infrastructure planning in france context is critical

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1 infrastructure planning in france context is critical In the second of a short series of articles examining the approach to infrastructure planning taken by selected mainland European countries, Tim Marshall looks at the French system Nord Pas-de- Calais Bretagne Haute- Normandie Basse- Normandie Pays de la Loire Poitou Charentes Aquitaine Centre Limousin Midi- Pyrénées Picardie Île-de- France Bourgogne Auvergne Languedoc- Roussillon Champagne- Ardenne Lorraine Rhône- Alpes Alsace Franche- Comté Provence-Alpes- Côte d Azur The message from France is that agencies like DIACT, and the much wider territorial articulation system in which it is embedded, help to manage centralregional-local relations, and something similar needs to be invented in the UK, and especially in England In France, much central and EU action is territorialised through the regions France is probably the country that most British people think of when they muse about other ways of doing things. Most planners know little about the French planning system, but are aware that the French think big, and seem to have a knack of getting things done in the infrastructure field roads, high-speed rail and nuclear power stations, at any rate. How does the reality match up against this stereotype? In fact, there are massive differences, on all the dimensions along which my study of infrastructure planning in Europe 1 analyses each country substantive policy, processes, and important contextual features. France can surprise us. Town & Country Planning November

2 National planning? France is thought of as the Jacobin state, run from Paris with a Gaullian image of the national future. But things are not what they were. The system of national economic plans was ended in 1991, and the Commissariat Général du Plan was wound up in Efforts to replace economic planning with national spatial planning, in laws of 1995 introduced under a Gaullist Minister, Charles Pasqua, and in 1999, under a Green, Dominique Voynet, have not prospered under subsequent governments of the political right. The Schemas de Services Collectifs, covering infrastructure and other investment sectors, were completed in 2002, but only just before the left lost power. But some elements of national planning or coordination remain. One is a small agency of central government, DIACT (previously DATAR), which works to connect all public bodies concerned with aménagement du territoire within central ministries and down through regions and localities. It has a staff of less than 200, but has extra force through guiding both the preparation of the state-region contracts system and the EU funding regime (running on the same timescale, ). This is not spatial planning or infrastructure planning, but it is a sort of residual regional development programme which territorialises much of central and EU action, within the new French decentralised polity. Monthly DIACT meetings with regional prefects and governments oil the wheels of decisions across the whole range of public policy and budgeting. Somehow or other the French have invented a system to articulate its evolving territorial constitution, a task which was achieved for the We actually know infrastructure should be a vital part of planning s instruments, but governments don t want to grasp this in our marketised world devolved administrations in the UK in 1999, but has still escaped England. The message from France is that agencies like DIACT, and the much wider territorial articulation system in which it is embedded, help to manage central-regional-local relations, and something similar needs to be invented in the UK, and especially in England. This would then play across to decision-making on big infrastructure, which has such large regional implications. Do big projects have to fit in with some overall national idea, even if there is no national spatial strategy? If this occurs, it will be for three reasons. First is the hangover of many years of national planning, which leaves an afterglow of an idea of the national territory. In infrastructure matters this is quite long-lasting. Secondly, the continual up and down of national and regional negotiating may work out some very rough and ready territorial balance, given that all national politicians are also regional or local ones, and fight hard for their areas. Thirdly, public investment levers do still exist to some extent, so the government, even without an explicit strategy, can distribute investment with some geographical care. None of this is like an explicit plan, of course. And, as in the Netherlands, 2 some matters are always too big to fit within such a plan, and are decided as one-offs the Paris airports, the Le Havre and Marseille port expansions, new nuclear power stations, new TGV lines. All of these may gesture to the national picture, but not necessarily anything more. An exception to this may be in the work under way to make an overall national transport scheme, referred to below. A more general point is that there is a longstanding grasp that infrastructure can be used by the state to structure the country. This was part of the Gaullian and DATAR philosophy of the 1960s to 1980s. Peter Hall has referred in these pages 3 to the question of how this works what building new high-speed rail links does to a country s geography. This was much debated in French academia, with unsurprising and very modulated conclusions no general rules; it depends on what else you do too; and so on. Spanish academics are conducting the same debate now, on the impact of their new rail system. Sceptics did emerge in France, saying you cannot just depend on transport investment to solve development problems. But we always knew that, if we just thought a bit so this, in my view, does nothing to invalidate the general point that infrastructure can be a powerful force to steer big spatial planning projects. We actually know infrastructure should be a vital part of planning s instruments, but governments don t want to grasp this in our marketised world. The Grenelle de l environnement The second element of a sort of national planning is quite different. One of the most fascinating political phenomena of the Sarkozy era since 2007 has been the big public debate and policy process called the Grenelle (indicating a public discussion). This was an election campaign commitment, under Green pressure, to carry out a process of consultation on what to do about climate change (and to an extent other environmental issues) and then to act on the results. A sort of corporatist college guides the process from five sectors (government, regional and local government, NGOs, employees, business), and the commitments put together in 2007 were then 488 Town & Country Planning November 2009

promised full government support. Since then a wide range of measures are being progressed, many critical for big infrastructure, especially the actions on transport and energy.

3 promised full government support. Since then a wide range of measures are being progressed, many critical for big infrastructure, especially the actions on transport and energy. Much of the emphasis is naturally on not building infrastructure, and on conservation and on more intelligent ways of managing demand, especially in the built environment. Green budget laws have followed. A national transport scheme is being drawn up for agreement by the end of 2009 with logic. Within the now regionalised French state, this cannot be a national spatial plan: it will have to be territorialised in discussion with regional and local governments, like all French public policy. But it may have to take decisions of a spatially prioritising nature in some areas. Incidentally, the other big change of the Sarkozy regime has been a major reshuffling of ministries. In order to bring more matters in the sustainable development zone together, a mega-ministry of Réseau Ferré de France Major projects on the French rail network an expectation that this will stress demand management; set new priorities for maintenance rather than construction, but continuing the rail investment programmes on to the 2020s; and place major emphasis on shifting freight to rail and water the latter already beginning to happen on the Seine and the Rhône. So this shows the return, to an extent, to national planning, now centred around the climate change transport, environment, energy and urbanism/ housing was formed. Sceptics say one motive was to cut costs, as the merging process is seeing only one of every two civil servants that retire being replaced. But I would judge that this should allow a better focus (I was always a fan of the UK Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions big ministry, of , which brought things together more than they have been since). Town & Country Planning November

4 Substantive infrastructure policy Substantively, some of the standard picture of the French system remains true. The nuclear power stations built mainly in the 1980s and early 1990s do supply most electricity, and a new one is being built at Flamanville, with a second one announced by presidential decree in 2007, based on the view that, as the present set will start being retired in the 2020s, a new stream will be needed, to more advanced specifications. And after decades of search, a site has been found for a nuclear waste store, although nothing looks due to happen at all quickly (this uses the classic French encouragement for a poorer area, supplying lots of public investment alongside the project). But there is far more to French energy policy than this, with a massive programme of gas investments to link in France to global networks, and a big offshore wind programme led by the state. Targets are set for wind production in a multi-annual programme to 2020, and if schemes do not come forward the state simply contracts to get things built. Each of the 22 regions must draw up a climate, air and energy scheme, whose implementation is then negotiated with central government. For the railways, the TGV story is certainly all true, being delivered in a persistent programme since around But even so, delivery has been more piecemeal and stuttering than most of us realise. Funding for every kilometre of every new link has to be negotiated, with local and regional governments paying most of the bill on the less financially viable lines now under construction. Broadly, since the first national rail strategy of 1991, governments have committed themselves to 2,000 kilometres by Better judged infrastructure outcomes require less marketisation, with more responsibility carried by governments in steering the public interest so many years time, and then hoped that money and drive will emerge to achieve this. The links in to the conventional rail system have been highly criticised, with much of that system languishing in massive under-investment. And station choices too have been highly controversial, with some stations stranded out in the strangest spots. But the French dynamic of decentralisation has supported the drive, with each region pressing for becoming connected so that it is only one, two or three hours from Paris. The privatisation push now arriving from the EU threatens the future of the railways, as in all states; but luckily France will have completed a good part of its network before this becomes critical. For motorways, the machine has been frighteningly impressive, probably the most unstoppable part of the French state, with the same logic as the TGV territorial equity, with every town and area to be no more than a set distance (famously, 50 kilometres or 45 minutes drive in the 1995 planning law) from a motorway junction or a highway or high-speed rail network. At last this may be slowing, with the Grenelle programme promising new roads only for safety, congestion or problems of local interest reasons (big get-out clauses, but a sign that policy is shifting). Key contextual elements One thing France teaches us is that context is critical not the planning itself, but the features of the political economy in which it sits. Two factors are overwhelming here: regionalisation and marketisation. The first is far more advanced in France than in England, the second far less advanced. These shape decisions on infrastructure. The ongoing drive of handing powers to regions, as well as to lower levels (departments and communal groupings), means that more and more parts of infrastructure systems are no longer the direct responsibility of the central state this applies to all regional airports, to all but seven major ports, to all but a designated 10,000 kilometre motorway network, to regional train services, and to much work on energy, waste and water systems. So on all these matters action has to be negotiated through a complex geometry of deals, both political and financial. No Jacobin state here any longer. On the other hand, marketisation, although advancing, is not what it is in the UK. Some core elements remain within reach of the state, even when most of the companies supplying services are formally private. The state still has shares in or some sort of control in some core areas the Paris airports, the seven big ports (where it invests massively, above all at Le Havre and Marseille), electricity and gas. EDF and Gaz de France/Suez are part-private, but the transmission and transport companies are in effect guided by the state. National rail operator SNCF and the rail track body RFF are public still, although within a liberalising system. The ensemble of the French state, central, regional and local, effectively steers priorities for rail investment. All this means that strong instruments exist to implement strategies, in a way which is harder in the UK, where more complex regulatory means could in principle be used to do much, but for which political will is normally absent. Of course the UK is the UK, and France is France, but the message to me is clear: better judged infrastructure outcomes require less marketisation, with more responsibility carried 490 Town & Country Planning November 2009

5 Commission Nationale du Débat Public by governments in steering the public interest. And a better conjugating of national, regional and local, away from the to-a-degree Jacobin English state, would also be a key facilitating condition. Le débat public Probably the most impressive part of the new French approach to infrastructure is the creation of a new way to think about big projects. This contrasts strongly with the new English and Scottish approaches. In the early 1990s the big developers (for roads, the TGV, power lines, etc.) found it increasingly difficult to get their schemes approved, as citizen activism used all available means to challenge the impacts of the proposals. First, normal reforms were made to the public inquiry system, but this did not work, and finally in 1995 resort was made to a system developed in Quebec for holding public Le débat public democratic public deliberation taken to its highest level so far debates well in advance of a proposal. This is now institutionalised as Le débat public, and forms a core part of any project in all the infrastructure sectors, above certain thresholds (similar to those used under the Infrastructure Planning Commission). There are two critical features. One is that there is no decision, only a report summing up the outcome of the four-month event that the public debate commission (Commission Nationale du Débat Public) has organised. In the light of this report the developer decides within three months whether to go ahead with the development of the scheme (with all the usual public inquiry steps, Environmental Impact Assessment, etc.), or whether to drop the idea. In about one third of the 50 cases, schemes have been dropped (twice) or, more usually, big changes have been made for example in the case of the Roissy express, a rail line to Charles de Gaulle Airport, the Parisian transport operator RATP simply adopted the opponents proposal. The second feature is that there is a genuinely fair resourcing for participants, with a real independence very clearly visible on the part of the Commission Nationale du Débat Public. All actors are given the same support to draw up and publish their arguments and to participate fully in discussions (within the fourmonth limit). The president of each project commission also monitors promises made by developers, a key factor in maintaining trust and legitimacy. This seems to be democratic public deliberation taken to its highest level so far, clearly born under the signs of the joint French appetites for conflict and for democratic collaboration. British planners and governors could surely learn from this inspiring system. 4 Lessons? Some may say that France is too different to learn anything from. Certainly it is large, and that matters; and the state form is different, as is the political economy. I have left out a mass of factors here, some painting the French system in by no means a rosy hue. 5 But we can still be inspired to think afresh by French successes, and think more long term about why the UK and above all England has thrown away what planning mentality and instruments it once had, and how we can innovate to construct these anew. Bringing in wide societal debate (Grenelle, débat public), structuring for the long term by investment to transform geographies (energy, transport), getting contexts right (regionalisation, less marketisation), strategising to cut down the need for any new investment (Grenelle again, plus room for local and regional innovation) all these are worth thinking about. Tim Marshall is with the Department of Planning, Oxford Brookes University. The views expressed here are personal. Notes 1 This is the third of a series of articles drawing on work funded by an ESRC Fellowship on Infrastructure and Spatial Planning (grant number RES ). This is allowing the author to examine practice in relation to planning big infrastructure in other EU states, as well as study changes in England. Further details, in the shape of a working paper on the French experience, can be found at planning/projects/tmarshall.html For the earlier articles in the series by the author, see Infrastructure and spatial planning legitimacy under challenge. Town & Country Planning, 2009, Vol. 78, Sept., 386-8; and Infrastructure planning in the Netherlands not paradise but valuable directions. Town & Country Planning, 2009, Vol. 78, Oct., T. Marshall: Infrastructure planning in the Netherlands not paradise but valuable directions (see note 1) 3 P. Hall: Investment spatially targeted or spatially blind?. Town & Country Planning, 2009, Vol. 78, Jul./Aug., See the webpages of the CNDP, at 5 See the working paper on the French experience (see note 1) at planning/projects/tmarshall.html Town & Country Planning November

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