The central-local relations in French energy policy making and the environmental watershed: towards a new model of governance ?

Working Papers Series on line, n°19 "Governance and Globalization", Sciences Po in China, may 2010. Consultable sur Internet : http://sciencespo-globalgovernance.net/node/53/edit?q=webfm_send/74After a long period of centralization, local authorities have been taking a new place in the French energy sector. This revival began in the 1990‟s, with the process of liberalization, which gave them new rooms to manoeuvre. They recovered old competences that had fallen into abeyance after the creation of national public monopolies and gained new ones. A new turning point has been passed over the last few years with the agenda-setting of energy efficiency and climate change issues. This was linked to a new strategy of the State and the idea that these problems require to "act (more) local", such a level being considered to be efficient in terms of proximity, reactivity or coordination capabilities. For the first time, local authorities were explicitly recognized as active protagonists of the energy policy in France (law POPE of July 2005, "Grenelle de l‟environnement‟). Some practitioners and academic researchers consider this stage as a major institutional innovation which initiates a new model of governance. In this contribution, we propose to discuss this hypothesis and to show that this change of paradigm in energy policy making (the energy efficiency and climate-change watershed) had not yet lead to major evolutions in the central-local relations. If one cannot deny that local authorities have been developing new institutional capacities for the last decade, their role is still quite limited. Their revival must therefore be interpreted as an aggiornamento of the former centralized model of governance. Three explanations will be mobilized to illustrate this thesis