Contenu du sommaire : Varia 2008

This article inquires into the recent development of inter - communality in France and its knock-on effects. Contrary to the expected beneficial effects (fall in the cost of public services, economies of scale, etc.), we will see that intercommunality is causing an increase in the local tax burden. Even though part of this increase can be put down to improved services, we argue that the tax increases are clearly the logical consequence of the strategy developed by elected local council officials.

The Constitutional Bylaw on Budget Acts (LOLF) of 1 August 2001 was amended in 2005 in order to introduce the “budgetary governance” rule to regulate the use of any surpluses of tax receipts accruing during the year. The exact scope of this rule has raised a number of questions from the outset. Although the system's use in two full budget rounds has helped to pinpoint the implications and limits, several misgivings remain, reflecting budget policy's resistance to attempts at legal control.

Administrative reforms are social phenomena. When it was elected in 2003, the Quebec Liberal Pa rty had promised to undertake the most ambitious overhaul of the State since the 1960s. But this turned out to be a damp squib. T o explain this failure, we must do more than just list the political blunders made. Close attention should be given to the social networks and various sociological and cultural factors arising as a result of Quebec's history. W e also compare Quebec's experience with administrative reforms implemented elsewhere in Canada.

Public service outsourcing entails forms of cooperation in which public and private sector principles are very closely entwined. The outsourced activity legally conserves its public nature, a nd continues to come under the responsibility of the outsourcing authority. However, scrutiny of the different methods public officials use to audit outsourced services too often shows that there is no real control of the outsourced operations, a nd these can thus be considered as effectively escaping the public domain. Having noted the existence of these failures, which are often identified by judicial authorities and are illustrated in this article by two case studies, it is useful to propose a definition for “publicness” in terms of the effective ability to control (de facto publicness in contrast to de jure publicness). When the scope of the public sector is redefined in this way, it seems to be much narrower than it would be if considered using legal criteria. This redefinition raises various questions about the way our public institutions operate and their approach to managing public services. It also highlights the need for management methods that are suited to public organisations.

Using German and French examples, this article aims to show that the comparative approach offers a mutual and not just one-sided method of learning that is useful for the development of administrative law.Through the comparative analysis of extensive changes in the two legal systems that are affecting those concerned with the development of administrative law, the influence of the democratic principle and the structure of local administration, the authors highlight parallel developments and areas of convergence which provide an extra source of solutions and models for use by politico-administrative systems that are often confronted with the same difficulties.

By refocusing the legal definition of the subsidiarity principle, the author of this article raises a hardly perceptible but crucial point of European public law, namely the codification of the pre-legislative procedure. The Union lacks the administrative codes it would need in order to improve monitoring of European policies. The subsidiarity principle is reiterated in the Treaty of Lisbon, which notably introduces new monitoring mechanisms. Use of the principle entails certain procedural criteria. To codify them, they would have to be reorganised into four strands: the obligation to provide a legal motivation, normative necessity, the proportionality principle, and economic, social and environmental impacts.

This article sets out to examine the frame of reference underpinning the identity of Swiss civil servants in the current context of public administration reforms. Through an examination of the main representations and values to which civil service employees nowadays refer, it discusses the different modes of identification inherent to the organisation of public administration and the civil service profession. The analysis firstly shows that civil servants'identity comprises traditional civil service qualities on the one hand, a nd qualities more similar to those found in the private sector on the other hand. This matches the conclusions of several studies on the issue. It then attempts to rise above this two-sided view by enriching the discussion through the development of a tentative typology of the logics underpinning and characterising the different dimensions of civil servants' identity today.