The ‘reform of the state’ is one of the most powerful contemporary narratives in French politics, but it is deeply ambivalent. It rests upon the assumption that the state needs reforming, a diagnosis contested by public sector workers, mid-ranking civil servants and much of public opinion, but central to official reports such as the Picq report of 1994. In the largely constructivist French political science tradition, writers such as Rouban (1997, 2003) emphasise that a convincing discourse is needed to legitimise state reform in France, a discourse that is consistent with pre-existing ideational frames and institutional orders. Yet there is no commonly accepted overarching référentiel, or framework of ideas, in the field of state reform. In Chapter 2, three distinctive but interconnected versions of the reform of the state programmes are presented, based on administrative modernisation, contractualisation and budgetary reform. These cases each illustrate an important dimension of governance in France: the attempt by governmental elites to redefine the core of state activity to give a strategic sense to the centre under threat. The chapter begins by setting out in some detail the state-centric model in France and its limits. It then considers in turn administrative modernisation and instrumentation, contractualisation and budgetary reform as attempts by powerful actors at the core of the state to reaffirm their centrality. It concludes by relating the evidence from the state reform case to the framework of analysis defined in Chapter 1.

While ‘government’ evokes the sense of the regular exercise of hierarchical power across the whole range of areas of public policy, ‘governance’ describes a more mediated, context-specific process. The dynamics of public policy vary according to the nature of the policy problem, the characteristics of the policy sector, key historical junctures and path-dependent decisions and the configurations of the actors in play. For those analysts imbued with the concept, policy dynamics can best be understood by fine-grained comparisons of contrasting policy sectors. From this perspective, the dynamics in economic development, welfare or education are contingent upon the structural qualities of the sectors concerned, or, in a weaker definition, upon the structural context within which games are played or prevailing ideas or discursive registers diffused. Thus framed, policy sectors can be compared in terms of their ideational structures and discursive coalitions; their institutions, actors and networks; the exogenous or endogenous provenance of change therein; and their capacity for legitimising or resisting change.

Reasoning in terms of policy sectors, the approach adopted here for the sake of comparison, emphasises the contingent nature of power and process. Generalities, whether about power or the nature of the state, require fine-grained, meso-level analysis to be undertaken to provide support for or to falsify general propositions. Comparing distinct areas of public policy is a robust means of testing propositions about governance, as well as revisiting representations of France as a state-centric polity.

Governing as governance challenges core understandings of the traditional state-centric model, as the argument of the previous chapters has shown. Complex legal orders and interdependent relationships lay bare traditional beliefs about the supremacy of the state and the viability of a system of public law. Some interest groups have begun to shift the focus of their lobbying away from central government. The state itself now emphasises its own productivity as the key to future prosperity. Multi-level dynamics and the requirements of multi-actor coordination create new challenges for actors vested with public authority. The operation of the international political economy has produced metaphors of a hollow state that go to the very heart of the French statist model.

These various pressures are not simply accepted in a passive manner. This chapter shows how French academics and policy analysts have sought to understand and make sense of the changing environment in a way that is consistent with or builds upon accepted frameworks. It then argues that state officials view new management practices and organisational reforms through their own lenses as public servants and their own belief in the appropriate behaviour their professional status implies. Above all, the chapter suggests that the main national political parties and politicians attempt to make sense of their own activity and accord a pre-eminent role to politics and the state.

France's governors face key challenges in an age of state transformation and changing patterns of state–society relations. This book has embraced a critical version of the governance paradigm. Governance is best understood as a middle-range concept, rather than an overarching meta-narrative such as power or domination. Governance imposes a model on a complex reality. It identifies objects that are ontologically plural, and hence finds it difficult to identify precise dependent variables. Any framework for analysis must accommodate the contingent nature of governance itself, as well as its application to specific cases. This final chapter offers a series of concluding judgments about France's version of governance. Though the processes described throughout this book add up to very substantive change, there are countervailing and contradictory forces at play. The theme of governance is better at explaining change than continuity, but even change does not occur on a tabula rasa. It is processed, at least in part, by existing political institutions. It is interpreted by reference to sets of ingrained ideas and referential frames. It must brave the reaction of established interests. If the metaphor of governing as governance is central to the argument, governing can also take the form of resisting change. The second half of the book has presented much evidence of institutions, interests and ideas resisting the pressures for change that have been labelled collectively as governance.

The title of this book is Governing and Governance in France. If modern day France can be geographically located in a precise manner, there is no easy agreement about the concepts of governing, government or governance. Some basic definitions assist conceptual and empirical clarity. For French political scientist Leca (1996) governing ‘is a matter of taking decisions, resolving conflicts, producing public goods, coordinating private behaviour, regulating markets, organising elections, distributing resources, determining spending’. Governing is the core business of government, which claims to speak with an authoritative voice and to embody a superior legitimacy to other interests or forces in society. For Le Galès (2002: 17) government ‘refers to structures, actors, processes and outputs’, while governance ‘relates to all the institutions, networks, directives, regulations, norms, political and social usages, public and private actors that contribute to the stability of a society…’. In this basic framework, governance represents new forms of coordination – or of governing – that go beyond the traditional confines of government. But what is government and how does it exemplify itself in the ‘strong state’ of France?

Governing as government

In the definition given by Le Galès, the four key features of government were identified as structures, actors, processes and outputs. Though there are semantic difficulties with these terms, a credible definition of government must integrate an understanding of each of them. We would add a fifth variable: namely institutions, a central component that provides meaning between structures and actors.

More than anything else, the success of the concept of Europeanisation in recent years is due to the realisation that EU policy has become domestic policy, with 80 per cent of all policy sectors influenced in one way or another by the Union. Such processes might better be described as ‘EUisation’, in so far as they refer to the impact of the institutions, actors and policies of the European Union on its member states. But most scholars prefer to reason in terms of Europeanisation and to avoid the unattractive phraseology of the alternative term (Börzel 2002; Featherstone and Radaelli 2004; Bulmer and Lequesne 2005). Among the various definitions of Europeanisation, a distinction is usually drawn between top-down and bottom-up processes. For Saurugger (2007) top-down Europeanisation can best be understood as a continuum at three levels: adaptation, inertia and resistance. Adaptation of preferences to the perceived requirements of integration is the strongest form of Europeanisation. There has been a proliferation of work looking at the domestic effects of European integration on political (typically executive) structures and on public policies. Inertia signifies the absence of any causal relationship between European-level and domestic change (Börzel 2002). Paradigmatic policy change, or changing relations between the state and non-state actors, for example, might have nothing to do with EU-level processes. Rejection is much stronger. Social movement and party actors use an anti-EU discourse to shape their own strategies, while policy-makers resist unwelcome developments in European integration by all means at their disposal.

As a leading European nation with a particular state tradition and historical legacy, France has long fascinated observers. The title of this book is Governing and Governance in France. Such a title presupposes that the study of single countries is a legitimate, indeed central dimension of the study of European politics. Some comparativists would contest this claim (Dogan and Pelassy 1990). There are a number of objections levelled against single-country studies. Claims made on the basis of studying a single country are unlikely to be very robust. Single-country studies amass considerable detail, but interpretation of detail is likely to be deficient in the absence of either a comparative perspective or a sound theory, because there is no empirical or theoretical basis on which to draw conclusions. The ‘unique’ or special character of a particular country can be demonstrated only through comparing one country with others, so as to establish whether it is a deviant case. There is a danger of false universalism, of the drawing of universal generalisations from the single-country case-study. There are also hazards involved with treating countries themselves as coherent units of analysis. Reasoning in terms of overarching political cultures, policy styles or state traditions can overplay state-wide systemic effects and underplay within-country variations between the contrasting dynamics of specific policy sectors and arenas.

Of all the leading European nations, France is usually taken as the model of the unitary state. The movement of decentralisation in France has been gathering pace since the 1960s, however, with the landmark reforms of 1982–3 and 2003–4 representing staging posts in an ongoing process of incremental change. How best can we understand decentralisation in France? In this chapter, decentralisation in France is viewed through three alternative prisms – central steering, territorial capacity-building and identity construction. The first understanding of decentralisation in France is as part of a broader programme of state reform, part of a drive by central governors to divest themselves of unwanted or inflationary functions. It is an exercise in steering at a distance, a close approximation of our hypotheses 2 (regulatory mode of governance) and 7 (state capacity-building). The second understanding of decentralisation is in terms of new forms of local and regional governance practices, most closely matching our hypotheses 1 (participatory mode of governance), 3 (multi-actor coordination) and, to a lesser extent, 4 (multi-level dynamics). The third understanding of decentralisation in France refers to new forms of identity-based territorial mobilisation, in part captured by our first hypothesis (participatory mode of governance). Interlocutors repeatedly interpreted decentralisation in terms of one (or more) of these three main understandings, each of which is also embedded in different academic literatures.

Chapter 2 introduced the narrative of French history as that of a coherent central state defining the general will in an objective manner over and above specific professional, territorial or partisan interests. Mainstream French intellectual traditions have been hostile to the interplay of interests (Saurugger and Grossman 2006). In a classic orthodox account, Mény (1986) identified four features in the French policy style that favour the ‘general interest’ over more pluralist approaches: élus are representatives of the nation; deputies are not allowed to defend specific interests within the Assembly; access to the public sector is organised on the basis of merit, rather than quotas; and the Council of State is apt to use jurisprudence to label any decision of the state as being of ‘public utility’ or the ‘general interest’. In Mény's view, the state calls the shots in its relationship with professions and organised groups. The prevailing interpretation, articulated by Mény, is that the French state has historically been less tolerant towards autonomous groups than comparable countries. Organised group activity was forbidden during the French Revolution. Only in 1884, with the repeal of the Loi le Chapelier, were professional groups allowed to organise, but they remained weak (Guiliani 1991).

This narrative is historically inaccurate in important respects. The overarching référentiel has usually accommodated interests, whether framed in terms of maintaining social equilibrium (before 1939) or modernising society (after 1945). During the parliamentary-centred Third Republic, interests focused their attention on key parliamentary committees with power to distribute resources.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter gives an overview of the research design of the project, of the variables under investigation and of the data. Given the central research question underlying this project, convergence of national environmental policies is conceived as the dependent variable. Convergence is observed for twenty‐four countries over a period of thirty years. Policy convergence is measured as increasing policy similarity over time. Policy similarity is investigated with respect to three dimensions of policy: presence‐of‐policy, policy instruments and policy settings. In section 4.2, we specify the operationalisation of and data collection for the dependent variable.

As outlined in chapter 3, the explanatory focus of the project is on three factors as the main independent variables that are expected to account for differences in environmental policy convergence: (1) the degree of interlinkage of countries in international institutions with obligatory potential, (2) the degree of interlinkage of countries in international institutions with communicative potential, and (3) the degree of economic interlinkage, i.e., the extent to which a country is connected with other countries by its trade relations. Moreover, we include further explanatory variables (referred to as ‘other variables’ in chapter 3).

INTRODUCTION

This chapter deals with the following sub‐set of questions of the research project:

1. What is the direction of policy convergence; i.e., does convergence coincide with an upward (‘race‐to‐the‐top’) or downward trend (‘race‐to‐the‐bottom’)?

2. What institutional and economic factors (as well as other potentially relevant variables) can explain upward or downward patterns of environmental policy convergence?

3. To what extent do our empirical findings vary across different policy dimensions (presence‐of‐policies and policy settings) as well as across various policy types (trade‐related versus non‐trade‐related policies and obligatory versus non‐obligatory standards)?

Theoretically, this chapter builds upon delta‐convergence, dealing with convergence towards an exemplary model (Heichel, Pape and Sommerer 2005). Methodologically, this chapter builds on the so‐called gap approach, based on an assessment of the gaps between individual country policies on the one hand and a certain policy benchmark – for example the best practice available – on the other, over different points in time. An average policy gap change in the direction of the benchmark then points at delta‐convergence as well as at a ‘race‐to‐the‐top’, provided that the benchmark is the best practice.

This approach is complementary to the ‘classical’ ones as well as to the pair approach. On the basis of aggregate descriptive data and the concept of sigma‐convergence, the ‘classical’ approach (chapter 5) primarily dealt with the degree of convergence. By calculating changes in the regulatory mean, furthermore, an idea of the direction of convergence could be given.

This book is the result of a collaborative European research project. After first ideas to organise a joint project on the convergence of environmental policies had been put forward at a ‘tapas’ bar in Barcelona in autumn 2000, seven political scientists at five universities participated in the common endeavour: Christoph Knill (University of Jena, and later on, Konstanz, coordination), Katharina Holzinger (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Bonn, and later on, University of Konstanz), Martin Jänicke and Helge Jörgens (Free University Berlin), Bas Arts (University of Wageningen) and Duncan Liefferink (University of Nijmegen) and Andrea Lenschow (University of Salzburg and later on, Osnabrück). In a series of very inspiring, enjoyable and sometimes exciting meetings – one of them took place on 11 September 2001 – this group developed a joint research design and a proposal under the Fifth Framework Programme of the European Commission.

Under this programme, our research was supported by the RTD programme ‘Improving the human research potential and the socio‐economic knowledge base’, contract no. HPSE‐CT‐2002‐00103. Funds were provided from January 2003 to June 2006. This way the initial group could be complemented by a full dozen senior and junior researchers: Stephan Heichel, Jessica Pape, Maren Riepe, Jale Tosun and Natascha Warta in Konstanz, Thomas Sommerer and Tobias Meier in Hamburg, Per‐Olof Busch in Berlin, Johan Albrecht, Jelmer Kamstra, Jeroen Ooijevaar and Sietske Veenman in Nijmegen, and Dieter Pesendorfer in Salzburg.