Contenu du sommaire

European transparency policy (2005-2016): from contestation to consecration of lobbying
This article proposes to explain how stricter control of lobbying at the EU level has eventually contributed to its legitimization, even in the eye of its most virulent detractors, although the policy of more thoroughly controlling lobbying was sometimes inspired by a strong critique of existing practices. It shows that transparency has been seen as a “solution” by various actors who defend very different views of problems raised by lobbying. Nevertheless, the institutional actors as well as civil society organizations and NGOs have gradually taken a moralizing outlook on lobbying, making it a matter of personal ethics. Thus, the political critique of lobbying as an efficient vehicle for the domination of private interests over the European decision process has been relegated to the background. This transparency policy, which has been co-produced by public and private actors over the last decade, reveals the asymmetric capacities to influence public policymaking at the EU level. Analyzing European transparency policy also sheds light on the heavy influence the European political system exerts on the modes of contestation adopted by its opponents/critics.

French farmers and red tape
Based on a fieldwork in the French agricultural sector, this article analyses the political and social consequences of red tape on farmers. It proposes to use the notion of red tape as an analytical category, and to consider its effects on the relationships between citizens and public authorities. In a first step, we describe the different dimensions of individual experiences of administrative constraints. For this purpose we distinguish learning, compliance and symbolic costs associated with paperwork. In a second step, the article explores several hypotheses regarding the administrative aspect of policy feedbacks based on the analysis of farmers' relationship to bureaucratic and political authorities. Overall, this case study encourages the general study of red tape as a political experience, and underlines the symbolic aspects of such experience.

Neutralization of public management
This research aims at spreading knowledge methods and recipes of the New Public Management label. The renewal of local staff would be an ideal vehicle for local governments to convert to the manager rationality. This work is a localized analysis of generational struggles between the various components of administrative elites within a regional Council. It attempts to describe the dynamics of circulation of this new version of the “self-interest of State”. Indeed, public servants are opposed. However, the institutional framework where they struggle has a strong executive. In this context, the relationship with managerial knowledge seems less related to the profile officials as structural logic of politics.

This article investigates the territorial politics of State retrenchment through the case of the reforms of military base closures in France between 1989 and 2012. It examines how the local interests constrain the policies of State retrenchment that suppress both public activities and investments in territories. Facing a risk of policy failure due to the multiple oppositions to base closures, the Ministry of Defense develops a policy of blame avoidance and compensation. It seeks to anticipate the mobilisation from locally elected officials, while at the same time mitigating the negative effects of base closures on local development. It is argued that this territorial politics of State retrenchment is explained, on the one hand, by elected officials holding both local and national offices and, on the other hand, by national policies of spatial planning. Both of them are integrating institutions that structure the politics of territorial retrenchment in France.

Governing groundwater in Morocco: the state as a liberal modernizer
In the Saiss agricultural plains in Morocco, public authorities have been voicing their concern over falling groundwater level. They have drawn up an “aquifer contract” to regulate water extraction. What difference does it make with respect to traditional water policies that sought to provide ever-greater quantities of water? This article argues that the environmental objective of preserving the aquifer actually served to justify the continuation of large water works for surface water. These works now coexist alongside a more liberal management of groundwater. The liberal modernizer State accepts to relinquish some control over irrigation dynamics insofar as these dynamics seem politically manageable and, at least in the short run, economically desirable. However, such complex political arrangements take place at the expense of a sustainable groundwater management.