wider context by the Aquitaine regional authorities … The project is an enabling infrastructure for regional development on a European level, which is expected to act as a catalyst for the economies of both provinces.8 The Somport project should not be seen as an isolated example of interregional policymaking, but rather as one of the most concrete examples of the dominant trend in policy action at regional and departmental level. Thus the Pyrénées-Atlantiques département has been highly active in constructing a cooperation policy with the neighbouring Spanish frontier regions of Aragon and Navarre; and, strongly influenced by structural fund eligibility and the INTERREG programme, Aquitaine regional council has developed interregional cooperation in transfrontier and Atlantic frameworks. The entry of Spain and Portugal into the EC was central to the regional council’s decision to launch a strategy of international ouverture in 1985 towards Euskadi, and thence Navarre; a bilateral cooperation protocol was subsequently signed with Euskadi in 1989, an interregional fund created in 1990, and extended to Navarre in 1992. In 1989, the region also joined the Arc Atlantique (which boasts


the membership of 32 coastal regions from Gibraltar to northern Scotland), and the following year became a founder of the Sud-EuropeAtlantique network federating 11 Spanish, Portuguese and French regions. In 1993, Aquitaine, Euskadi and Navarre created a Eurorégion Atlantique Pyrénées. Infrastructure development has been at the forefront of such cooperation. The protocol of the bilateral agreement concluded between Aquitaine and Aragon in September 1989, for example, expressly affirms the importance of the Pyrenees regions in the construction of a Europe without frontiers, and the most important substantive part of the two regions’ joint declaration commits them to the improvement of their transfrontier transport infrastructure through their national governments and the European Commission: The Aragon government and the Aquitaine regional council are in agreement that it is a priority to achieve the total permeability of the Pyrenees by improving the communications infrastructure across the mountain range. With this objective, and with respect to the common border shared by the Aquitaine and Aragon, both authorities, recognising the widely expressed aspirations of the respective social and economic bodies in each territory, commit themselves to the actions necessary to improve access at border crossing points, and to seek from their respective national governments as well as the Commission of the European Communities all sufficient measures which may enable the reinforcement and improvement of crossborder exchanges and communications infrastructures of all types. (In Luchaire et al., 1992, p. 17) Though the Somport tunnel is not specifically named in the joint declaration, the project provided the primary motivation for the conclusion of the agreement.9 The close cooperation between Spanish and French national governments over the Somport tunnel therefore needs to be firmly placed within the context of the development of regional policy communities and European integration. Following successive periods of growth and crisis in post-war territorial planning, European development marks a third phase in such public policy initiatives, the key features of which are training, research, and infrastructural development. As a consequence, formerly peripheral regions like the French south-west have been transformed by European integration into key areas of economic exchange (Savy, 1991, pp. 282–5).


The mobilisation of regional political and socio-economic élites The European dimension to the project has accordingly been at the forefront of the pro-tunnel campaign, stressing the role of improved transport communications with Spain within a discourse of regional economic modernisation and désenclavement, the policy of ‘opening up’ declining or geographically isolated areas. Indeed, proponents argue that the chronic population loss suffered by the valley this century – from an initial 12,000, the valley now boasts fewer than 3000 inhabitants – can only be arrested by attracting new jobs and investment to the region, for which better road transport links are essential. It is thus important to understand the Somport project in the European context not only because of its centrality to the TEN but also because of the type of economic development envisaged by the proponents of the scheme. For the proponents, the construction of the tunnel and the modernisation of the RN134 through the Aspe Valley has a double function: on the one hand, the creation of a transport infrastructure linking Aquitaine and the Pyrénées-Atlantiques with Aragon and Catalonia in northern Spain, opening up new markets and creating more jobs within the region and département; and on the other hand, the désenclavement of the economically underdeveloped valleys of the Béarn south of Pau. As the next chapter will argue, for the proponents of the scheme, these objectives are complementary; for those opposed to the project, they are contradictory and polarising. In contrast to the Loire development programme, the integration of regional and local élites into established policy networks meant that the profile of these élites during the initial phases of policy elaboration and deliberation was somewhat lower than we have seen for the dam scheme. Only with the development of opposition to the scheme did subnational political and socio-economic actors organise within campaigning groups. Although the Pau CCI has been a major backer of the scheme from the beginning, it was only in reaction to an anti-tunnel demonstration which attracted 2500 protesters in Bedous in the heart of the Aspe valley, and with the project’s construction permit under legal challenge from environmental groups, that regional professional associations united in May 1992 to lead a concerted, public, pro-tunnel campaign. The resulting Manifeste du 26 mai was signed by an alliance of groups claiming to represent 85 per cent of the region’s socio-economic workforce. Thus the managerial, farmers’ and ‘reformist’ unions, and the local chambers of agriculture, and of commerce and industry, demanded that ‘absolute priority’ be given not only to the completion


of the tunnel and the upgrading of the RN134, but also to a range of other transport infrastructure projects, including motorway links between Bordeaux and Pau and Pau and Oloron. By the admission of the second public inquiry commission, the arguments put forward by the Manifeste were particularly influential. Pro-tunnel campaigning has been led by the regional political as well as economic élite. Indeed, reaction to the government’s decision not to contest the Pau administrative court’s cancellation of the tunnel’s DUP in December 1992 was led by almost the entire regional political class. A demonstration led by Pau mayor André Labarrère and other key notables such as MEP Nicole Péry, RPR député Michel Inchauspé, and departmental council president François Bayrou, attracted 6000 demonstrators through the streets of Pau on 12 December 1992. The date also marked the establishment of the Association Marche pour le Somport, a protunnel lobbying and campaigning group composed of local and regional politicians, designed to complement the efforts of the Manifeste; its first action was to lobby infrastructure minister Jean-Louis Bianco in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to persuade the government to appeal against the court’s decision. In conjunction with the Pau CCI, Marche pour le Somport began to publish a quarterly review named Somport actualités from April 1994, and produced a pro-tunnel ‘information’ video cofinanced by the departmental council. The video, which underlined the necessity of the tunnel and featured interviews with regional politi-cal and socio-economic élites, was distributed to be shown in schools throughout the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Rather than simply a product of intergovernmental relations between the French and Spanish states, the Somport project was conceived within a framework of multilevel governance uniting established policy actors at European, national, and subnational levels. The next chapter will explore in greater detail the consequences of this polycentric policy process model for the organisation of dissent against the Somport project, and the structure of political opportunities available to it.

7 Opportunity, Protest, and the Somport Tunnel

In November 1989, André Tissidre, president of the Aquitaine regional CCI, Georges Lanta, and André Labarrère held a press conference in Paris to impress upon the French national authorities the importance of the Somport route. Seeking a new angle on a story which it had been covering since December 1988, regional newspaper Sud-Ouest highlighted the reluctance of several other key regional political and economic actors, including RPR député Michel Inchauspé and Aquitaine regional council president Jean Tavernier, to attend the conference. The event might possibly be overplaying the region’s hand, the newspaper pointed out, and was unnecessary given the extent of the consensus behind the scheme. Indeed, The inhabitants of Aragon see it as a means of opening up their region, which is currently under-populated and unevenly developed. The government in Madrid, not wishing to let the autonomous Basque and Catalan regions retain a monopoly of Spain’s border crossings with France, is ready to make a financial stake in the project. The people of Béarn are counting on this tunnel so they can reduce the cost of exporting their maize and intensify their exchanges with Spain. The Pyrénées-Atlantiques departmental council and the Aquitaine regional council have echoed this will through unanimous votes. And, in agreement with Madrid, the French government has indicated its willingness to invest. In contrast, although brief mention was made of the reservations expressed by a number of environmentalists in the Aspe valley, the only real source of conflict stemmed from Basque élites concerned that the Somport tunnel might attract investment away from the western end of 175


the Pyrenees. Such anxieties, however, were really rather minor: ‘no-one, or almost no-one, is openly questioning the need for this tunnel to be built,’ noted the newspaper.1 A year later, the tunnel’s public inquiry was to be held in an atmosphere of general indifference. Such a state of affairs was not to last much longer, however, as the following year saw the organisation of concerted resistance to the project. In similar vein to our earlier discussion of the opposition to Serre de la Fare, this chapter will examine the political opportunity structure of the Somport protest within the institutional context set by a multilevel, sectorally differentiated policy process. The chapter is divided into three main sections. The first addresses the organisation of protest, the strategies deployed by protest groups, and the importance of political allies. The second then assesses the impact on protest mobilisation of the involvement of European and regional tiers of government in the project’s elaboration and funding. Instead of constructing the type of coalition founded on the defence of the region that was fundamental to environmental mobilisation in the 1970s, challenging groups have attempted to reframe the policy agenda by concentrating on alternative issues, particularly the project’s impact on the Pyrenean bears and on the Pau–Canfranc railway. Yet rather than providing a viable alternative sectoral paradigm, these issues have consequently highlighted the internal contradictions of the protest movement, weakened its legitimacy among its target constituency, and allowed it to be outflanked by the proponents of the scheme. Protest outcomes are addressed as a function of sectoral opportunities in the chapter’s final section.

The organisation of dissent Resistance to the tunnel was catalysed by the beginning of construction work, authorised by the public utility certificate (DUP) granted by the departmental prefect on 13 August 1991. The same month, a short-lived occupation of the construction site was begun by members of the Comité pour la sauvegarde active de la vallée d’Aspe (CSAVA), a countercultural group based in La Goutte d’Eau, a disused railway station in the valley. In addition to the CSAVA, two further groups rapidly formed to organise opposition to the project. Most prominently, the Collectif Alternatives Pyrénéennes à l’Axe E7 (CAP) was established in Pau as an umbrella organisation federating local, regional, and national environmental protection and consumer groups. Among its members are Les Amis de la Terre, FNE, Greenpeace, the WWF, Les Verts, the PCF, Fédération Anarchiste, and the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire.

Opportunity, Protest, and the Somport Tunnel

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While the CSAVA has primarily concentrated on physical opposition to the tunnel and the dissemination of information to the press and the inhabitants of the valley, the CAP has focused foremost on legal challenges to the scheme and the development of counter-proposals. A number of inhabitants of the Aspe valley formed a further group, the Comité des habitants pour la vie en vallée d’Aspe (CHVVA), in October 1991. As we shall see, it is significant that the CSAVA and the CHVVA, both located and active in the valley, have existed as separate entities rather than operating as a unified organisation. A fourth group, the Comité pour la réouverture de la ligne Oloron–Canfranc (CRELOC), has also been at the forefront of the campaign. A single-issue group formed in 1986, the CRELOC campaigns for the reopening of a 56 km single-track railway line linking Pau with Canfranc in Aragon. Opened in 1928, the line was closed by the SNCF following a serious freight train accident in March 1970. Although not opposed to the tunnel per se, the CRELOC has principally attacked the project because of the physical and financial threat it poses to the possible future reactivation of the railway. Litigation and demonstrations The CRELOC, indeed, was one of the first groups to lodge a legal appeal against the scheme. Legal action taken by opposition groups has specifically sought to highlight areas where implementation procedures do not comply with existing legislation. Even before the ratification of the Franco-Spanish treaty governing the construction of the tunnel, FNE and the CRELOC succeeded in causing the temporary suspension of the payment of European credits. The complaint, lodged with the European Commission in December 1990, cited numerous omissions and irregularities in the tunnel’s first public inquiry (held in autumn 1990), including its perceived lack of attention to European environmental directives. Two years later, in November 1992, the CRELOC again lodged a formal complaint with the Commission’s environmental directorate, this time citing non-compliance with a directive requiring a cost–benefit road/rail comparison. Although these complaints were to have only a temporary stalling effect on the project, a much more significant victory was gained in December of that year when the Pau tribunal administratif (administrative court) quashed the tunnel’s DUP in response to an appeal lodged by FNE. Based on the incompleteness of the environmental impact assessment (and notably the absence of an evaluation of the indirect effects of an increase in traffic on the environment), the court’s decision effectively ruled the tunnel illegal, and automatically led to the suspension of EC credits.2


Despite considerable pressure from regional élites, the ruling Socialist government declined the invitation to lodge a counter-appeal against the tribunal’s judgment. However, if the change of government in March 1993 bore little fruit for the EPALA’s dam programme, its effect was much more beneficial for the Somport tunnel. Almost immediately, the Balladur government announced that a second public inquiry would be held in late spring 1993. Following the advice submitted by the public works section of the Conseil d’État, the inquiry led simply to the issue, signed by Balladur, of a second DUP in October that year. Even though anti-tunnel groups succeeded in attracting ever greater numbers of protesters to joint annual demonstrations – 2500 gathered in Bedous in May 1992, and 10,000 braved the wind and the rain two years later – construction work recommenced in late 1994. An appeal against the second DUP, lodged by various groups in the CAP, was finally rejected in October 1995 by France’s highest appeal court, otherwise known as the … Conseil d’État. ‘It is now difficult’, observed Sud-Ouest, ‘to see what arguments the anti-tunnel groups can put forward to try and stop construction.’3 The drilling of the tunnel was duly completed in September 1996. Confrontation and physical resistance At first sight, the details of the Somport protest tend to confirm standard domestic regime predictions. Environmental groups have been excluded from policy elaboration and forced into essentially reactive strategies. Judicial victories have been gained on procedural grounds, while public inquiries have failed to provide an opportunity for protest groups to influence the project, despite numerous critical conclusions pronounced by commissioners. Tactics used by protest groups, especially the CSAVA, have been predominantly confrontational, including numerous examples of physical obstruction, mass demonstrations, sitins on the RN134, sabotage of construction vehicles, and occupations of and damage to the construction site. In the words of the charter drawn up by protesters based in the valley, ‘we intend to use all means at our disposal. The legality of those means is not an issue for us’.4 In the six months following the first site occupation, there were over forty separate confrontations between police and protesters. From spring 1992 until 1996, an armed police tactical response unit, nominally based in the Parisian suburb of Drancy, took up constant surveillance of the tunnel entrance and approach road. Police and courts have acted swiftly and firmly with resistance to the project. Relations between protesters and authorities have been typified


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by the enthusiasm of the latter to pursue the former through the criminal courts. Eric Pétetin, a prominent, charismatic figure in the CSAVA, alone has been arrested on over fifty occasions, gaoled numerous times, and even received a presidential pardon from François Mitterrand in the summer of 1993 while serving a 14-month sentence for a combination of offences including contempt of court and criminal damage. Though his detention prompted widespread, and generally sympathetic, coverage in the national press (Le Monde in particular pointed out the repressive and disproportionate nature of his sentence),5 this episode neither curtailed Pétetin’s willingness to engage in direct action nor did it lead to more lenient policing or sentencing. After a routine fracas in spring 1999, for example, Pétetin was charged with a string of offences including damage to public property, extortion, attempted extortion, rebellion, assault, attempted theft (of a gendarme’s hat) and, following a urine test, the use and possession of cannabis. Fines imposed on protesters have correspondingly tended to be severe. For painting graffiti at the mouth of the tunnel in 1992, four activists were given a suspended prison sentence of one month each, and ordered to pay 58,000 F in damages and interest to the DDE. For the incident leading to his imprisonment in June 1993, Pétetin and a second protester were fined 110,000 F for damage to wire fencing (some 478 F per metre, subsequently raised to a total of 400,000 F!). Other offences for which Pétetin was brought before the Pau criminal court include an incident in September 1991, when he dropped his trousers in the direction of two gendarmes, for which the state prosecutor demanded Pétetin be fined 3000 F for the seditiousness of the act. Even Sud-Ouest, not noted for the even-handedness of its coverage, was to find this incident ‘anodine’ and the penalty to be ‘out of proportion’.6 Jean-Pierre Raffin, former president of FNE and at the time a Green MEP, characterised the conflict thus: For the construction and road haulage lobbies and their national and local intermediaries, a ‘rich and interactive democracy’ means the police forces which today attack peaceful protesters with truncheons, gas, and rubber bullets, and a local judiciary which persecutes these same protesters when they demonstrate peacefully but leaves violent pro-tunnel activists unpunished.7 In fact, protesters have frequently levelled complaints at the laxity of both the police and the judicial system towards pro-tunnel groups engaged in illegal acts. For Me Blanco, Pétetin’s lawyer, ‘justice is at the


exclusive service of those who support the tunnel, its decisions are creating a crisis of morality’; his client, meanwhile, can expect the slightest misdemeanour to land him instantly in court, subjected to a ‘judicial TGV’.8 Similarly, in an open letter sent by Les Verts to justice minister Michel Vauzelle in 1992, Dominique Voynet contrasted ‘the indulgence shown towards supporters of the Somport project’ with ‘the firmness and lack of understanding directed towards those that are hostile to it’.9 The persécution juridico-policière meted out to Pétetin, and the creation of ‘a two-speed’ or ‘one-way’ justice system have been common themes in the party’s pronouncements on the conflict. Yet firm policing of obstructive but essentially non-violent direct action in the valley has also served to mediatise the protest within the wider national community, and to increase levels of mobilisation among the more radical activists. Support groups set up in 1993 to campaign for Pétetin’s release from prison were subsequently organised into Comités Somport, to organise protest throughout France and Europe. In 1994, the CSAVA launched the Coordination autonome des Comités Somport pour l’arrêt immédiat des travaux en vallée d’Aspe to coordinate this network. Delaying tactics Confrontation has nonetheless been almost exclusively the preserve of the CSAVA and associated groups, and is far from typical of the tactics deployed by the majority of groups opposing the project. Nevertheless, actions undertaken by these groups have not necessarily been constructive or consensual either, especially since the protest moved into its second phase after the recommencement of construction work on the tunnel in 1994. Up to this point, resistance had focused on the southern end of the Aspe valley, and the foothills of the Pyrenees where the tunnel is sited. For reasons which will be explained in greater detail below, the 1994 mass demonstration against the tunnel marked a watershed in relations between the component groups in the loose protest alliance. From this point onwards, the zones of influence of the CSAVA and CAP in particular, always implicit, became much more explicit as the CAP shifted the focus of its action away from the tunnel towards the modernisation of the RN134. This shift was also geographical, as the CAP began to concentrate on the northern end of the Aspe valley and the plain separating it from Oloron. In March 1995, the CAP, in conjunction with Greenpeace and the WWF, responded to what they considered to be the imposition of the project by organising a collective land-purchasing scheme. Between


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June 1995 and January 1996, three strips of land across the route of the strategically important Bedous bypass in the valley were jointly acquired by 3160 protesters. Notable buyers included Dominique Voynet, and Mireille Jospin, mother of Lionel. The express objective of the scheme was to delay the project by forcing lengthy, complicated and expensive expropriation procedures; by late 1999, the initial projection of 117 MF for the bypass had spiralled to 160 MF, with the CAP estimating the costs imposed by the expropriation process to be between 10 and 20 MF. Simultaneously, several groups including the CAP, CHVVA, and CRELOC lodged a legal challenge against the DUP for the Bedous bypass, which had been granted by Prime Minister Alain Juppé in September 1995 despite the negative recommendations expressed by a public inquiry seven months earlier. Even though the Conseil d’État rejected this appeal in May 1998, a further appeal against two prefectoral decrees of May 1999 authorising construction work on the bypass was provisionally upheld by the Pau administrative court in December 1999. This victory was to last less than three months, however, as the same court ruled in March 2000 that the decrees were valid after all. Yet even this does not mark the end of the process, and the DDE has decided not to recommence work pending the outcome of further appeals. Given the success of these obstructive tactics, the CAP launched a second collective land-buying scheme at Précilhon, on the route of the mooted A650 Pau–Oloron motorway, in 1998. The importance of political allies As discussed in Chapter 2, the political opportunity structure literature emphasises the importance of political allies to successful protest outcomes in France. Again, the Somport campaign tends to confirm these predictions, as at two specific moments protest groups appeared to be offered real ‘windows of opportunity’ to achieve the cancellation or postponement of the project. First, as already discussed in the examination of the Serre de la Fare campaign, the ruling Socialists extended numerous overtures to Les Verts and Génération Écologie prior to the 1993 legislative elections. Simultaneously, the government’s decision not to appeal against the annulment of the tunnel’s DUP responded to a key demand of both Green formations. Second, after coming second in the first round of the 1995 presidential elections, Lionel Jospin offered in mid-campaign to cancel the tunnel if elected at the second round of voting. Although Jospin had discussed the importance of promoting cross-national rail links for freight (ferroutage) in his general policy outline (Jospin, 1995, pp. 70–1), such sentiments tended to the vague and


his position on the Somport tunnel, despite his mother’s stance, had been in considerable doubt. Jospin’s commitment thus has strong parallels with those given to protests against the Larzac military camp and the Le Pellerin and Plogoff nuclear power stations by candidate Mitterrand in 1981. Essentially limited substantive concessions are made available to protest groups at heightened moments of electoral activity in order to maximise votes within an essentially bipolar electoral contest; even small percentages gained by other candidates at the first round, such as the 3.32 per cent gained by Voynet in 1995, can be crucial on the second round. Although Les Verts gave Jospin only a partial endorsement at the second round of voting, this in itself broke with the precedent followed by the party since its creation in 1984. ‘Since the cancellation of Larzac and the Plogoff power station, we have obtained nothing on this scale’, argued Voynet. ‘For me’, she announced of the run-off between Jospin and Chirac, ‘the choice is clear.’10 If the opposition to Serre de la Fare demonstrated the impact of national politics upon local considerations, the same can however certainly not be said of the Somport tunnel. While the Aspe valley section of the PS has consistently opposed the tunnel, its opposition has isolated it not just from the party’s departmental federation and the quasi-totality of regional Socialist élus, but also, in the words of Jean Lassalle, centre-right mayor of Lourdos-Ichère and vice-president of the departmental council, ‘the most beautiful political and socio-economic consensus that the Béarn has ever given birth to’.11 Among Socialist élus, only Robert Balangué, mayor of Bedous, has been vocal in opposition (and this opposition has decreased significantly since the publication of the plans for the bypass). Moreover, key regional political actors clearly perceived the scheme as primarily a subnational rather than a national political issue. Local Socialist grandee André Labarrère, for instance, was placed in a delicate position by the government’s refusal to appeal over the DUP in December 1992; as observed above, the party’s national agenda, with elections approaching in March 1993, clearly outweighed local considerations. It is significant therefore that Labarrère took the opposite decision, resolving the tension between local and national imperatives by angrily suspending his membership of the party. Labarrère, député-mayor of Pau since 1971 and a former government minister and regional president, declared: I retain a deep bond of affection for all my comrades within the party, but I cannot hesitate before the knife-wound that has been inflicted on the economic development of Pau and the Béarn …


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[I] hold myself to be a man of principles and conviction, but I would always choose the defence of the Béarn.12 What, then, of Les Verts themselves? Within a multilevel policy process, one might expect that the presence of Greens within regional and European parliaments would enable them to influence policy-making. This has not, however, been the case; just as the presence of the three members of SOS Loire Vivante on the Le Puy municipal council brought few direct benefits in terms of decisional power, Green representatives elected by proportional representation to sub- and supranational parliaments have achieved little impact on the Somport scheme. Within the European institutions, Les Verts focused from early 1990 on supporting legal challenges and gaining information from the Commission, chiefly through oral and written questions. Yet despite the respectable Green presence in the European Parliament (where, from 1989–94, Les Verts accounted for nine members of the 28-strong European Green group), in June 1990 the Parliament adopted an amendment endorsing the joint Franco-Spanish request for the Somport project to be included among the TEN priority projects. Moreover, in October 1993 the Parliament approved the construction of new road links between Pau and Bordeaux, and Pau and Limoges via Tarbes and Perigueux, as well as recommending that the Pau–Canfranc line be torn up, though this last recommendation was subsequently rejected by the Council of Ministers. Greens have thus concentrated at European level on mediatising the conflict beyond France and providing logistical support for protest actions, including the organisation of a fast in Brussels by students from each European member state in September 1993. The Greens were similarly unable to influence the decisional process at regional level, in which the relative failure of the Entente Écologiste at the 1993 legislative elections may well have proved decisive. This is not only because it greatly reduced the electoral capital upon which Les Verts and Génération Écologie had been counting, but also because it sparked internal recriminations which weakened both parties locally and nationally. Of the two seats on the Aquitaine regional council held by Les Verts and seven held by Génération Écologie following the March 1992 regional elections, by March 1995 only one remained in each party. Of the remaining seven councillors, one had joined Antoine Waechter’s Mouvement Écologiste Indépendant, one Noël Mamère’s Convergences Écologie Solidarité, and two a regional grouping named Grande Aquitaine. A further three chose to sit as independents. Given the ‘balkanisation’ of both parties into splinter movements in the aftermath of the


legislative elections, it proved impossible for Greens on the Aquitaine regional council to meet among themselves to decide on policy. The situation in Aquitaine reflected the national position: at the half-way point of the six-year term, barely half of the original Les Verts and Génération Écologie regional councillors were still members of their respective parties (Boy et al., 1995, pp. 90–106). In any case, by the time that Greens had achieved representation on the council, nearly all the important funding decisions within the CPER for the tunnel and RN134 had been taken. Links with the environment ministry In the Serre de la Fare conflict, the decisions taken by successive environment ministers under different governments, particularly Brice Lalonde and Michel Barnier, were regarded by protestors and promoters alike as decisive steps in the eventual cancellation of the dam programme. The visit by Barnier to the dam construction site was considered especially significant by SOS Loire Vivante, as the group saw his presence as the legitimation of their arguments and status as a responsible policy actor. Barnier’s visit to the Haute-Loire was made as part of a tour of France’s key environmental focal points, a tour which also took in the Haut-Béarn, the first time that an environment minister had officially visited the area since the early 1970s. For the anti-tunnel groups, however, the outcome of this visit was rather different than it had been for SOS Loire Vivante. ‘Of the idea that it is necessary,’ announced Barnier of the tunnel during his visit, ‘there can be no ambiguity.’13 Similarly, Lalonde’s intervention in the Somport dossier proved equally fruitless for the protest campaign. As for the Loire programme, Lalonde was seen by regional élites to be more interested in listening to environmental associations than to themselves, provoking a rift between the administration and local political and socio-economic actors. His last-minute intervention in July 1991 to oppose the siting of the tunnel entrance within the borders of the protected Pyrenees national park was therefore considered by Labarrère to be ‘a personal political strategy’, pursuing a Parisian political agenda detrimental to the needs of the Béarn.14 Yet Lalonde’s opposition also testifies to the rivalry between the respective ministères de l’environnement and de l’équipement. In the words of a senior official in the environment ministry, ‘From the start of the affair we have been alerting the infrastructure ministry. They thought they could push things through. They were wrong.’15 After a ‘marathon’ negotiation session between the prime minister’s office and representatives of the environment, infrastructure, and foreign


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affairs ministries, a compromise solution was agreed on 9 August 1991 to relocate the entrance outside the national park. In reality, this meant that the tunnel would be extended by about fifty metres. Infrastructure minister Paul Quilès was able to announce official confirmation that the tunnel would be therefore completed ‘in the shortest possible timeframe […] without damaging the Pyrenees national park’. Likewise, Lalonde declared himself to be ‘très content’ with the outcome, despite his stated intention to use the issue to ‘settle’ the problem of the Pyrenean bears. The DUP was signed four days later. ‘The dossier of the bears’, the environment ministry maintained, ‘will be re-opened very shortly.’16 The failure of Lalonde’s initiative should not be seen in personal terms, but rather within the context of the vertical segmentation of policy-making. Whereas the structuring of water policy within the sectoral remit of the environment ministry allowed anti-dam protest groups both to form a de facto alliance with the state administration and ultimately to integrate established policy networks, the structuring of roads policy produced a very different pattern of intraministerial relationships. That the environment ministry is not the lead ministry for road infrastructure, combined with its relative weakness in comparison with the much more powerful infrastructure ministry, left it in a subordinate position, unable to impose putative policy preferences. Instead, the environment ministry was obliged to proceed as the junior partner in a bi-ministerial process of project management, accepting the general characteristics of the project but able only to ensure its conformity to national and European environmental standards and regulation.

Environmental protest in a multilevel policy process Although allies might have provided a rapport de forces central to a possible renegotiation of the project at specific moments, any appreciation of what might have happened had the Left won in 1993 or 1995 can only be speculative. Leaving aside such conjunctural factors, an important explanation for the inability of strategic allies in key positions to influence the policy process can be found in the vertical segmentation of the policy process. Yet, although the structuring of water policy was ultimately crucial to the outcome of the Loire dam programme, one might also reasonably argue that past environmental victories have been gained in the face of highly integrated policy communities. One further structural factor therefore needs to be considered here: the construction of policy as a specifically multilevel process,


involving not merely central actors but those at the periphery. This section will contend, then, that a vital factor differentiating this conflict from those of the 1970s is the changed institutional structure within which it has taken place. Contingent factors such as the choice of discourses on which the conflict has been fought out are ultimately dependent on this new institutional context. Mobilising the Larzac myth As discussed in Chapter 1, the Fifth Republic’s first wave of environmental protest was characterised by coalitions of interests linking environmental grievances with a critique of the democratic deficit produced by a centralised regime. In anti-nuclear and the Larzac protests in particular, resistance to state-sponsored projects united local populations and political actors with environmental campaigners hailing from outside the concerned area. The Somport protest would therefore seem to underline the continuity of environmental protest in France in the 1990s with the campaigns of the 1970s. In particular, comparisons with Larzac have explicitly and frequently been made by groups opposing the Somport tunnel. The Comités Somport were explicitly styled on the Comités Larzac of the 1970s, and opposition to l’appareil militaro-répressif de l’État has been prominent within the tracts and rallies of the CSAVA. Pétetin has repeatedly used Larzac as a symbol of victory over a repressive state, exhorting activists to make the protest an ‘anti-capitalist Larzac’. The evocation of Larzac is not unique to the protestors in the valley but is shared by the CAP, whose land-acquisition scheme is specifically adapted from the ‘agricultural land groupings’ launched in the mid-1970s to stop the army buying up all the land on the Larzac plateau. ‘Faced with the madness of this project, we have the historic opportunity, as at Larzac and Plogoff, to form a united front of resistance between the rural inhabitants of the valley and all radical protesters, in the best traditions of popular struggles against the state’, argued Pétetin in spring 1995.17 And indeed, the farmworkers and traders of the Aspe valley have been active in opposition to the road project. The Association des socioprofessionnels de la vallée d’Aspe has forged links with protest groups, and organised such actions as Bedous ville morte in October 1999, effectively shutting the village down on market day in protest against the work on the RN134. The following year’s spring demonstration was the most successful since 1994, attracting over 3000 protesters; yet the involvement of local people and businesses in protest actions represents a significant development rather than a foundation stone of the opposition


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movement. In fact, such alliances have predominantly been forged during the second phase of the protest, after the completion of the tunnel. The arrival of a number of local agriculteurs driving tractors at a sit-in on the RN134 in December 1994 was thus notable not so much because of the disruption caused – blocking the road is a favourite tactic of the CSAVA – as because this was the first occasion since the start of the protest that locals had participated in this type of action. Local protest has chiefly been mobilised not by the tunnel itself, but rather by opposition to the routing of the bypasses through the valley, particularly at Bedous. The reaction of one hotel and restaurant owner from Accous is arguably typical: I’m not against progress, I’m even for the tunnel and an improved highway, but if they route the Bedous bypass along the banks of the river, we’ll all bite the dust and the valley will simply become a corridor for lorries, just as Pétetin said it would.18 Alliances between protest groups and local economic concerns were wholly untypical of the initial stages of the protest; it is rather characteristic that an open letter from the Association des socioprofessionnels to the inhabitants of the valley in July 1998 advised: ‘If longstanding resentments, bitter personal disputes, prejudices, or other quarrels are still to the fore, put them aside!’19 There are, therefore, important differences between the organisation and development of the Larzac and Somport protests, particularly concerning the actors and institutions involved; where the artisans of Larzac formed the cornerstone of the protest, those of the Béarn – despite the formation of the CHVVA in 1991 – were initially implacable supporters of the tunnel. Peripheral defence and economic development One of the most striking features of the Somport protest as a whole has been the isolation of opposition groups within the locality. Many of the violent confrontations which have been typical of the conflict have opposed not simply local activists and the state, but activists with the local population. From the first signs of organisation against the project, a pro-tunnel militia also began to operate within the valley. A visit to the site in October 1991 by Antoine Waechter and Jean-Pierre Raffin was forcibly cut short after their car was besieged by what regional newspaper La République des Pyrénées described as approximately a hundred angry shepherds, hunters, shopkeepers and artisans from the Aspe and Ossau valleys ‘vomiting their anger’. ‘We do not’, observed Raymond


Dieste, Socialist mayor of Oloron, ‘ask outsiders to come and tell local people what they ought to do.’20 The report of the confrontation in Les Verts’ newsletter was, unsurprisingly, less forgiving of the local opposition, choosing to emphasise the involvement of a number of the protunnel politicians in the shower of abuse, obscenities, punches, objects and manure suffered by Waechter and Raffin.21 Similar treatment had been meted out the previous week to Noël Mamère, at that time a leading figure in Génération Écologie. The regional profile of protesters, particularly the CSAVA, has been predominantly negative, especially in the mainstream press. The ‘Aspachois’ tribe, as Pétetin styles the CSAVA, are generally rejected as outsiders, provocateurs, and drug users by the inhabitants of the valley, particularly following the death of a young woman in 1988 from an overdose at the Goutte d’Eau. A serious arson attack in June 1992 was followed by a violent attack on the Goutte d’Eau in November 1993, carried out by groups of locals including six local élus – all of whom were members of Marche pour le Somport, and five of whom were members of the Laruns municipal council.22 The participation in the latter attack of Henri Eyt – café owner, deputy-mayor of Laruns and former RPR departmental councillor – was described by the café-proprietors’ union as simply ‘an expression of the popular feeling’.23 The tension between activists and much of the (predominantly conservative) local population has been palpable. Clashes in the valley between pro- and antitunnel groups have frequently been characterised by an atmosphere of xenophobia and violence, physical and verbal. Regional forces vives, headed by such high-profile national politicians as François Bayrou, Michel Inchauspé, and Nicole Péry, have been particularly effective at framing the tunnel project as the key to the economic regeneration of both the Pau conglommeration and the Béarn as a whole. Moreover, the participation of regional and departmental institutions and élites in the funding and decisional process, as discussed in the previous chapter, has transformed the relationship between the centre and periphery typical of the first wave of environmental discourse. According to Lassalle, the Somport tunnel is not just a road project, but a question of the ability of the Béarn to determine its own economic future: This tunnel is, above all, a mad hope. We have to win this difficult battle, because it is a battle for life itself. Each new census sees the valley lose 20 per cent of its inhabitants. We see our schools close one after the other, more than 50 per cent of the Aspe valley’s inhabitants


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are 50 or older. We have seen whole neighbourhoods die. We’re fighting to put a stop to that, young people are beginning to settle here again because they want to live in their homeland […]. This European highway will bring life back to the valley. We need to give our young people and our children their pride back, to make them proud to be from the Haut-Béarn.24 Beyond the mainstream political parties, the scheme is supported by a relatively homogeneous coalition of socio-economic élites united behind the prospect of regional economic development promised by the tunnel, notably grouped together within the Manifeste du 26 mai (see the previous chapter). These groups have consistently drawn attention to the contrast between their legitimacy as regional representatives, and the provenance of protesters: Groups claiming to be ecologist or ‘defending’ the Aspe valley would rather repeat, with the crucial support of two ecological multinationals whose real headquarters are abroad (one in Switzerland, the other in the United States), unchanging arguments and radicalised and unacceptable demands.25 Such sentiments were shared by the supposedly impartial commissioners conducting the project’s second public inquiry, who concluded that: Certain local opponents, with very little broad support, express less a disagreement with the substance of this project than highlight a few omissions on the basis of contradictory rumours […]. The vast majority of such opposition emanates from outside the valley, from people who have not in all probability examined the impact study report. They are counterbalanced by a very significant mobilisation of local and regional people. (In CAP, 1993, p. 50) Where a regionalist consciousness has been mobilised, indeed, it has been as often by proponents as opponents of the tunnel. Bayrou himself – president of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques departmental council as well as of the Euro-federalist centre-right UDF, and education minister from 1993–97 in the Balladur and Juppé governments – speaks Occitan as his first language, and founded the Institut Occitan in Pau. Rallies organised by supporters of the tunnel have frequently included displays of Béarn folk costumes and music, and speeches in Occitan. Even though the Comité des habitants claims 500 members, it has been unable to rally


the majority of an area which arguably has the least to gain and the most to fear from the scheme. Despite the size of the May 1994 demonstration, many of those present came from outside the region, and rallies in favour of the project have also attracted large numbers. The opposition to the project has found it even harder to gain a foothold in the greater Pau area, where the economic development potential of the project is strongest. Indeed, in the wake of the administrative court’s annulment of the DUP, 6000 people marched through the streets of Pau to demand the immediate resumption of construction work on the tunnel. Inchauspé, speaking at the subsequent rally, explicitly recuperated the vivre et travailler au pays discourses of the peripheral protests of the 1970s to the profit of the pro-tunnel campaign: Children should not have to listen to liars. They need to be told that, to live on the land, to work on the land, it’s not enough to write some poetry and put a feather in your hat – you need an infrastructure worthy of a new century.26 Sud-Ouest emphasised the extent of local support for the project: The remorse, the grief, the anger there was capable of moving mountains. On Saturday, six thousand people – Basques, Bigourdans, Landais and above all Spaniards particularly preoccupied with the crossing of the Somport peak on the eve of the opening up of borders announced by the single European market – rose up together to celebrate the tunnel and demand that construction continue. Politicians of left and right, business leaders, workers, shopkeepers, trades unionists, artisans – all, for once, moving forward together.27 Clearly, the anti-system logic and provocative tactics of the CSAVA have had a significant detrimental effect on the ability of protesters to aggregate opinion against the scheme. The decision of the Coordination Autonome to switch the focus of its campaign to anti-militarism, holding a rally in Bedous on Armistice day in 1994 to protest against the occupation militaire of the valley, served only further to alienate the local population. Instead of being able to construct a coalition of interests founded on the defence of the region, as was fundamental to environmentalist discourse and action during the 1970s, therefore, challenging groups have attempted to mobilise dissent around alternative issues.


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Competing discourses: frame alignment variations and protest Because Europe has dictated the framework for the perception of the project by the inhabitants of the area directly affected by the construction of the tunnel, it has also provided a highly visible ideological mobilising point for conflicting views of the tunnel. For the CSAVA, protesters are the new International Brigades fighting against the militarist, expansionist and imperialist ‘bulldozers of commercial Europe’. The enemy is the ‘Europe of business, desperate for new profits, proving once again with the Somport tunnel that its logic is ever more expansionist and imperialist’,28 a choice between: On the one hand the accelerated pursuit of productivism, where goods must travel ever more quickly from Europe’s north to its south, and where the Pyrenees must be ‘erased’ by drilling the Somport tunnel. On the other hand, ecologists, alternatifs, protectors of nature, who dream of a better world where money will no longer be king and where men will no longer give up their lives trying to live them.29 Contrasting diagnostic frames within the heterogeneous anti-tunnel alliance have had a significant effect on the organisation and mobilisation of protest. The anti-capitalist, anti-statist, libertarian stance of the CSAVA and the Coordination Autonome demarcate them clearly from the CAP, whose critique of European integration is more clearly focused on transport policy. Within the CAP, however, different groups have advanced different interpretations of the project. Greenpeace in particular has been careful to frame its opposition as criticism of the TEN as a whole, arguing that the programme is in breach of the climate policy agreed at the 1992 Rio summit; 25 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions are produced by road freight, a situation which can only be exacerbated, they maintain, by new international road projects. In contrast, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) Communist trade union opposes the project as part of l’Europe de Maastricht, and the 1986 Guichard report on territorial planning, which together will create ‘de-industrialised urban megapoles’ and convert the countryside for ‘luxury tourism’.30 The real purpose of the project is to link the Atlantic Arc with the banane bleue of centralised industry and finance in central Europe (and Germany in particular), as the tunnel ‘belongs to a north–south axis which has nothing to do with the development of the Aspe valley or the regional economy of Aquitaine’.31 While the CGT’s


critique of the project may superficially resemble that of the CSAVA, it diverges in its continued emphasis on productivism. Thus the EC subsidy would be better spent creating ‘real’ jobs in Aquitaine, in particular by developing the Lacq chemical and petrochemical complex which has been allowed to decline by the lack of state intervention, itself partly the product of European directives. At stake here is not the relationship between transport infrastructure and economic development, but the type of infrastructures and the type of economic development proposed: To oppose the European, governmental and regional transport programme of the eleventh national plan is to oppose the economic abandon of our region. We need a regional network for the industrial, agricultural and cultural development of Aquitaine, and to meet the expectations of our transport users and workers.32 The CGT’s opposition to the tunnel is thus part of its opposition to foreign multinationals ‘who come to set up here and take over our businesses’ and its demands for industrial jobs in the region; ‘the best way to save our heritage’, argues the union, ‘is to put people first.’33 Notably, the CGT opposes the tunnel, but supports the upgrading of the RN134, the construction of an express road between Pau and Bordeaux, free parking for all employees in the centre of Pau, and even the ‘expansion to the necessary number of lanes’ of the Pau–Oloron highway, thus explicitly including the prospect of a motorway. Frame alignment variations within the CAP have generally been contained by the instrumental logic of the organisation. However, the divergence between its legalistic action strategies and those of the CSAVA has produced highly visible points of conflict between the protest groups. Indeed, in the absence of a unifying mobilising basis capable of integrating diverse ideological positions, the supposed complementarity of the different protest groups has become increasingly prone to division and opposition. The CSAVA’s initiative to set up the Coordination Autonome stems in part from the May 1994 demonstration organised by the CAP. Concerned with protecting its legitimacy as a responsible actor, the CAP negotiated with the departmental prefect to curtail the march before it reached the construction site; when a significant proportion of the demonstrators, led by the CSAVA, defied the instruction and continued on to the tunnel head, relations between the two groups deteriorated into mutual accusation and denunciation, with one group accusing the other of cowardice and complicity with the authorities, and the other returning accusations of irresponsibility.


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The decline in mobilisation following the 1994 protest was significant, as demonstrations struggled to attract protesters and the tunnel neared completion. Moreover, bitter personal, ideological, and tactical disputes within the Somport committees resulted in the exclusion of Pétetin the following year and the break-up of the CSAVA, although Pétetin continues to organise protest events from La Goutte d’Eau. Although the annual spring demonstrations have revived interest in the protest by focusing on the Bedous bypass and proposed A650 (Figures 7.1 and 7.2), they have also continued to reveal the splits in the protest: at the May 1999 demonstration, anarchist protesters launched a public custard-pie attack (entartement) on Denis Baupin (Les Verts’ spokesman on the issue), while Greenpeace unfurled a banner explicitly blaming Voynet for the scheme’s continued existence. The response of the CAP to the arrest two days later of two activists (including Pétetin) for blocking the RN134 was to send an open letter to Jospin disowning such actions. Les Verts, making the link between the Somport protest and the successful campaigns at Serre de la Fare and La Borie, argued in 1992 that: The use of symbols often helps a campaign. For the Loire, protest set out to preserve Europe’s last major untamed river. The Borie was a place of great historical significance for French protestantism. For the Aspe valley, the symbol is clear: the last French bears live here … The burning subject of freight transport is furthermore the crucial and determinant element for the radical ecologist opposition to the Somport tunnel.34 But whereas the use of the salmon as a symbol of water quality and a viable economic development project successfully enabled groups protesting against Serre de la Fare to reset the policy agenda and isolate the EPALA, similar attempts to reframe the issue have been less successful in the Somport campaign. Focus on the choice between road and rail links, and the status of the Aspe Valley as the last refuge in France of brown bears living in the wild, has proved in each case highly problematic. Indeed, these issues have both been recuperated by regional élites and highlighted the inconsistencies in a challenging alliance characterised by disparate discourses and practices. Protecting the Pyrenean brown bear Officially protected in France since 1972 and in Spain since 1973 (bear hunting was banned in France in 1962), the brown bear is nonetheless in critical decline in the Pyrenees: from a total of 70 in 1954, the


Figure 7.1 Anti-tunnel demonstration, May 1998, Oloron. By kind permission of the CAP. Collectif Alternatives Pyrénéennes, 1998.

Figure 7.2 Anti-tunnel demonstration, May 1998, Oloron. By kind permission of the CAP. Collectif Alternatives Pyrénéennes, 1998.


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indigenous Pyrenean population is now estimated to be only half a dozen. A CEMAGREF (Centre national du machinisme agricole du génie rural, des eaux et des forêts, the National rural engineering centre for agriculture, water and forestry) report commissioned by the Pyrénées-Atlantiques DDE in July 1991 argued that the upgrading of the RN134 would effectively endanger the bears even further by cutting their territorial domain in two and creating two discrete sub-populations. Moreover, the road would bring about an inevitable increase in human activity within the bears’ natural habitat, the prime reason why the species is in decline in western Europe; as traffic increases on the RN134, the bears will become ever more wary of crossing it. As a consequence, the genetic diversity of the bear population would be significantly reduced, rendering it highly probable that the population would die out in the medium term: The modernisation of the RN134 is likely to have irreversible consequences for the only vestigial bear colony on French territory; the risks are first and foremost linked to the division of the colony, followed to a lesser degree by the disappearance of favourable habitats, and by the possibility of death through collisions with road traffic.35 In the short term, the inclusion of the bears in the anti-tunnel argument had an extremely beneficial effect for protesters. Les Verts, who frequently focused on the plight of the bears at European level, greeted the abrogation of the first DUP by declaring Victory for the Pyrenean bear! – a refrain which had been seized upon from the start by the national media. Libération, for example, responded to the resiting of the tunnel entrance in August 1991 by trumpeting: ‘The bears have won. In order to protect their tranquillity, the government has decided that future Somport tunnel will entirely avoid the national park.’36 That the resiting of the tunnel entrance by about fifty metres should be seen as a victory might well appear somewhat bizarre, but it is clear that the use of the bears as a mobilising point for opposition to the tunnel was, initially at least, highly effective in aggregating and mediatising protest. Concerns about the project’s effect on the bears had been both translated and amplified by the withdrawal of the national park’s European diploma by the Council of Europe in March 1991, which had specifically cited the failure to protect the brown bear in the park’s peripheral zones in its reasoning. Indeed, it is debatable whether opposition to the tunnel would have become so prominent without the bears. Certainly, until 1991 the national media had paid scarce attention to the project, and the Puymorens tunnel linking Barcelona with


Perpignan – formally opened by Mitterrand, Balladur, and Felipe Gonzalez in October 1994 – never achieved anything remotely approaching the level of opposition experienced by the Somport tunnel. Yet the medium-term effects of focusing on the bears have been less positive. In fact, the association of the bears with the road scheme has proved highly problematic in two senses: first, because the impression created by and through the media that the cancellation of the project would ensure the survival of the species was in clear contrast to the available figures on the decline of the bear; and second, because successful implementation of schemes for the protection and renewal of the existing bear population subsequently had the effect of removing the principal grounds for opposition to the project. The relaunch of the public inquiry procedure by the Balladur government was enabled by the findings of the Balent commission, a team of experts set up jointly by the environment and infrastructure ministries under the previous government to report on the possibility of survival of the bear population. The report argued that the RN134 and tunnel projects would have little impact on the chances of survival of the bears, and that unless new bears were introduced, they would disappear within 20 years whatever was decided. ‘It appears perfectly clear’, concluded infrastructure minister Bernard Bosson, explaining why he and environment minister Michel Barnier had authorised a second public inquiry, ‘that the survival of the bear is in no way related to the problem of the tunnel.’37 Unanimously approving the project, the three public inquiry commissioners agreed. What the media and environmental groups, particularly the WWF, had presented as the principal point of controversy was now effectively undercut. The second public inquiry found that: The experts’ report has been decisive in the separation of the two problems, of traffic on the RN134 and the conservation of the bears. It has clearly established that the bear colony was condemned to disappear, and that the low probability that the few remaining bears will reproduce cannot be imputed to road traffic. It has especially established that chances of renewing this colony by the introduction of individuals from other colonies are entirely compatible with the proposed improvements to the RN134, given a certain number of technically and financially viable modifications. Local opinion has very largely rallied to this new way of presenting the problem of the bears, because the problem has been definitively demystified during the inquiry. (In CAP, 1993, p. 52)


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Following the granting of the second DUP, Barnier and Bosson confirmed that a number of zones de passage à ours, or bear-crossing zones, would be constructed. Indeed, two such plans to ‘embed’ the approach road to the tunnel, each for a stretch of approximately half a kilometre, are currently promised. Yet these passages are far from the seven separate sections totalling 4.3 km proposed by the CEMAGREF in 1992, will not be completed before the tunnel is opened to road traffic, and may take up to 15 years to construct. Accordingly, while national and European organisations have continued to use the image of the bear as a mobilising focus of their opposition to the construction of the tunnel, associations within the region itself attempted to dissociate themselves from it: thus ‘the valley of the bears’ became a ‘space where a dense rural community cohabits with an untouched wildlife’.38 Furthermore, the enforcement of European regulations to protect bears has been resented in the locality as the outside imposition of public policy on the traditions of an area where hunters and shepherds coexist with the bears only with the greatest of difficulty. These groups, who themselves have little to gain from the construction of the tunnel, have become implacable supporters of it due to their resentment of the attention paid to the protection of the bears. ‘A hateful climate has developed between the local population, their elected representatives and the bear protection associations’, remarked the Balent report. The issue, moreover, has been recuperated by regional élites. Initially hostile to any wildlife protection measures they considered would have a negative impact on economic development, pro-tunnel groups have subsequently sought political capital by supporting measures designed to make the project more ‘bear-friendly’, such as Labarrère’s suggestion that the RN134 be equiped with ursoducts to allow the bears safe passage (Labarrère had previously shown somewhat less concern for the local plantigrades). Regional élites have subsequently attempted to show that it is they and not the anti-tunnel protesters who are the real environmentalists. Following the publication of the Balent report, bear protection and reintroduction schemes, including recent attempts to introduce tagged Slovenian bears to the east of the Aspe valley as part of the European LIFE programme (10 MF have been made available by the EC for the protection of Pyrenean wildlife, 4 MF of which are reserved for bear recolonisation projects), have subsequently been championed by arch proponents of the tunnel – including Jean Lassalle. Lassalle is president of both the Pyrenees national park and the Institution patrimoniale du Haut-Béarn (IPHB), the organism charged with the protection of the bears established by the Charte de développement durable des


vallées béarnaises et de protection de l’ours of January 1994. The charter was signed by the local and regional political élites sponsoring the tunnel, together with the departmental hunting federation, which, along with shepherds’ representatives, sits on the consultative committee of the IPHB. Reopening the Pau–Canfranc railway Emphasis on alternative transportation links has also proved problematic. The arguments against the tunnel put forward by Les Verts have repeatedly centred on a rail freight alternative, proposing that the public funds be reallocated to the development of trans-Pyrenean rail transport. Indeed, the elaboration of a Convention pyrénéenne promoting rail freight and limiting road haulage between France and Spain (similar to that regulating freight traffic through the Alps) is a central demand of Greenpeace and the CAP. The reopening of the Pau–Canfranc railway is a key element of the CAP’s founding charter, vigorously promoted by the CRELOC, and further supported by the quasi-totality of groups opposing the tunnel. To bring the line back into service would cost, according to the CRELOC, approximately one-fifth that of the road project. Moreover, despite the official position of the CSAVA in favour of the rail link, the Coordination Autonome has rejected it on the grounds that it forms as much a part of the system of capitalist exchanges as roads. Indeed, this is explicit within the arguments put forward by the CRELOC. Thus while the CRELOC does point out that the construction of the road tunnel and upgrading of the RN134 risk causing irreparable damage to the valley and the gave, or river, which runs through it, it also claims that the railway line must be reopened because ‘France can and must open up Aquitaine’s markets, across the Pyrenees to Aragon, the Levant, Madrid, in one word, to Europe’.39 The tenor of such arguments, one might conclude, is difficult to differentiate from those put forward by the regional actors supporting the road project. Likewise, it is significant that the Communist daily newspaper L’Humanité frames the conflict as a ten-year struggle over the choice of the best mode of transport for transnational freight movement, rather than calling into question the basis and objectives of such traffic.40 The ability of protesters to develop a clear position on the reopening of the railway line was further hampered by the reaction of the CRELOC to the 1992 CEMAGREF report, which argued that the principal obstacle to the creation of zones de passage à ours was the position of the railway line; indeed, the retention of the railway would seriously affect the effectiveness of the proposed compensatory measures. It is significant


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therefore that the November 1992 complaint to the European Commission was lodged by the CRELOC without the support of other groups campaigning against the tunnel. For the CRELOC’s Michel Rodes, the CEMAGREF report was ‘commissioned and paid for by the DDE’ with the sole objective of hastening the destruction of the existing track: We’re finally reaching the height of technocratic and media perversity. It is now apparently in the name of the eco-system (the survival of the bear) that we must destroy the only non-polluting form of transport: the railway.41 Members of the CSAVA have correspondingly made conflicting pronouncements about the railway line. While Pétetin has consistently advocated its reopening, other members of the group have been less convinced, and Florence Corbier of the CSAVA declared at the 1994 anti-tunnel demonstration that ‘At the risk of sounding out of date and anti-everything, I shout with all my being: No! Neither road nor rail!’ Given the ideological differences already separating the various members of the anti-tunnel coalition, it is unsurprising that the CGT, which has consistently lobbied for the reopening of the line, has been particularly scathing about ‘Pétetin’s gang’, arguing that ‘the campaign led by certain ecologists has been more negative and off-putting than open or constructive […] we’re not about to return to the days of the oillamp’. Where the CSAVA opposes le tout camion, the prioritisation of road haulage, the CGT argues that the stance of the environmentalists should more correctly be termed le contre tout, opposition to everything.42 Moreover, this lack of clarity was (perhaps paradoxically) not helped by Yves Boisset’s controversial reportage broadcast on France 2 in October 1992, which implied that France was about to sign an agreement with the Spanish province of Huesca to transport European industrial, chemical, and even radioactive waste for storage at Sabiñánigo via the Somport tunnel. The argument subsequently developed in Science & Vie magazine that the tunnel would, intentionally or not, form the link between the same toxic waste plant and – in the opposite direction this time – the chemical reprocessing plant under construction in Lacq (Bourdial, 1995), served to harden the opposition of a number of protesters against both road and rail, on the basis that the reopened railway line could only increase the risk of a serious environmental accident in the valley. Although initially only lukewarm towards the reintroduction of the Pau–Canfranc line, regional élites have gradually succeeded in


recuperating the issue from the opponents of the tunnel. Thus the Manifeste du 26 mai, the departmental federation of the Parti Socialiste, the CTP, the regional council, and perhaps most notably, François Bayrou, have all successively allowed themselves to be convinced by the necessity of the rail link. It was at Bayrou’s request that the regional and departmental councils commissioned a joint feasibility study on the economic viability of the line in 1994; Bayrou has henceforth been both a passionate defender of the railway and its place in the heritage of the Béarn, and announced his willingness to open dialogue with environmental associations on the issue. Indeed, the reopening of the line has attained a consensus amongst mainstream Béarn political and economic forces, who stress the complementarity of road and rail links. A demonstration in Zaragoza in April 1997 found the march being led by the ubiquitous Jean Lassalle, determined to make the link his ‘new crusade’, while the by now familiar triumvirate of Bayrou, Lassalle, and René Rose, the mayor of Borce in the Aspe valley, made a symbolic visit to the celebrated Urdos railway tunnel in July 1998 to campaign for the line. The Aquitaine and Aragon regional councils subsequently agreed to work together to secure European funding for the project, in addition to the 25 per cent of the total cost pledged by Jean-Claude Gayssot in April 1999. Although the precise funding arrangements for the reopening of the line have yet to be finalised, the project was awarded 340 MF from the budget of the fourth CPER decided in April 2000, and a FrancoSpanish interministerial seminar held in Toulouse in July 2001 has tentatively fixed the opening of the line for early 2006. If current forecasts are accurate, 28 freight and 12 passenger trains per day will eventually run via the Somport on an electrified Pau–Zaragoza line. Thus while the Somport campaign has arguably been successful in placing the reopening of the Pau–Canfranc rail line back on the policy agenda, it has achieved this only in addition to, rather than instead of, the road tunnel link. Furthermore, the saturation of transfrontier road traffic is such, and the arguments for ferroutage have gained so much ground that, with an eye on the 12 transborder routes through the Alps, the CTP has begun to organise regional élites to lobby for a further trans-Pyrenean crossing. Following a feasibility study carried out by the Aragon and Midi-Pyrénées regional councils in 1995, in 1998 a wider study on transfrontier crossings was piloted by a cross-border grouping of five regional councils from Spain (Aragon), France (Aquitaine, Limousin and Midi-Pyrénées), and Portugal (Alentejo). The resulting proposal, again within a context defined by European institutions and


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economic activity, is for the construction of another ‘pharaonic’ project: a 41 km rail tunnel for freight traffic through the Pyrenees at Vignemale, approved in principle by Alain Juppé’s government in April 1997. Indeed, Vignemale was the driving force behind the conclusion in April 2001 of a bilateral transborder cooperation agreement between the Aragon and Midi-Pyrénées regional councils, an agreement which also established the CONSEPT (Conférence Sud Europe Pyrénées Transcontinental) group of regional authorities and economic organisations from France, Spain and Portugal to lobby national and European authorities for the project.

Sectoral strength and protest outcomes As discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, the campaign against the Loire dam programme achieved successful impacts at each of the three different stages of the policy process. In terms of sensitising impacts, the campaign contributed to the reframing of water policy, inscribing qualitative concerns into resource management at national and subnational levels, where resource-distribution had previously dominated the agenda. Procedurally, policy elaboration within the environment ministry has traditionally been characterised by close group–state relationships. The access and ultimate policy responsibility devolution (though clearly far from absolute) enjoyed by anti-dam groups should therefore be seen within this context. Substantively, only one of the dams – the smallest – was constructed, from an agreement for four (and, it should be remembered, an orignal proposal for 37). In contrast, the campaign against the Somport tunnel has produced few tangible positive outcomes at any of these phases. Protest has failed to halt the construction of the tunnel. The road transport agenda, particularly motorway construction, appears not to have been seriously affected by the campaign. And despite the willingness of the environment ministry to keep the lines of communication open to groups such as the CAP and FNE, there is little evidence of their inclusion within consultative or supervisory bodies. Yet the campaign has achieved positive impacts in two main areas. First, protest has led to significant modifications of the project. Concerted ‘whistle-blowing’ and legal challenges to the project have, for example, highlighted serious deficiencies in the environmental impact assessment. The implementation of the scheme has, since 1993 in particular, been characterised by explicit adherence to environmental regulations, which has also had the effect of imposing additional costs and delays on its


realisation. The recuperation of the issue of the bears by regional élites has catalysed efforts to address the problem, and the projected wildlife crossings on the RN134 were the product of government commissions established to discuss questions raised by protest groups. Moreover, in the minds of regional élites, the tunnel was and remains the priority project. While the CAP continues to argue that the reopening of the Pau–Canfranc line should replace the road project and be complemented by a ban on international road haulage movements, regional politicians stress a very different complementarity – that of road and rail operating side by side, increasing both the level and choice of cross-border exchanges. That regional and national political actors have again recuperated this issue has undoubtedly weakened the antitunnel campaign, but it has also testified to the way that the protest has influenced the policy agenda; it should not be lost that, in France at least, there existed little political will in the late 1980s to reopen the Pau–Canfranc line. Further, the decision to reopen the railway also underlines the DDE’s piecemeal approach to infrastructure development in the valley and a serious failure of long-term planning: at no fewer than six points in the valley, the modernisation work already completed on the RN134 has encroached upon the rail track. These sections must consequently be restored. Second, it would be misleading to judge the substantive impact of the anti-tunnel campaign as a failure by the simple fact of the tunnel’s construction. The political opportunity structure literature stresses the difficulty experienced by protest in France at imposing delays on the realisation of infrastructural projects. Indeed, comparing anti-nuclear protest in France and West Germany, Nelkin and Pollak (1981) consider the ability of German and the inability of French campaigns to delay completion to be one of the main reasons for the classification of the Fifth Republic as a strong state. As these two chapters have discussed, within the French state, infrastructure policy-making ranks as one of the strongest and most closed policy sectors. Yet the costs imposed by the protest campaign have placed the ability of the Somport tunnel to operate as a major transfrontier transport route in serious doubt. Even in 1992, delays to the construction work were estimated to amount to 50,000 F per day. The very latest indications are that, though the tunnel was originally scheduled to open to traffic in 1995, it will not do so before October 2002 at the earliest. This delay represents almost a tripling of the estimated period of construction. Moreover, the greatest delays have been imposed by the campaigns waged against the upgrading of the RN134 through the Aspe valley.


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‘Tronçonnage’ and the imposition of costs and delays In fact, the very procedures used by the DDE in order to defuse dissent have created the opportunities exploited by protest groups. One of the principal complaints levelled by protesters against the project is that the impact of the tunnel cannot be separated from the impact of the scheme as a whole, and that the work on the RN134 and the proposed Pau–Oloron motorway should also be included as part of one single environmental impact assessment. However, not only has the DDE treated each of these sections as discrete, but it has also treated each section of modernisation work on the RN134 as being discrete. As one might possibly expect, the Association Marche pour le Somport defends this practice, arguing that: in conformity with the correct legal procedure, each individual bypass route has to be the subject of a preliminary study, an inquiry, and then public utility certification … In order to speed up the procedure and thus the completion of the scheme, the specifications for each bypass are each drawn up by different agencies, all working in close collaboration with the DDE. This process is all the more judicious when one considers that each village has its own specific circumstances and conditions.43 The work on the RN134 has therefore been divided into twelve separate tronçons, or sections, each requiring a separate public inquiry and a separate DUP. It should also be noted that the DDE did not publish the details of the Bedous, Eygun and Etsaut bypasses until December 1994, thus effectively delaying the realisation of the project’s impact on local commerce. One further consequence of this procedure is that the state has been able to avoid undertaking a road/rail cost–benefit comparison, in alleged contravention of the loi d’orientation des transports intérieurs (LOTI) of 30 December 1982. According to article 14 of the LOTI, Major infrastructural projects and important technology choices are assessed on the basis of common criteria, enabling comparisons to be made for a single mode of transport and between different or combinations of modes of transport. The financial threshold at which the law becomes operational was initially set by a 1984 decree at 500 MF, raised to 545 MF five years later. The decree also stipulates that, where an infrastructure project is divided into sections, the cost of the whole project – and not of each separate


section – should be taken as the base calculation. Indeed, the initial tronçonnage of the project formed one of the prime motivations for the recommendation by commissioner Rey to the Pau administrative court in 1992 to find the first DUP illegal, and in October 1998, the Conseil d’État overturned the DUP for the modernisation of the Urdos-Forges d’Abel section of the RN134, on the grounds this time that the RN134 was part of a ‘major infrastructure project’, and that the LOTI should therefore apply. Moreover, in addition to the numerous reserves expressed by the Conseil d’État at the practice of tronçonnage, the Commission for the tunnel’s first public inquiry sharply criticised the procedure, which it found to be symptomatic of the DDE’s modus operandi. Yet there remains a lack of clarity even within the public inquiry and legal system over the circumstances under which the LOTI should apply, and legal challenges citing this regulation have more often been refused than upheld. The judgments laid down by both the Pau administrative court in December 1992, and the Conseil d’État in October 1993, for example, argued that the LOTI did not apply to the tunnel for two reasons: first, because the law only applies to projects which are contained within national borders, and second, because it only applies to new projects. The upgrading of the RN134 could not therefore be taken into consideration, nor could the sections of the tunnel on the Spanish side of the border, the cost of which would have clearly exceeded 545 MF. Nonetheless, tronçonnage has provided increased opportunities for protest groups to effectively oppose the project’s completion. Multiple public inquiries have enabled multiple points of opposition to the project and multiple legal challenges, slowing down implementation and escalating costs. As noted in Chapter 6, finance for the Bedous bypass and the Urdos-Forges d’Abel section was provided in the second CPER, by the end of which almost half of the work on the RN134 was to have been completed. However, even the public inquiries for these sections did not commence until 1994. Even in 1994, Marche pour le Somport predicted that work on the RN134 would be finished within the period of the third CPER – thus by the end of 1998 at the latest. The latest indications given by the DDE are that the work will not be finished before a highly optimistic 2012 at the earliest. This delay can principally be explained by the outcomes of the protest: legal and administrative challenges have slowed the procedure down significantly and increased the cost of the work. Thus the total cost of the tunnel project has, despite initial forecasts, exceeded 750 MF for the French side of the project alone, while the increase in the cost of the work on the RN134


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Table 7.1 Increase in costs (actual and projected), in million francs, for each part of the Pau–Somport link Date

1991 1994 1996 1999 2000 2001

Somport tunnel (France only)

RN134 (Oloron– Somport)

370

513 750

450 750 1,000 1,200 1,500

A650 (Pau– Oloron)

1,300 2,300 2,700

Total

820 MF 2,420 MF 3,670 MF 3,870 MF 4,713 MF 4,950 MF

Source: Adapted from Palacio (2000, p. 98).

has been even more spectacular. A projection of 450 MF in 1991 has since spiralled (the wildlife crossings will cost an estimated 350 MF), with the modernisation of the RN134 recosted in 2000 to a figure in excess of 1500 MF (Table 7.1). Although a further 262.8 MF have been allocated to the RN134 under the 4th CPER (2000–06), the vast majority of the extra money has yet to be found. Moreover, the public inquiry for the third section of the Pau–Somport link, the construction of the A650 motorway between Pau and Oloron, has not yet been authorised. Although regional actors had initially lobbied for this part of the link to be financed through the péage system, transport and infrastructure minister Jean-Claude Gayssot confirmed in January 2001 that this would not be realistic; the precise funding arrangements have yet to be finalised. It is no small measure of success for protesters that the DDE now conceives this motorway, mooted in 1995 as a four-lane dual carriageway, as a two-lane ‘rapid link’ – if indeed it is to be built at all, which at the time of writing remains in doubt.

Conclusion Explaining Environmental Protest in France

Twenty years ago, Hayward (1982) famously identified the key to policy implementation in France to be ‘the mobilisation of private interests in the pursuit of public objectives’. Yet the picture apparent from the preceding case studies is somewhat different: ultimately, it is the mobilisation of subnational interests, both public and private, which has been fundamental to the fate of both projects. Initially at least, the central state has been not so much a mobilising as a mobilised force in both cases. The central state has operated on an essentially reactive basis throughout the history of the Loire dam programme; although the ANECLA programme clearly concorded with the expansionist, modernising référentiel of post-war economic and infrastructural development, state policy-makers were slow to respond to the regional agenda, as policy authorisation became trapped in a fragmented administrative framework characterised by interministerial horse-trading. The EPALA programme, although authorised by the ‘heroic’ act of decentralisation, similarly demonstrated a central state responding to a challenge in the sectoral policy paradigm. Here, social protest actors, legitimised by both their ability to mobilise resources and by reference to the European sectoral policy paradigm, enabled the environment ministry to regain control of the policy process and, subsequently, pass new legislation enshrining new sectoral principles. The Somport project similarly points to the limits of central state autonomy, with the state but one actor within a multilevel policy process. Here, however, the concordance between national, European and subnational policy objectives – the realisation of the European free market – afforded 206

Conclusion 207

the central state a much more proactive role in response to initial lobbying by public and private subnational interests. The processes of regionalisation and contractualisation in particular have enabled the transport and infrastructure ministry to mobilise subnational élites in the pursuit of strategic national objectives. The development of policy-making at European level has thus been integral to the form and content of both roads infrastructure and water resource policy-making in France. Moreover, decentralisation has impacted on the policy process in two especially significant ways. First, policy capacity has been devolved away from the centre in a number of policy sectors, including education and social policy, infrastructural development, and urban and economic planning. As Balme (1995, p. 181) underlines, the efforts of regional governments to define and impose their own identities have frequently been expressed in preferences for public policies producing concrete results. Regional élites have consequently tended to focus on attracting ERDF grants for highly visible infrastructure projects, rather than for the less immediately perceptible benefits of other structural fund projects (such as vocational training). Thus while decentralisation and European integration have changed the nature of regional aid and economic development policy, regional political élites have tended to focus on investment in transport and education (particularly physical infrastructure). Notwithstanding substantial interregional variations, these two policy areas account for some 65 per cent of total regional development expenditure (Balme, 1998, pp. 187–90). The budgetary plan contract negotiated with the state by Aquitaine for the current 2000–06 period (as set out in Table 8.1) continues to demonstrate the strength of the relative financial commitment to transport in such contracts. The Somport tunnel, conceived and promoted by regional actors working within a multilevel policy and funding framework, is a prime Table 8.1

Budget breakdown for the 4th Aquitaine CPER 4th Aquitaine CPER, 2000–06

Transport infrastructure Employment and economic development Cultural policy, youth projects, sports development Education, professional training, research and development

38.2% 25.3% 20.4% 16.1%

Total Source: ‘Du nouveau pour le rail’, La République des Pyrénées, 27 March 2000.

3,620 MF 2,400 MF 1,930 MF 1,520 MF 9,470 MF


example of this dynamic. Roads, moreover, continue to dominate state– region transport infrastructure projects; despite the inclusion of the Pau–Canfranc railway in the regional budget, road construction takes up some 57 per cent of projected transport expenditure for Aquitaine’s 4th CPER. Second, as the traditional context for policy formulation and implementation has changed, subnational political actors have adopted new roles in politico-administrative arenas. The decentralisation reforms, far from democratising local politics, concentrated economic and formal powers in the hands of traditional élites anxious to demonstrate their new prestige both to the electorate and to competing subnational territorial units. The delay in the initial elections for regional councils, coupled with their timing to coincide with the 1986 legislative elections, disadvantaged the region and bolstered the département; traditional élites were thus able in the first instance to strengthen their hold on the policy process. In the case of the Loire dam programme, the Defferre reforms had a decisive effect, enabling local established political élites to proceed to the implementation of a vast construction project for which they had already been lobbying for some 20 years. Of course, decentralisation is limited in extent, and is frequently confined by observers and academics to its administrative component. Yet, not to appreciate the importance of the changes in policy networks produced by decentralisation is to ignore their effect on the public policy process. Indeed, it is hard to see how analyses which do not take into account the development of public policy as a negotiated multilevel process can explain the pattern and mobilisation of environmental protest in France, given the emphasis on infrastructural development apparent in decentralised policy choices. If indeed it ever was, the central French state is no longer the sole progenitor of public infrastructure projects.

Sectoral differentiation ‘Saumon et ours, même combat!’ claimed Bernard Rousseau at the height of the Serre de la Fare and Somport protests.1 And indeed, even beyond the identification of an endangered species – the salmon and the bear – as a mobilising force, there are numerous links between the two campaigns. SOS Loire Vivante is a constituent member of the CAP; two of the four spokespersons for the first protest action against the tunnel were the anti-dam association’s Roberto Epple and Martin Arnould. It is also interesting that the Pau administrative tribunal’s suspension

Conclusion 209

of the DUP for the Bedous bypass in December 1999 was based on the insufficiency of the environmental impact assessment on the gave d’Aspe, the river which runs alongside the RN134. Specifically, the impact assessment did not meet the provisions of the 1992 revised water law, drafted to take into account both the redefinition of the problematic in the light of EC directives, new methodologies of river management practised elsewhere in Europe, and the opposition to the Loire dam programme. However, there are of course differences between the campaigns, differences which can principally be explained by the structure of the French state. In fact, the very concept of environmental protest is arguably misleading where the interaction between protest groups and the state is being analysed, for the specificity of the environment is that it is a cross-sectoral policy issue. Unlike (for example) anti-nuclear protest, where the state is clearly identifiable as interlocutor and contained within a single ministry, environmental associations mobilising on comparable issues may be faced not only with public policy actors on different territorial levels, but also within entirely different branches of the state administration. Both the Somport and Loire dam projects point not only to the importance of territorial fragmentation in French public policy networks, therefore, but also to the centrality of sectoral differentiation to the construction of state–group relationships and consequent protest outcomes. As the preceding chapters have already discussed, the contrast between the structure of opportunities for challenging groups in the water and road infrastructure policy sectors is stark (indeed, the Somport scheme was reportedly presented by engineers from the Ponts et Chaussées élite administrative corps at the 1990 Congrès National de la Route even before the project was officially announced by the minister of transport).2 One conclusion of our sectoral approach is that, rather than constructing a state’s political opportunity structure, singular, we should analyse its political opportunity structures, plural. Indeed, the concept of an aggregated macro-level political opportunity structure provides an insufficiently supple lens through which to analyse environmental protest mobilisations. Different policies decided in different sectors may produce very different results, protest strategies, and state–group relationships, even for groups sharing similar objectives and ideologies. Water policy outcomes One of the most significant aspects of the Serre de la Fare campaign is that it secured the cancellation of a major construction project outside periods


of first-order electoral competition. It is thus significantly different from the ‘historic’ environmental campaigns of Larzac and Plogoff discussed in Chapter 1, both of which were cancelled as part of explicit promises made by a Parti Socialiste anxious to win the 1981 presidential and legislative elections. Yet the victory at Serre de la Fare needs to be understood in procedural as well as substantive terms. The entry of protesters into decisional structures and the devolution of policy responsibility for an alternative scheme are clearly dependent on the culture of the environment ministry, but equally on the structure of the water policy sector. Such outcomes point to a significant reversal of the expectations about environmental protest in France generated by a reading of the political opportunity structure model. The emergence of the environment ministry as lead administration not only increased state water policy coordination, but has also produced the reframing of the policy issue. As Brénac has argued, the primary function of the environment ministry has, given its budgetary and regulatory weaknesses, been essentially ‘intellectual’. In other words, its presence has secured the reframing of trans-sectoral issues, establishing the primacy of environmental requirements within issues of water resource management, even though the ministry does not command sufficient resources to develop and implement policy itself. Its role should not therefore be primarily understood in terms of the production of narrowly technical sets of norms and standards; rather, its main contribution has lain in generating ‘perspectives, values, renewed criteria for conducting action for all actors, whether public or private’ (Brénac, 1988, p. 144). As discussed in Chapter 5, a key result of such reframing has been to erode much of the legitimacy of the original EPALA project. Not only does the water policy sector appear strikingly different from the Jacobin ideal therefore, but it is also the case that in this domain the French state appears to be less and less the exception it is often held to be. As observers have shown, in common with similar developments in France, the tight post-war water policy communities of Holland (Bressers et al., 1994), Germany (Rüdig and Kraemer, 1994), England and Wales (Maloney and Richardson, 1994), and the United States (Heilman et al., 1994) have given way to more plural policy networks, featuring representatives of consumers’ and environmental associations. EC legislation has contributed to the strengthening of these associations by setting publicly visible standards for water quality against which national peformance can be measured (Buller, 1996b, pp. 474–5), and has in France been a major factor in the shift from the technical

Conclusion 211

management of drinking water to a more integrated approach to water management, negotiated between public, private, associational and industrial actors. Nevertheless, for France at least, it is important not to overstate the case. While water resource management is subject to a greater pluralisation of interests, the system remains essentially corporatist. Thus while the role of the basin committee and local authorities has been considerably reinforced within the formulation of water policy – local authorities in particular have sought to make basin committees a dynamic tool of decentralised policy-making, with the proviso that SAGE must gain the a priori consent of the state through the offices of the coordinating prefect – environmental associations remain marginalised. If environmental associations have gained access to basin committees since the early 1980s (Capoduro, 1997), then it is also the case, as Feldman (1991) points out, that they are whistle-blowers rather than fully-fledged decisional actors with significant input into the formulation of policy choices. Despite the trend to pluralism, therefore, interest group representation remains dominated by industrial users; the basin committees are still dominated by ‘the usual lobbies’ (Gouverne, 1994, p. 119). The water users’ college of the basin committees remains far from representative of all interested parties; at best, environmental and consumers’ associations represent only 8 per cent of users, and there are only nine consumers’ group representatives among the total 535 basin committee members (Table 8.2). Pluralism therefore remains limited and, in the eyes of environmental associations, insufficient; it is telling that the greater the strategic nature of decisions to be taken, the lesser the openness to associational actors. No member of any environmental association sits on the conseil d’administration of any of the six basin committees, and the president of all six basin committees is a conservative notable, typically a regional council president or former government minister. Moreover, despite the reframing of the policy paradigm under the twin dynamics of supranational policy-making and associational pressure group activism, the evidence points to a deterioration rather than an improvement in water quality in France, even discounting the effects of such events as the shipwreck of the Erika oil tanker off the Brittany coast in December 1999. In March 2001, the European Court of Justice judged that France had failed in its responsibilities over drinking water quality in Brittany, where nitrate levels in several areas were double that permitted by European norms. Two months later, the Rennes administrative tribunal fined the environment ministry over 700,000 F

212 Environmental Protest and the State in France Table 8.2 Membership of basin agency committees as of 1 January 1997. Figures for all basin committees, and for the Loire-Bretagne basin committee All water basin agencies number

Loire-Bretagne water basin agency

%

number

%

Local authorities regions départements communes Total

33 130 34 197

6 24 6 37

8 28 6 42

7 25 5 37

Users’ representatives industry agriculture consumers environmental anglers other Total

84 25 9 15 24 40 197

16 5 2 3 4 7 37

17 7 2 3 5 8 42

15 6 2 3 4 7 37

State prefects other representatives socio-professionals Total

37 72 32 141

7 13 6 26

10 12 8 30

9 11 7 26

Total (all)

535

100

114

100

Source: Adapted from CGP (1997, p. 35, p. 198) and OIE (2000).

for the neglect of its duties in maintaining water quality between 1990–96, again in Brittany. Unprecedentedly, the action had been brought by the Lyonnaise des Eaux, enabling it to recoup some of its costs following a previous trial, in which consumers, supported by the environmental association Eau et Rivières de Bretagne, had sued the company over the poor quality of the drinking water it supplied. In October 2001, a highy critical CGP report found that quality was suffering because only a third of the protection zones stipulated by the 1992 law had been put in place around water catchment points, while the previous year a WWF report underlined that, though each basin agency had met its targets by publishing an SDAGE by the end of 1996, only three out of an expected 300 SAGE had been drawn up by the year 2000. Institutional fragmentation and rivalry, and the influence of established interest groups, again lie at the heart of France’s apparent inability to deal effectively with qualitative issues. Although responsible

Conclusion 213

for some 69 per cent of water consumption in France and two-thirds of nitrate emissions, agriculture has always been exempted from the polluter-pays mechanism, effectively transferring environmental costs to domestic consumers, who bear 85 per cent of the basin redevance. A further revised water bill, due to be debated in parliament as this book was going to press in January 2002, aims to extend the mechanism to agricultural activities for the first time, bringing their contribution to 5 per cent of the redevance. Yet before even reaching parliament, the bill has been transformed in negotiations between the agriculture and environment ministries, and by the hostility of the FNSEA farmers’ union. Indeed, the bill has reportedly gone through 17 different drafts over a three-year consultation period; the proposed tax on the excess use of nitrogens has been reduced from 3 F per kilogramme to 1.5 F/kg; a tax on radioactive waste has disappeared completely from the bill, under the influence of the COGEMA and the energy and industry ministry; private distribution companies (Vivendi, Saur, Ondeo) have lobbied hard against the proposed reduction of the maximum concession period to 12 years, and have seen a weakening in the proposed state regulatory mechanisms for delegated management. The FNSEA has tabled 50 amendments to the bill in order to further reduce its obligations on the farming community. Roads policy outcomes Nonetheless, the paradigm shifts and procedural entrées gained in the water policy sector contrast sharply with the lack of access to environmental groups within road infrastructure policy-making. In response to the campaign against the TGV-Méditérannée, in late 1992 infrastructure minister Jean-Louis Bianco issued a circular reforming the public inquiry procedure for TGV and motorway projects whose cost exceeds the financial threshold defined by the LOTI (see Chapter 7). Previously, public inquiries had represented the first opportunity within the authorisation process for the public to comment on infrastructure projects. The innovation of the circulaire Bianco was therefore to introduce public consultation prior to a project’s preliminary studies, thus lengthening the procedure and enabling greater democratic participation in public policy choices. Moreover, should a proposed project be authorised, the circular provides for the organisation of comités départementaux de suivi to oversee its implementation. Initial evaluations of the circular have been mixed. Analysing the debate on the TGV-Aquitaine project of 1995–96, Rui found that whereas the new procedures provided a forum for socio-economic élites to


influence the project, the experience was less positive for citizens’ groups. In fact, the dispositions of the circulaire may merely serve to legitimise public policy choices (1997, p. 42). Similarly, Tapie-Grime argues that the new procedures were deployed by the state to defuse opposition to the A104 motorway project. As a result, opponents radicalised, widening their critique to the democratic structures of the state (1997, p. 25). For the Somport case study, initial indications are that a similar dynamic is at play. Given its reference to the LOTI and its application to only those road projects specifically classified as motorways, the circulaire could not apply to either the RN134 or to the tunnel, but does apply to the A650 between Pau and Oloron. Yet the CAP remains excluded from the debate: Again, we have to signal that transparency hasn’t stopped … becoming more opaque! Ministerial circular 92–71 15 December 1992 (known as the Bianco circular) established that, for new motorway sections, a ‘transparent debate would be organised with the participation of all concerned parties, political, socio-economic or associational.’ The prefect, in Pau, on the morning of 6 October [1999], presented this new two-lane project and the sub-prefect, in Oloron that afternoon, did the same. From the tri-partite composition defined by the circular, the associations have been excluded.3 One of the central demands of the CAP is precisely that it should be consulted over the modernisation of the RN134, and the Bedous bypass in particular. It is not for the want of trying that the CAP has found itself on the outside looking in, subjected to what it calls procedural ‘apartheid’. For the CSAVA, however, the situation is a little different. When comparing the site occupations at Serre de la Fare and the Somport tunnel, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that contingent as well as structural factors are central to explanations of the differing police responses. Although no attempt at evicting the Indiens of the HauteLoire was made, it should be noted that the geographical terrain was very different; the dam construction site lay off-road, and (successful) attempts to obstruct construction did not impinge on nearby traffic flow. In the Aspe valley, the circumstances were the reverse; toleration of sit-ins on the RN134 would have caused severe and sustained disruption to traffic. Nonetheless, as outlined in Chapter 7, the protesters of the Goutte d’eau have undoubtedly been subjected to repressive policing and pursuit through the courts. This is the more remarkable given that

Conclusion 215

general trends detected in France have stressed negotiation, compromise, and the underuse of coercive potential by forces policing street demonstrations (Fillieule and Jobard, 1998, p. 75), findings which moreover appear consistent across western democracies (Della Porta and Reiter, 1998, p. 29). Dalton’s concept of ideologically structured action appears particularly apposite here. Dalton, noting the value-free patterns of behaviour found in resource mobilisation theory, argues that the ‘political concerns derived from the ideology and identity of a group determine the specific options available to a group and its choice between the available options’ (1994, p. 11). Ideology thus influences strategical choices, resources, and mobilisation constituencies. This framework may go some way to help explain why, despite the multilevel policy process discussed in Chapter 6 and the importance of regional élites to the Somport project, Eric Pétetin does not differentiate between its progenitors. Simply, resistance is levelled against the state, or ‘le Pouvoir’. Indeed, this conflictual relationship is also apparent in the continued deployment by protesters of the Larzac myth as a reference point for mobilisation, perpetuating the articulation of environmental protest as opposition to the state. The CSAVA and its successors are thus ideological outsiders, placing themselves deliberately outside the policy process though their opposition to the state. Protest actions and discourses target the state because the state represents the means of coercion, particularly if, as Della Porta and Reiter (1998, p. 1) maintain, police responses are a central determinant of group perceptions of their political opportunity structure. Thus the identification by the more visible elements of the protest movement of the state as the primary anatagonist is a function of both the ideological and countercultural orientations of these elements, and the repressive strategies deployed by the state. This conflictual relationship persists: Pétetin and the other inhabitants of the Goutte d’eau have been fighting eviction since 1996 and staged a lengthy hunger strike in spring 2000. One of the benefits of studying the passage of a construction programme through the policy process over a long period of time is that it provides greater clarity when addressing procedural determinants and outcomes. This is especially the case for the Loire dam programme; in the case of the Somport tunnel, however, the shorter time-span renders attempts to produce a final assessment of the effects of the protest campaign on the policy process less easily manageable. Nonetheless, the very fact that the campaign is still ongoing points to one unexpected outcome, as the delaying tactics of the CSAVA and the CAP may yet


bring substantive and even procedural success. Here again therefore, we must qualify the effects of institutional strength: although the closure of the sectoral opportunity structure has enabled the exclusion of potentially oppositional societal interests at all stages of the policy process, the very strength of the administration at the output stage has, paradoxically, produced ineffective policy implementation. Thus tronçonnage, the principal tactic employed by the DDE to circumvent legal challenge to the modernisation of the RN134, has instead afforded multiple opportunities for protest groups to mount physical and legal challenges to the project, imposing massive costs and delays. Moreover, the fatal accidents in the Mont Blanc and St Gothard trans-Alpine tunnels, both of which took place after the Somport tunnel was scheduled to open, have increased uncertainty over the Somport’s long-term viability. Following the Mont Blanc tragedy of March 1999, the state was ultimately obliged to find an extra 2000 MF to fund new safety procedures in France’s 39 road tunnels, throwing the ability of tunnels like the Somport to accept freight traffic into doubt. In their discussion of radical environmental action in Britain in the 1990s, Seel and Plows (2000, p. 126) argue that: The basis of the cost escalation strategy is that while corporations often do not want to understand the arguments or values of radical environmentalists, the one thing they do understand very well is a balance sheet. […] In general, cost escalation is likely to have a more decisive effect when the scheme in question is not being funded by central government. The lessons of the Somport tunnel project are similar, although with one significant difference: the funding of the RN134 through contractualised regional programming has meant that it is the investment budgets of subnational authorities, rather than private interests, that are obliged to bear the weight of the increased costs. As we have seen, this has resulted in a funding crisis: the estimated completion date of the Pau–Somport route has subsequently been telescoped while its strategic importance has been scaled down. Belatedly due to open to non-lorry traffic in autumn 2002, the Somport tunnel is now unlikely ever to become a major international road transit route.

Evaluating environmental protest in France What final conclusions about environmental protest as a whole can we then draw from the investigation of the Serre de la Fare and Somport

Conclusion 217

protests? First, it appears the case that, despite the incidents in the Aspe valley, direct action has in general been less violent and less confrontational in the late 1980s and 1990s, and that the range of tactics used by environmental protesters has awarded an increasingly large place to judicial and institutional channels. Clearly, these methods have a number of consequences, not least that they require significant financial resources. SOS Loire Vivante has secured sponsorship from environmentally active firms such as Patagonia, and even – as part of the European Rivers Network – Unilever. Meanwhile, though the CAP has been able to build up a fighting fund through its land-buying scheme, the group led by Eric Pétetin has been less fortunate. Owing 50,000 F in rent, administrative and legal bills, and subject to a daily interest charge of 2000 F, the Goutte d’eau has been forced to close its bank account. Second, as groups resort to legal action, the ground over which conflicts are played out becomes increasingly technical as well as expensive; associations have correspondingly become increasingly reliant on the lobbying, legal and scientific expertise that can be provided by the national and regional arms of FNE. As a further consequence, private multinational organisations such as WWF and Greenpeace, comparatively and historically weak in France (Van der Heijden, 1997, pp. 36–44), have become increasingly important, given their expertise and organisational capacity. The WWF, as we have seen, has played a major role in the opposition to the Loire scheme at all levels, whether promoting river protection at national and international levels or funding and coordinating at local and basin levels. Together with Greenpeace, the WWF enabled the CAP to set up its land-buying schemes. The final conclusion offered here centres on perhaps the most important question for any challenging group, that of access. Even before the victory of the Gauche plurielle, the loi Barnier of 1995 introduced a tripartite Commission nationale du débat public (CNDP), a new negotiating structure intervening prior to the public enquiry procedure for infrastructure projects of national importance, or grandes opérations publiques d’aménagement d’intérêt national. In September 1997, the extension of the port facility at Le Havre, and the installation of high-tension electricity lines between Boutre in the Var and Carros in the AlpesMaritimes became the first two projects submitted for consideration. The significance of the body is underlined by the fact that Dominique Voynet considered she had won a significant concession when the third Parisian airport project was referred to the CNDP (see Chapter 1), while the referral of the Mont Blanc tunnel dossier to the same body has been a central demand of Les Verts.


At face value therefore, this body appears to concretise the entry of environmental protest groups into formal decisional structures on infrastructure policy-making, and the functioning of this body would appear to provide an intriguing basis for the continuation of enquiry into environmental activism and the structure of political opportunities in France. However, on the initial evidence of the third Parisian airport inquiry, the signs appear mixed, to say the least. In September 2001, Green député André Aschieri resigned from the third airport commission in protest at what Les Verts called a ‘parody’ of a consultation procedure, while Jean Sivardière, president of the FNAUT transport users’ group, has been especially scathing of the conditions in which the apparent decision to press ahead with the new airport has been taken. The affair has developed into an ideological and procedural interministerial battle between the environment ministry and the transport and infrastructure ministry. For Libération, the whole affair has been conducted à la française; rather than deliberating whether the third airport should be built or not, the DUCSAI commission was rather charged with evaluating the respective merits of the eight possibilities.4 In other words, despite the DUCSAI’s belated agreement to fund a study of air traffic growth (which challenged the civil aviation authority’s official forecast and argued against the need for a third airport), one could be forgiven for thinking that the political decision to build a third airport had already been taken before the consultation procedure was organised. Some aspects of public policy-making in France have therefore changed little, despite appearances. Yet this should not divert us from those aspects of French policy-making which have changed, or indeed those aspects which have remained relatively stable over the course of the Fifth Republic but which tend to be overlooked by macro-structural models of the state. Indeed, the increased importance of European and subnational tiers of government in public policy-making provides one answer to the paradox of the persistence of environmental protest in an institutional climate held to be highly unresponsive to such mobilisations. As competing levels of subnational authority have sought to stake out the ground for the limits of their action, they have been keen to implement prestigious development policies which have brought them into conflict with environmental groups. Increasingly, such environmental conflict is being waged with subnational as well as, or rather than, national power centres. A sectorally and territorially differentiated structural analysis of the state is therefore crucial to any analysis of the formation and outcomes of environmental protest, and it is within this context that the second wave of environmental protest in France should be understood.

Notes Introduction 1. Parliamentary Commission 3134, Rapport de la Commission d’enquête sur l’aménagement de la Loire, le maintien de son débit, la protection de son environnement, 11 December 1992, pp. 183–91. Christine Jean, coordinator of Loire Vivante, is quoted from her participation in the parliamentary hearings of 8 September 1992.

1 Environmental protest in France 1. Since May 1989, France Nature Environnement has been the official name of the FFSPN. 2. ‘Les soixante “points chauds” du territoire’, Le Monde, 5 June 1997, p. 17. 3. ‘En piste pour un troisième aéroport’, La Nouvelle République du Centre Ouest, 4 May 2001. 4. ‘Le troisième aéroport sera construit dans la Somme’, Le Monde, 15 November 2001. 5. ‘Quand vous voudrez … Le programme de Brice Lalonde et René Dumont, candidats Amis de la Terre aux élections partielles du 5e arrondissement de Paris, en novembre 1976.’ Le Courrier de la Baleine, 26–7 (numéro spécial), 1977, pp. 34–6. 6. ‘Nous irons cracher sur vos centrales’, Le Courrier de la Baleine, 4, February 1973, p. 3. 7. ‘Le ministère de l’Énergie’, Le Courrier de la Baleine, 28, 1977, p. 2. 8. ‘L’enjeu de référendum’, Le Courrier de la Baleine, 45, May 1979, p. 2. 9. ‘Un barrage pour quelques arpents de Lozère’, Le Monde, 7 August 1977, p. 5. 10. ‘Si l’usine sautait …’, Le Courrier de la Baleine, 28, 1977, p. 4.

3 Institutional change and the Fifth Republic 1. Note that the results refer to valid votes cast and not to registered voters. The figures for 1978 and 1981 refer to metropolitan France only; the figures for subsequent elections include France’s overseas départements. 2. See ‘Quand la métropole vampirise l’espace rural’, Le Monde, 21 April 1999, p. 14.

4 Water resource management 1. ‘La France va-t-elle manquer d’eau? II. – L’unité nouvelle: le bassin hydraulique’, Le Monde, 15 June 1967, p. 13. 219

220 Notes 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

Journal Officiel (Lois et Décrets), 124/3, 4 January 1992, p. 187. Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 2, August 1961, p. 1. Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 24, September 1963, p. 1. Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 32, June–July 1964, pp. 3–5. Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 88, July–August 1970, p. 5. See Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 26, November 1963, pp. 1–5; 31, May 1964, p. 2; 32, July 1964, p. 6. Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 83, November 1969, p. 2; 112, June 1973, p. 1; 116, March 1974, p. 3. Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 98, July 1971, p. 5. Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 105, June 1972, p. 3. The other being the menace of Marxist socialism. See ‘Faire pénétrer la morale dans l’économie’, Le Monde, 2 May 1974, p. 6. Bulletin de l’ANECLA, numéro spécial, 65, December 1967, p. 21. Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 116, March 1974, p. 2. Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 84, February 1970, p. 3. See ‘Les riverains de la Loire pressent le gouvernement de définir une politique d’équipement du fleuve’, Le Monde, 3 October 1978, p. 39. Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 98, July 1971, p. 7; 92, December 1970, pp. 1–2. Protection et aménagement intégré de la vallée de la Loire, rapport de M Jean Chapon, vice-président du Conseil Général des Ponts et Chaussées à M le Ministre de l’Environnement et du Cadre de Vie, of December 1979. For examples of the former, see Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 45, October 1965, p. 4, and 95, April 1971, p. 1; and of the latter, Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 28, February 1964, p. 4. ‘Orléans, Blois et Tours demandent une société d’aménagement de la Loire’, Le Monde, 6 June 1973, p. 30. ‘Les riverains de la Loire pressent le gouvernement de définir une politique d’équipement du fleuve’, Le Monde, 3 October 1978, p. 39. In fact, ANECLA wound itself up in June 1979, to be replaced by LIGER, an organisation set up as a counterweight to the administration. See Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 143, July 1979, p. 1.

5 Vive la Loire sauvage! 1. Le Monde, 30 March 1989, p. 1. 2. Letter reproduced in L’Éveil, 29 April 1989, p. 7. 3. Quoted in ‘Une décision exclusivement politique ’, Le Monde, 2 August 1991, p. 6. 4. For example, the comments of Pierre Goldberg, Communist mayor of Montluçon and EPALA vice-president, and an (unnamed) EPALA chargé de mission, in ‘Un comité de défense en voie de constitution’, L’Éveil, 23 August 1990, and ‘EPALA: réouverture des grands chantiers sur la Loire’, Le Progrès de Saône et Loire, 18 March 1990, respectively. 5. SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 10, September 1991, p. 2. 6. SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 19, December 1993, p. 1. 7. Interview with Martin Arnould, Le Puy, 4 April 1996. 8. Interview with Martin Arnould, op.cit.

Notes 221 9. Fabrice Nicolino, ‘Une victoire culturelle’, Les Réalités de l’Écologie, 50, February 1994, p. 22. 10. ‘Des tentes sur le site et une chaîne humaine devant les bulldozers’, L’Éveil, 20 February 1989. 11. SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 8, March 1991, p. 4. 12. ‘Barrage au barrage!’, Le Monde, 3 May 1989, p. 11. 13. ‘La Loire: “un long égout tranquille”?’, La Tribune, 11 December 1989. 14. See ‘Barrage au barrage’, La Tribune, 27 November 1989, and SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 10, September 1991, p. 2. 15. Quoted in ‘Barrage sur la Loire: les élus socialistes hésitent à mouiller’, Libération, 7 February 1990. 16. See ‘La construction du dernier grand barrage du bassin de la Loire est contestée’, Le Monde, 11 August 1998, p. 8; ‘Remous autour de la gestion de l’eau’, Le Monde, 12 December 1998, p. 11. 17. Quoted in ‘Loire: ils sont contre cet EPALA-là’, La Nouvelle République du Centre, 28 January 1991. 18. SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 6, October 1990, p. 3. 19. Quoted in L’Éveil, 3 March 1989, p. 4. 20. In a speech at SOS Loire Vivante’s 1991 AGM; quoted in L’Éveil, 5 February 1991, p. 5. 21. See ‘Laissez le long fleuve tranquille’, L’Express, 11 November 1988, pp. 81–4. 22. See Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 32, July 1964, p. 3, and 13, September 1962, p. 2. 23. Parliamentary Commission 3134, op.cit., pp. 151–68. Royer is quoted from his participation in the parliamentary hearings of 1 September 1992. 24. ‘Editorial’, SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 4, October 1989, p. 1. 25. Parliamentary Commission 3134, op.cit., p. 185; hearings of 8 September 1992. 26. See ‘Naussac II, un barrage contesté’, Les Réalités de l’Écologie, 42, May 1993, p. 39. 27. His comments were made in August 1990 when bathing was cancelled on the Villerest reservoir due to the proliferation of algae in the water; quoted in ‘Lac de Villerest: le flop de l’été’, Le Pays Roannais, 31 August 1990. 28. ‘Brice Lalonde et les aménageurs: “Oui, mais …” ’, Ça m’intéresse, 92, October 1988. 29. See Communication du Conseil des Ministres du 7 février 1990: l’aménagement de la Loire, reproduced in annex to report of Parliamentary Commission 3134, op.cit., pp. 127–8, and Lalonde interviewed in ‘Référendum sur la Loire’, Le Journal du Dimanche, 4 February 1990, pp. 1 and 7. 30. See L’Éveil, 1 December 1990, p. 7, and 23 December 1990, p. 9. 31. See ‘En accord avec SOS Loire Vivante’, La Tribune, 15 December 1990. 32. ‘Le barrage de Serre de la Farre [sic]: les opinions des habitants de la HauteLoire’, IFOP (Institut français d’opinion publique et d’étude de marché), étude no. 1,316, December 1990. Published in ‘Le ministére de l’environnement rend public un sondage IFOP à propos du barrage de Serre de la Fare’, L’Éveil du Dimanche, 30 December 1990, p. 13. 33. Quoted in L’Éveil, 8 December 1990, p. 9. 34. Quoted in ‘Le ministère de l’environnement rend public …’, op.cit. 35. ‘Aménagement de la Loire: les élus barrent le référendum’, Libération, 17 December 1990.

222 Notes 36. Communiqué de la Fédération de la Haute-Loire du PCF, published in L’Éveil, 22 December 1990, p. 5. 37. Evrard is quoted in L’Éveil, 7 February 1991, p. 7. 38. Quoted in L’Éveil, 8 December 1990, p. 9. 39. ‘SOS Loire Vivante ne veut pas vendre la peau de l’ours’, L’Éveil, 27 January 1990. 40. Interview with Martin Arnould, Le Puy, 4 April 1996. 41. Jean Royer, ‘Rester solidaires’, EPALA Infos, 25, December 1994, p. 1. 42. Lalonde, parliamentary hearing of 22 September 1992, Parliamentary Commission 3134, op.cit., p. 270. 43. ‘Aménagement de la Loire: le gouvernement donne le feu vert pour la construction de deux barrages’, AFP press communiqué, 4 January 1994. 44. Parliamentary Commission 3134, op.cit., pp. 57 and 110. 45. ‘La Loire est une affaire d’état’, SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 23, December 1994, p. 1. 46. Royal, parliamentary hearing of 8 September 1992, Parliamentary Commission 3134, op.cit., p. 178. 47. ‘Quand la Loire reprend son cours’, Les Réalités de l’Écologie, 67, September 1995, p. 37. 48. Interview with EPALA technical director Régis Thépot, Orléans, 9 April 1996.

6 Roads policy and multilevel decision-making 1. ‘Le gouvernement programme la construction de 2730 kilomètres de voies autoroutières’, Le Monde, 15 April 1987, p. 31. 2. Bulletin of the European Communities, December 1986, 1.3.8, p. 18. 3. Official Journal of the European Communities, C288, 15 November 1986, p. 7. 4. See COM(92)231 final, 11 June 1992, Transport infrastructure. 5. ‘La construction d’un “Isthme européen” ’, Le Monde, 16 May 1994, p. R06. 6. Ministère de l’équipement, des transports et du tourisme, ‘Tunnel du Somport. Dossier d’enquête préalable à la Déclaration d’Utilité Publique’, 1993, pp. 15–17. 7. In ‘Les pro-tunnel mobilisent’, Sud-Ouest, 11 December 1992. 8. ‘Tunnel du Somport – Enquête Publique. Avis de la Commission’, 16 December 1990; www-penelope.drec.unilim.fr/penelope/cases/france/avis90.htm 9. See ‘Impatients Aragonais’, Sud-Ouest, 21 September 1989.

7 Opportunity, protest, and the Somport tunnel 1. 2. 3. 4.

‘Coup de cymbales médiatique’, Sud-Ouest, 6 November 1989. See www-penelope.drec.unilim.fr/penelope/cases/france/courtd1.htm ‘Les antitunnel déboutés’, Sud-Ouest, 24 October 1995. ‘Proposition de texte de base pour la création de la Coordination Autonome des Comités Somport pour l’Arrêt Immédiat des Travaux en Vallée d’Aspe’, Aspaches, 1, 1994, p. 3. 5. See ‘Eric Pétetin est condamné à 9 mois de prison ferme’, Le Monde, 11 June 1993, p. 12; ‘Le cas Pétetin’, Le Monde, 31 July 1993, p. 8; ‘Grâce providentielle’, Le Monde, 23 August 1993, p. 16.

Notes 223 6. ‘Somport: les dessous de l’affaire …’, Sud-Ouest, 19 December 1991. 7. Press release of 14 April 1992. See also ‘Deux poids, deux mesures’, communiqué à la presse issued by Les Verts, 9 June 1992. 8. See ‘Eric Péte … saint et martyr’, Sud-Ouest, 14 May 1992, and ‘Pétetin en … direct’, Sud-Ouest, 18 July 1992. 9. ‘Lettre ouverte à Michel Vauzelle, Garde des Sceaux’, 28 July 1992. Printed in Vert Contact, 256, 1 August 1992. 10. ‘Les Verts préfèrent Lionel Jospin’, Le Monde, 3 May 1995, p. 11. 11. ‘Un aménagement exemplaire pour la RN134’, Sud-Ouest, 9 July 1993. 12. Quoted in ‘L’Union sacrée de gauche à droite’, Sud-Ouest, 5 December 1992. 13. ‘Fin d’un malentendu?’, Sud-Ouest, 21 June 1993. 14. Quoted in ‘Le dossier à Matignon’, Sud-Ouest, 9 August 1991. 15. ‘Le dossier à Matignon’, op.cit. 16. See ‘Affaire réglée’, Sud-Ouest, 10 August 1991, and also ‘Feu vert pour le Somport’, Sud-Ouest, 13 August 1991. 17. ‘L’État dévoile enfin les plans du massacre’, Aspaches, 4, March 1995, pp. 10–11. 18. Quoted in ‘Pendant les travaux, la lutte continue’, Sud-Ouest Dimanche, 4 September 1994, pp. 16–17. 19. ‘Lettre ouverte aux habitants de la vallée d’Aspe’, L’Association des socioprofessionnels de la vallée d’Aspe, 3 July 1998. 20. ‘Antoine Waechter pris au piège’, La République des Pyrénées, 2 October 1991, p. 3. 21. Vert Contact, 216, 8 October 1991. 22. Easily a quorum … ‘Le “club” des 21’, Sud-Ouest (Béarn et Soule), 6 October 1994. 23. ‘Somport: un élu valléen en examen’, La République des Pyrénées, 3 October 1994, p. 5; ‘Les cafétiers avec H. Eyt’, La République des Pyrénées, 6 October 1994. 24. ‘D’une même voix’, La République des Pyrénées, 7 October 1991, pp. 4–5. 25. Quoted in ‘Colère sur voie montante’, La République des Pyrénées, 21 March 1995. 26. Quoted in ‘Les montagnards sont là’, Sud-Ouest, 14 December 1992. 27. ‘Les montagnards sont là’, op.cit. 28. ‘Somport: la lutte continue!’, Les Réalités de l’Écologie, 43, June 1993, p. 8. 29. ‘Trois ans de lutte pour la vallée sacrée’, Les Réalités de l’Écologie, supplément au 31, May 1992, pp. 4–5. 30. ‘Spécial vallée d’Aspe’, CGT Aquitaine informations, January 1992, p. 6. 31. ‘Quels transports en Aquitaine et pour quelle région?’: leaflet INDECOSA/ CGT Aquitaine, 1995, p. 2. 32. ‘Quels transports en Aquitaine et pour quelle région?’, op.cit., p. 2. 33. Interview with Gérald Broccot, CGT departmental secretary (PyrénéesAtlantiques), Pau, 11 April 1995. 34. ‘SOS Vallée d’Aspe’, Vert Contact, 246, 23 May 1992. 35. Provisional conclusions of the CEMAGREF report, June 1992. wwwpenelope.drec.unilim.fr/penelope/cases/france/CEMGREF.htm 36. ‘Dans les Pyrénées, l’ours fait reculer le tunnel’, Libération, 12 August 1991. 37. Bernard Bosson, Journal Officiel (Débats Parlementaires), 1993/6, 22 April 1993, p. 115.

224 Notes 38. For a fuller discussion of this point, see Florence Corbier, ‘Fallait-il utiliser l’ours dans le combat du Somport?’, Les Réalités de l’Écologie, 45, September 1993, pp. 12–14. 39. CRELOC (1990), ‘La ligne Oloron–Canfranc: des chiffres et des dates’; www-penelope.drec.unilim.fr/penelope/cases/france/CRELOC.htm 40. ‘En vallée d’Aspe, le train on y croit dur comme fer’, L’Humanité, 4 May 1998. 41. Quoted in ‘Le CRELOC saisit Bruxelles’, Sud-Ouest, 13 November 1992. 42. Interview with Gérald Broccot, op.cit. 43. ‘Aménagement de la RN134’, Somport actualités, 1 April 1994, p. 3.

Conclusion 1. Nature Environnement/Pour que vive la Loire et son bassin, 32, September– October 1991, p. 7. 2. Interview with Eric Pétetin, Paris, 17 March 1999. 3. ‘L’autoroute, à géométrie variable, Pau–Oloron (suite … et fin?)’, Journal du Collectif, 15, December 1999, p. 2. 4. ‘Débats en l’air autour d’une décision déjà prise’, Libération, 5 September 2001.

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Index advocacy coalitions, 56 agricultural policy-making, 60, 65, 96, 99–100, 213 airport, third Paris, 17, 25–8, 30–2, 217–18 Les Amis de la Terre, 2, 10, 34, 176 ANECLA, 103, 118, 119–28, 143–4, 206 see also EPALA; SEMECLA anti-nuclear protests siting conflicts, 13–14, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 37, 61, 146, 182, 210 and the state, 32, 34–5, 36–7, 37–9, 46, 186, 202 and violence, 37, 38, 100 see also EDF; Loire development programme

corporatism, 64, 65, 66, 67, 73–4, 99, 211 see also pluralism Communauté de Travail des Pyrénées, 169–72, 200 see also Somport tunnel; inter-regional cooperation agreements cost escalation, 134, 180–1, 201–5, 216 CSAVA, 176, 178–80, 186–8, 190–3, 198–9, 214, 217

Barnier, Michel, 151, 152, 184, 196, 217 Bayrou, François, 174, 188, 189, 200 Centre européen des volcans, 17, 18, 24 see also Giscard d’Estaing Chambonchard, 6, 7, 123, 128, 137, 147, 154 cleavage structures, 48–50, 79–80 see also political opportunity structures CODER, 104, 108 see also regional development programmes cohabitation, 74, 75–7, 81 Collectif Alternatives Pyrénéennes, 11, 176, 180–1, 186, 191, 198, 202, 214, 217 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), 191–2, 198 Conseil national du débat public (CNDP), 26–7, 30–1, 217–18 Constitutional Council, 74, 77–9, 84

dam protests, see under individual names DATAR, 94–5, 104, 108, 123, 127, 157–8, 167, 168, 169 see also regional development programmes DDE, 37, 112, 130, 150, 153, 156–7, 167, 170, 179, 181, 195, 202, 203–5, 216 decentralisation, 5, 6, 72, 74, 90, 94–5, 105, 139, 146, 206-8, 218 Defferre reforms, 29, 86–7, 95, 129–30, 142–3, 208 and environmental activism, 24, 29–32, 217–18 demonstrations, 18, 20–3, 99–100, 133, 173, 174, 178, 186, 189–90, 192–4, 200 see also protest strategies DIREN, 116, 117, 153 EDF, 35, 37, 38, 96, 98, 118–19, 126–7, 145, 148, 153 see also anti-nuclear protests; privatisation electoral systems, 48–9, 79–80, 81–2, 129 see also party systems environmental policy-making, 9, 104, 111–12, 128, 210

243

244 Index environmentalism, 10–11 EPALA, 6, 103, 118, 124, 127, 130, 133–46, 148–54, 206, 210 see also ANECLA; SEMECLA European Round Table of Industrialists, 162, 164–5 European structural funds, 87, 88–90, 93, 96, 160–1, 171–2, 200, 207 see also inter-regional cooperation agreements European transport policy, 161–70 Motorways Working Group, 165–6 Trans-European Road Network, 162, 165–7, 168–70, 173, 183, 191 France Nature Environnement, 25, 177, 201, 217 Gayssot, Jean-Claude, 8, 26, 200, 205 Génération Écologie, 17, 18, 84, 138, 181, 183–4 Giscard d’Estaing, Valérie, 17, 18, 24, 26, 135 see also Centre européen des volcans Greenpeace, 166–7, 176, 180, 191, 193, 198, 217 inter-regional cooperation agreements, 87–8, 89–92, 169–72, 200–1 see also Communauté de Travail des Pyrénées, European structural funds, regional policy-making Labarrère, André, 174, 175, 182–3, 184 Lalonde, Brice, 34, 105, 133, 138, 146–52, 184–5 land-buying schemes, 180–1, 186, 217 Larzac, 14, 21, 34, 35–6, 133, 182, 186, 187, 210, 215 see also Naussac Lassalle, Jean, 182, 188–9, 197–8, 200 legal challenges, 37–8, 133, 134, 173, 177–8, 181, 204, 217 see also protest strategies Loire development programme, 118–31 and nuclear power, 126–7

Loire Vivante, 103, 132, 133, 144, 149–50, 151 Mamère, Noël, 1, 85, 183, 188 Mont Blanc tunnel, 20, 146, 147, 216 motorway protests, 7, 17, 24–5, 29–30, 214 see also roads policy-making Mouvement Écologiste Indépendant, 84, 183 multi-level governance, 5, 86–96, 160–74, 186–90, 206–13 Naussac, 6, 7, 36, 38, 121, 123, 124, 127, 135 see also Larzac national planning programmes, 103–4, 107–8, 119–25, 130–1, 158, 160, 192 new social movements, 2, 14–16, 22–4, 42, 45, 48–50, 61–2, 71–2 and grievances, 23–4, 42 and mobilisation, 22–3, 48–50 see also political opportunity structures; protest strategies; social movements nimby protest, 26–8, 139, 187–9 Parti Communiste Français, 1, 30, 80–2, 127, 137–9, 146, 149 Parti Socialiste, 1, 6, 14, 19, 30, 80–2, 84–5, 97, 127, 137–9 party funding laws, 74, 83–5 party systems, 48, 73, 79–85 see also electoral systems; cleavage structures Pétetin, Eric, 179–80, 186–8, 193, 199, 215, 217 Plan Loire Grandeur Nature, 126, 134, 151–4 pluralism, 64, 67, 211 see also corporatism policing of protest, 101, 178–80, 214–5 policy communities, see under policy networks policy networks, 53–7, 61–2, 67, 88, 93–4, 130–1, 206–9, 210–16 policy process phases, 58–60

Index policy sectorisation, 8–10, 41, 51–3, 65, 66, 101–2 and France, 66–7, 69–70 policy styles, 51, 67–70 political opportunity structures, 3–5, 19, 40, 41–51, 50–1, 54–8, 147, 202–4, 209, 215–16, 218 allies, importance of, 19, 48, 50, 63, 71–3, 100, 136–9 application to France, 3, 5, 19, 62–4, 65, 71–3, 96–8, 146 configuration of power, 47–8, 71–3, 101 definitions of, 3–4, 19, 42–5, 101–2 and protest outcomes, 3, 4, 5, 45, 58–62, 63 Pont du Ré, 29, 136 privatisation, 96–8 of water utlities, 105–7, 109, 212 protest strategies, 8, 10, 16, 22, 36–8, 44–5, 57, 60–2, 64, 99–101, 134–6, 176–81, 186–8, 191–3 see also cost escalation; demonstrations; legal challenges; public inquiries; referendums; violence public inquiries, 133, 136, 171, 174, 176, 177, 181, 196, 203, 204, 213 see also protest strategies referendums, 33, 63, 76, 146–9 see also protest strategies regional development programmes, 103–4, 107–8, 118–25, 130–1, 141 regional planning contracts, 87, 93, 95–6, 160–1, 184, 200, 204–5, 207–8 regional policy-making, 87, 89–96 see also inter-regional cooperation agreements Resource Mobilisation theory, 42, 47, 215 Rhine–Rhône canal, 17, 20, 29, 68, 120, 125, 146, 147 roads policy-making, 9, 156–60, 213–6 motorway construction, 158–60

245

see also European transport policy; motorway protests Royer, Jean, 124, 126, 127, 133–4, 138, 142–4, 150, 151–3 SEMECLA, 120, 123–5, 129 see also ANECLA Serre de la Fare, 5, 6–7, 9, 11, 18, 20, 103, 118, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 133–41, 147–54, 184, 193, 201, 214, 217 social movements collective identity, 46–7 definitions of, 43, 57–8, 61–2 institutionalisation, 2, 10, 12, 13–14, 15–16, 60, 62 logic of action, 46, 50, 60, 215 mobilisation, 4, 42–3, 46, 47, 48, 50, 59–62, 72–3 and policy networks, 57, 61–2 see also political opportunity structures; protest strategies; social movements Somport tunnel, 6, 7–8, 9, 11, 18, 20, 160–1, 162, 168–74, 175–205, 214–16 bears, survival of, 7, 185, 193–8, 202 and European construction, 191–2, 198 and inter-regional lobbying, 168, 169–72, 175 and rail alternatives, 177, 181, 193, 198–201, 208 and regional consciousness, 187–90 and regional economic development, 170–4, 188–9, 191, 203–4 SOS Loire Vivante, 11, 103, 132, 133–7, 139–41, 143–54, 183, 184 salmon, repopulation of, 144–5, 153, 154, 193 TGV protests, 18, 20, 24, 29, 213–14 third Paris airport, 17, 25–8, 30–2, 217–18 Les Verts, 1, 12, 14, 17, 61, 217

246 Index Les Verts – continued and elections, 1, 17–18, 33, 79, 81–2, 83, 133, 136, 137, 138–9, 181–2, 183–4 and institutionalisation, 2, 18–19, 73 organisational structure of, 32–3 and protest, 18, 25, 146, 176, 179–80, 182–3, 188, 193, 195 and regionalism, 33 Villerest, 36, 121, 124, 126, 127, 145 violence, 37–8, 43, 60–1, 101, 134–5, 178–80, 187–8, 217 Voynet, Dominique, 1, 7, 8, 14, 17, 180, 181, 182, 193, 217

Waechter, Antoine, 84, 183, 187–8 water policy, 9, 103–18, 154, 209–13 basin agencies, 104, 108–11, 112, 113, 116, 117, 118, 122, 127, 211–3 catchment plans, 116–17, 118, 143, 154, 212 and European policy-making, 105, 113–16, 206–7 resource supply, 105–7 see also privatisation WWF, 34, 136, 176, 180, 196, 212, 217

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