The difficult match between a territorial policy instrument and the industry-centred tradition of French agricultural policies: the Land Management Contract (LMC)

DOI10.1177/0020852306068018
Published date01 September 2006
Date01 September 2006
Subject MatterArticles
The difficult match between a territorial policy instrument
and the industry-centred tradition of French agricultural
policies: the Land Management Contract (LMC)*
François Léger, Dominique Vollet and Ghislaine Urbano1
Abstract
Between 1999 and 2002, the Land Management Contract (LMC) programme
was the principal mechanism implemented by France in response to the demands
of the European Rural Development Regulation. It was presented as a territorial
policy instrument, at the service of sustainable development that set out to
encourage the multifunctionality of agriculture. However, the mid-term evaluation
of the programme revealed that its conditions of implementation did not make it
possible to fully achieve these ambitions. While it may have helped to make the
principle of the contractualization of subsidies more generally accepted and legiti-
mized the notion of the environment as a criterion in the definition of agricultural
policies, more often than not, the definition frameworks of these contracts were
restricted to the agricultural sphere alone and their target public to the relatively
François Léger is director of the UMR INRA/INAP-G ‘Sciences for action and development —
Activities, Products, Territories’. An agronomist and doctor in ecology, since 1990 he has been carry-
ing out research into issues linked to the implementation of agro-environmental policies, both
technical and those linked to the implementation of this policy.
Dominique Vollet is an economist at the Cemagref (Agricultural and Environmental Engineering
Research Institute) in Clermont-Ferrand, in a team focusing on the economy of rural areas. After a PhD
in regional economics and an accreditation to supervise research into modelling at regional level and
the evaluation of public policies, he is currently heading applied research into the evaluation of
different territorial policies.
Ghislaine Urbano heads the project into the evaluation of public policies within the French Ministry
of Agriculture. She is responsible for subjects relating to rural development policies in the broader
sense (objective 3 of the future Rural Development Regulation), territorial issues.
* Translation of the article written in French under the title: ‘Le Contrat Territorial d’Explotation: La
rencontre difficile d’un instrument à vocation territoriale et de la tradition sectorielle de la politique
agricole françoise.
Copyright © 2006 IIAS, SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 72(3):377–393 [DOI:10.1177/0020852306068018]
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
limited fringe group of farmers who were already familiar with the workings of
the departmental institutions in charge of agricultural development. This paper
sets out to not only describe some of the limitations of this programme but also
its positive repercussions. Both are important factors if we want to approach nat-
ional and European agricultural policy in terms of territorialization and with due
consideration for rural development issues. The LMC was the main instrument of
the Agriculture Framework Law of 1999 that embodied a ‘new approach to the
management of public action’ via a policy that ‘takes into account the economic,
environmental and social functions of agriculture and participates in land
management with a view to sustainable development’, as stipulated by the first
article of the Agriculture Framework Law of 9 July 1999.
Points for practitioners
The setting up of an innovative policy such as the LMC in France revealed the
important aspects that need to be taken into account in the change dynamic of
public policies in general and agricultural policies in particular. Indeed, the LMC
proved to be an innovative programme in many respects: the territorial and con-
tractual dimensions, consideration for the economic, environmental and social
functions of agriculture. Generally speaking, the experience of the LMC high-
lighted the role of the learning processes and the difficulty (for the beneficiaries
and the authorities) of appropriating an instrument that was innovative not only in
terms of its objectives but also in terms of its codification in the form of a contract.
As far as agricultural policy is concerned, the LMC underlined the tensions
between the industry-centred and territorial approaches, between the analytical
dimensions of the measures of the Rural Development Regulation and global
dimensions of the LMC. Its failure can be explained, on the one hand, by the fact
that the initial objectives of the LMC, which were territorial and global in nature,
were without a doubt difficult to quickly apply across the board to a large number
of farms and rural areas. On the other hand, the conditions of implementation (in
particular its funding by the Rural Development Regulation (RDR), the pressure to
sign up) were characterized by ambiguity and discrepancies compared with the
proclaimed ambitions.
Introduction
Within the framework of Agenda 2000, rural development has become the ’second
pillar of the common agricultural policy’ in order to accompany the management of
the markets and the support for the revenues of the farmers that come under ‘the
first pillar’ (which still represents over 80 percent of the committed budgets). The
national agricultural policy has changed emphasis, in line with certain objectives intro-
duced by Agenda 2000: promotion of a multifunctional, sustainable agriculture,
improvement of revenues and of quality of life. This change of emphasis was
particularly pronounced in the Agriculture Framework Law of 1999, of which the
LMC was one of the major innovative factors. An essential component of the appli-
cation of the RDR by France, it represented the French version of the application of
378 International Review of Administrative Sciences 72(3)

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