French governance of European local development policies: an analysis of regionalization

While the European Union has just agreed, amidthe COVID-19 pandemic, on the amount of the future multi annual financial framework (MFF), the three main European policies for local development are gradually being built in European territories. The economic, social, and territorial cohesion policy, the common agricultural policy (through its second pillar) and the fisheries and maritime affairs policy together represent an active territorialization of the local development policies of the European Union. They are operationalized by the European structural and investment funds, whose multi-level governance is ensured for France, both by the State, and Regions since the Act III of decentralization. This research is based on a 24-month case study, using a participatory observation methodology as a territorial civil servant in charge of these issues. The empirical analysis we have conducted is also based on the analysis of some forty semi-directive interviews with technicians and local elected officials, and on the monitoring and participation in various negotiation meetings and technical-political meetings on European funding in the territories. This research intends to follow an approach of political sociology and to analyze the way in which the territories have appropriated the EFSI since their regionalization 7 years ago, at the beginning of the previous MFF. The purpose of this paper is thus to question the changes in local public action regarding the preparation of a new program, and to sketch a first assessment of this regionalization, regarding sub-regional and national mobilizations. By examining the political-administrative environment, and the reports of the French National Assembly and Senate, we assume that the territories will support a new regionalization. Nevertheless, the empiricism of our data quickly leads us to emit new observations, which send European funding back to Jacobin vs Girondin logics. These logics also lead us to de prive European local development policies of their substance, in a purely financial use of the actors, which takes root in conflicts and logics of thematic appropriation of political competences