From the Governance of Sustainability to the Management of Climate Change: Reshaping Urban Policies and Central–local Relations in France

This paper analyses the interlinked usages of the concepts of ‘governance’ and ‘sustainable development’ over the past two decades of French urban policies. It shows that the importance of ‘sustainable development’ procedural principles has significantly declined in public agendas alongside the rise to prominence of climate change issues. Based on a study of the urban policies developed by central French government authorities since the 1990s, it identifies two main phases. In the 1990s and early 2000s, ‘sustainable development’ and ‘governance’ slogans were extensively mobilized in urban policies for the purposes of modernizing public action. In a context of economic, social and institutional transformations, these urban policies aimed at constructing local dynamics of collective action and encouraged the emergence of projects relying on incremental and deliberative practices. As of the mid-2000s, this dynamic weakened and climate change replaced sustainable development as a reference in urban policies. This shift occurred in the context of a neo-managerial restructuring, with central government authorities regaining influence over cities and urban policies being redefined around quantitative and technical objectives

Beyond Neoliberal Imposition: State–Local Cooperation and the Blending of Social and Economic Objectives in French Urban Development Corporations

For more than 15 years, the French central State created Etablissements publics d’aménagement in a series of major cities. These EPAs are in charge of large urban development projects mixing infrastructure, office development and housing projects and have been given formal authority over land use regulation. The similarities between French EPAs and British Urban Development Corporations created in the 1980s are striking. In many ways, the case of the EPA fits with the neoliberalization framework provided by radical geographers. Nevertheless, this case also shows limits to the generalization of this theoretical framework. Firstly, the distinction between two clearly distinct periods characterized by different agendas, policyinstruments and systems of relations between actors and levels is far from convincing in the French case. Secondly, evolutions that could be attributed to neoliberal urbanism are rather the result of processes of rationalization within organizations or professions which may have little to do with neoliberalism, or the result of a transformation of the welfare State and the reassessment of ways of producing social justice. On this basis, we argue for theoretical frameworks that put neoliberalization at its right place and allow its articulation with other trends of change such as rationalization and the refinement of Welfare mechanisms