The Opposition to Serre de la Fare: Understanding Local

Graeme Hayes
The opposition to Serre de la Fare: understanding local environmental protest in a
multi-level policy process.
Paper presented at ECPR Joint sessions
Workshop 10: Environmental Politics at the Local Level
Grenoble
6-11 April 2001
Dr Graeme Hayes
Department of Modern Languages
Nottingham Trent University
Clifton Lane
Nottingham
NG11 8NS
United Kingdom
tel 00 44 115 848 3272
fax 00 44 115 848 6686
[email protected]
Table of contents
Abstract
Introduction: contexts and overview
The structure of water resource management
Regional planning and the Loire development project
The organisation of dissent
Confrontation and litigation, moderation and consensus
The importance of political allies
Decentralisation and peripheral resistance
Changing the policy agenda: water quality and the salmon
Local economic development and the north-south divide
The Le Puy local referendum and the 4th solution
The Plan Loire Grandeur Nature and the recognition of protest groups
Water policy outcomes
Final conclusions
Bibliography
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Abstract
This paper will discuss the successful opposition movement organised by SOS Loire Vivante
against the proposed construction of a dam at Serre de la Fare on the river Loire, some 13km
south of Le Puy en Velay, France. From initial reactive opposition to the dam (part of a vast
construction programme designed to regulate water flow across the Loire basin) to partnership
with the national environment ministry in the implementation of an alternative flood alert and
river protection scheme, the local environmental protest spearheaded by SOS Loire Vivante
will be placed within the context of the development of water policy networks in a territorially
and functionally fragmented state context.
The paper will accordingly discuss the internal and external development of SOS Loire
Vivante, an umbrella organisation federating over one hundred separate organisations. It will
place SOS Loire Vivante within the development of basin-wide opposition to the dam
programme, and examine its relationship with Loire Vivante, a lobby and research
organisation established in Orléans by WWF and FNE (France Nature Environnement). The
paper will argue that the presence of sub-national actors as key proponents of the scheme, and
of Europe as key initiator and legitimator of national water policies, influenced the
development of the group’s protest strategies and discourses, and enabled it to construct a
consenual, mutually supportive relationship with the central state. Finally, the paper will
discuss the potential consequences of the Serre de la Fare campaign for future local
environmental action in France as a whole.
2
Introduction: contexts and overview
On 13 February 1986, the then Socialist government signed a tripartite protocol authorising an
ambitious economic development programme for the river Loire basin. Leading local and
regional political and economic notables, grouped within the Établissement public de
l’aménagement de la Loire et de ses affluents (EPALA) and the Loire-Bretagne water basin
agency, the other two signatories to the protocol, had been demanding such a scheme since
the late 1950s. As well as a number of smaller works, the agreement provided for the
construction of four dams designed to provide flood-protection and ensure the maintenance of
river flow levels on the river Loire and its tributaries, at a total estimated cost of some 2.3
thousand million francs. The chosen sites were Serre de la Fare on the upper Loire,
Chambonchard on the Cher, Le Veurdre on the lower Allier, and Naussac on the upper Allier.
The entire programme was scheduled to be completed within ten years; some fifteen years
later, however, little of the EPALA’s programme has been accomplished.
Opposition to the programme has chiefly been organised by two groups. These are Loire
Vivante, a lobbying organisation founded jointly by France Nature Environnement and the
WWF in Nantes in 1986, and the similarly-named SOS Loire Vivante, set up two years later
in Le Puy-en-Velay to organise local opposition to the first of the dams scheduled to be built,
Serre de la Fare. So successful were these groups that, despite the flooding which caused the
loss of eight lives in the suburbs of Le Puy in 1980, widespread local opposition caused
successive Socialist governments under Michel Rocard and Edith Cresson to review, then
suspend, and finally cancel Serre de la Fare. ‘Nous signerons avec un autre gouvernement ce
que nous n’avons pu obtenir avec celui-ci’, claimed EPALA president Jean Royer in 1991.1
Subsequent changes in government were ultimately to be of little avail to Royer, however.
Following an intensive round of consultation with interested parties across the Loire basin,
Michel Barnier – environment minister in Edouard Balladur’s conservative cohabitation
government of 1993-5 – produced a new charter for the Loire in January 1994. Duly signed
on 6 July 1994, Barnier’s ten-year Plan Loire Grandeur Nature (PLGN) not only confirmed
the cancellation of Serre de la Fare, but further strengthened the environmental protection
measures of the original programme. Moreover, the PLGN significantly reduced the proposed
capacity of Chambonchard and delayed a decision on Le Veurdre until the end of 1998,
1
In ‘“Une décision exclusivement politique”’, Le Monde, 2 August 1991, p6.
3
pending further studies. All told, this represented ‘une évolution positive depuis 1986’,
according to environmental groups.2
Yet even this second national package of measures did not mark the end of the process.
Following the election of a coalition government of Greens, Socialists, Radicals, and
Communists in 1997, the Green ministre de l’environnement et de l’aménagement du
territoire Dominique Voynet announced the review of the ‘first phase’ of the PLGN. Despite
continued vigorous lobbying by the EPALA with powerful support from a seemingly unlikely
alliance of agricultural unions and Communist politicians, Voynet was able to announce the
cancellation of Chambonchard in July 1999. Meanwhile, the Le Veurdre dam remains in
limbo, a state of affairs which seems likely to prevail in the current political climate. Of the
main projects set out in the 1986 agreement therefore, only the relatively modest construction
work at Naussac (actually referred to as Naussac 2, given its role as a turbine pump for the
already existing dam of the same name) has reached completion as intended.
One of the most significant aspects of the Serre de la Fare campaign is that it secured the
cancellation of a major construction project outside periods of first-order electoral
competition, setting it apart from such ‘historic’ environmental victories as Larzac and
Plogoff, themselves cancelled by a Socialist government whose leader had just won the 1981
presidential elections with the help of Green votes. Indeed, the victory at Serre de la Fare is all
the more impressive as studies of French environmentalism have tended to emphasise the
difficulties in gaining positive policy outcomes through protest actions. One set of
explanations for this centres on the French state’s prevailing structure of political
opportunities, or the ‘specific configurations of resources, institutional arrangements and
historical precedents for social mobilization, which facilitate the development of protest
movements in some instances and constrain them in others’ (Kitschelt 1986: 58).
In fact, applications of the opportunity structure model to France have represented the Fifth
Republic as the archetypally strong state, with a functionally and territorially centralised
polity, weak and marginalised legislature, dependent judiciary, highly integrated and
coordinated administrative apparatus, and majoritarian electoral system (Koopmans and
Kriesi 1995: 31, Kriesi 1995a: 171). There are ‘virtually no access points’ for challenging
groups at sub-national levels of government (Kriesi 1995a: 171); alternative or ‘new
2
Loire Vivante communiqué de presse of 5 January 1994.
4
democratic’ forms of political representation, such as citizens’ initiative referendums, are
unavailable (Van der Heijden 1997: 29).
Further, the Fifth Republic is held to be closed to challenging groups both formally and
informally, producing a ‘strong state with an exclusive dominant strategy’, termed ‘selective
exclusion’ (Koopmans and Kriesi 1995: 36). Sainteny (1993: 15) therefore classifies France
as ‘le type idéal d’une structure politique close à l’input et forte à l’output’; conflict
management is found to be rigid, with poor elite policy responsiveness, and challenging
groups are met with a high degree of repression (Diani and Van der Heijden 1994: 375).
Given such a context, protest groups are likely to be restricted at best to limited substantive
concessions, and are almost exclusively dependent on the presence of allies in power (Giugni
1995: 213, Kriesi 1995b: 78). In terms of procedural success, the situation is equally
unpromising; challenging groups can count on neither formal nor informal access to the
system (Kitschelt 1986: 74, Kriesi et al 1992: 222, Rucht 1990: 211). In such circumstances,
the action repertoires of challenging groups are characterised by the dominance of
confrontational, anti-system, disruptive strategies at the expense of conventional, assimilative
ones (Birnbaum 1988: 187-90, Kriesi et al 1992: 227-8).
It is against this backdrop therefore that this paper will explore the strategies, discourses, and
organisation of the campaign against Serre de la Fare as an example of localised
environmental protest in France. It will argue, in common with the political opportunity
literature, that the institutional configuration of the French state is indeed central to explaining
protest trajectories and outcomes. In contrast to much of the existing literature, however, it
will demonstrate that a more differentiated analysis of this institutional structure needs to be
constructed if we are to adequately account for the trajectories and impacts of protest
movements.
In fact, the concentration on social movement organisation in the political opportunity
structure literature has tended to minimise appreciation of the differentiated patterns of policy
sectorisation present in any given state, and the correspondingly differentiated policy
processes and policy communities to which these give rise. As a consequence, key dynamic
aspects of the political opportunity structure have hitherto not been properly addressed. This
is especially true of the literature on France, where contemporary studies of state-group
relations tend to neglect the effects of Europeanisation and decentralisation on the French
5
policy process. Yet as this paper will show, these twin dynamics are central to both the
authorisation and cancellation of the Loire development programme, which consequently
needs to be understood within wider debates about the responsiveness of the French state
apparatus to outsider groups.
Moreover, if the policy process is to be properly evaluated, then this discussion needs to
account not simply for macro-structural trends within the state apparatus, but also mesostructural trends governing the composition and operation of the individual policy sectors. For
the Loire programme, the salient sector governs water policy, where debate has revolved
throughout the last forty years around the composition of policy networks and consequent
choices about which actors should decide water policy and on what basis. In fact, in common
with similar broad trends detected in other European states, water resource management in
France has been characterised in recent years by the expansion of the number and range of
actors involved. As this paper will show, the relatively closed, technocratic policy
communities of the first two decades of the Fifth Republic have given way to much less
homogenous policy networks which negotiate in much more formalised, publicly visible
arenas, in turn creating increased opportunities for challenging groups to influence public
policy.
The structure of water resource management
As outlined above, the ‘classic’ model of the Fifth Republic policy process stresses above all
the concentration of decisional power at the centre, and the clarity and effectiveness of policy
implementation, ensured by the prefectoral system and the technical specialisation of the elite
administrative corps. Yet the management of water resources in France bears little relation to
the traditional view of the French policy process as one of state-domination fuelled by the
Jacobin conception of the general interest. This is because, one the one hand, although water
is notionally a public good, it has been supplied by private companies for more than a century,
and the increasing Europeanisation of water policy has been at least partly responsible for the
increasing privatisation of French water distribution networks over the last two decades,
designed as a pragmatic response to the investment demands of EC directives (Buller 1998:
73). On the other hand, water supply is highly decentralised: municipal authorities have
historically been responsible for domestic waste disposal, and water supply, treatment, and
waste collection, and since the decentralisation measures of 1982, the role of the state in
6
domestic water provision has been chiefly reduced to water law enforcement and the
ensurance of public health and safety, with national authorities retaining only general powers
of regulation, supervision, and funding (Valiron 1992).
Decentralisation, indeed, was a key feature of the 1964 water law, passed in the context of the
regionalisation of France’s indicative planning procedures. Designed to provide a devolved
administrative structure capable of coordinating water policy, the law created six basin
agencies as financially autonomous public administrative bodies charged with the study,
research and development, and funding of common interest water resource works, especially
water quality improvement schemes. The basin agencies embraced decentralisation; the
geohydrographic basin was recognised as the key territorial unit for policy development, and
water policy was to be elaborated through a consultative process involving not only the state
and the local authorities, but also representatives from industrial and professional groups, and
from other interested organisations, all grouped together in the basin committee or comité de
bassin (Barraqué et al 1995: 132-7, CGP 1997).
Such regionalised structures enabled the French state to increasingly disengage itself
financially from this policy area from the mid-1970s onwards. This financial withdrawal had
been reflected in the changed composition of the basin committees and their executives, or
conseils d’administration, as successive decrees of the 1970s and 1980s reinforced local
authority representation (and, at the same time, the strength of users’ representatives) at the
expense of the representatives of the central ministries of the French state.
The analysis offered will therefore evaluate the success of the protest movement in both
substantive (the cancellation of specific projects) and procedural terms, concentrating on the
reconfiguration of the water policy community. An emergent partnership between the state
and SOS Loire Vivante is indicative of this reconfiguration, as the formerly challenging group
has been responsible for the implementation of an alternative scheme for the management of
water resources in the upper Loire. This partnership was made possible by the new regulatory
framework laid down by the 1992 loi sur l’eau, itself transcribing into French law new
standards agreed at EC level. Amongst other innovations, the 1992 law established local and
basin-wide plans for resource development to be drawn up on a negotiated tri-partite basis
between public, private, and associational interest representatives.
7
Regional planning and the Loire development project
Neither EPALA nor the Serre de la Fare dam project originated in the early 1980s, but owe
their ancestry to successive development programmes dating back to the 1950s. Indeed, the
1986 protocol was the fruit of over three decades of lobbying by regional political and
economic elites, grouped from 1956 in the Association nationale pour l’étude de la
communauté de la Loire et de ses affluents (ANECLA), established to promote the industrial
and agricultural development of the Loire basin.
As early as November 1960, in fact, the ANECLA submitted an economic and financial study
for a preliminary dam construction programme with a view to inclusion within the then
operative 4th national plan. Believing that ‘les voies de l’eau sont la base fondamentale de
l’expansion industrielle’,3 the ANECLA originally proposed a comprehensive plan to
‘domesticate’ the Loire through the construction of some thirty-seven separate dams on the
Vienne, Cher, Allier, and upper Loire. With a total capacity of 1,887 million cubic metres, the
dams would regularise the river debit by maintaining water flow levels during the summer
months; in turn, this would enable the completion of a number of major projects, most
ambitiously the construction of a navigable waterway from Nantes to Basle. Further work
constructing dykes would allow barge traffic up the Loire from the Atlantic as far as Tours,
and from there to the Rhine-Rhône axis via the Saone, Cher, and canal du Centre. To this
would be added road and rail routes breaking the toile d’arraignée around Paris, linking
Nantes with Lyon by a parallel motorway and electrified main line railway. Further, these
projects would enable the decongestion of the Paris region and massive urban and industrial
expansion along the Loire valley.4 Finally, the preliminary study envisaged petrochemical
complexes and iron and steel works at Donges on the Atlantic coast, and the regularisation of
agricultural production through the creation of networks capable of irrigating up to 1,100,000
hectares.
The ANECLA viewed itself as orchestrating a modernising, dynamic plan for regional
prosperity. The context for such regional development was clearly set by the national
planning process; the ANECLA was careful to frame the development project within the
objectives set by the 4th and 5th national plans (the latter entering formal preparation from
3
4
Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 2, August 1961, p1.
Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 24, September 1963, p1.
8
1964), prioritising the development of the French centre and west, areas which – in contrast to
Paris and the industrialised north, east and south-east of the country – suffered from low
incomes, the structural decline of agriculture, and population loss. ‘This was the era’, write
Balme and Jouve (1996: 225) of the regionalised planning initiatives of the 1950s and the
1960s, ‘of major infrastructure projects, which were expected to have positive effects on
national development.’ This was also the era of widespread dam construction; between 1955
and 1985, 250 dams were constructed in mainland France, second only to Spain amongst
western European states (IFEN 1995). Yet by the end of the 1970s, the ANECLA’s
programme was seemingly little nearer to fruition than it had been twenty years earlier.
Indeed, in vivid contrast to official discourses stressing the need for large infrastructural
projects, the information bulletin published by the ANECLA from July 1961 onwards testifies
to the organisation’s mounting frustration at the non-realisation of its plans. Most of all, it
highlights the immobilism of the decisional process as successive committees approved and
then referred the programme, failing to authorise the construction of the dams or even
designate a project managing body.
At regional level, policy approval was easily achieved given the institutional configuration of
the basin agencies, where decision-making, under the influence of strongly integrated
industrial and employers’ interest groups, tended to be depoliticised, highly technical, and
dominated by short-term economic criteria (Brénac 1988: 129-36). Nevertheless, the
committee’s influence on national policy making proved to be negligible; its decisions could
not be (and were not) implemented without the approval of the national interministerial
committee. Despite the willingness of the ANECLA and its semi-public sister company, the
Société d’économie mixte pour l’étude de la communauté de la Loire et de ses affluents
(SEMECLA), to reduce the size of the programme, from the thirty-seven sites submitted to
the DATAR in 1963 to a priority proposal for five dams in 1965,5 and successive ministerial
declarations6 and institutional recommendations7 envisaging the start of construction on
various dams within successive national plan timetables, by May 1973, no response had been
forthcoming to initial demands for site concession. In July 1975, the SEMECLA voluntarily
instigated its own dissolution, claiming no further resources or role given the absence of state
Though this five-dam proposal needs to be seen not as the totality of the project, but merely as a first tranche.
Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 26, November 1963, p1, pp4-5.
6 Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 116, March 1974, p3.
7 Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 83, November 1969, p2; 112, June 1973, p1.
5
9
authorisation to proceed; by the end of the 7th plan, work on dams only at Villerest and
Naussac, neither of which were integral to the ANECLA programme, had commenced.
The ANECLA’s willingness to modify its programme demonstrates its pragmatism towards
the decisional process, but also its opportunism as it incorporated diverse justifications for the
project into a discourse centred on industrial expansion. Thus despite the emergence of the
corporatist basin agencies, the trans-sectoral nature of water policy issues condemned the
project to a no-man’s land between the decisional and implementation stages of the policy
process. Given that the legal framework within which the basin agencies have operated did
not enable them to act as a project managing or contracting body, the SEMECLA positioned
itself from the beginning to play such a role. It is significant that not only was the SEMECLA
created by the ANECLA in 1962 with the specific goal (as stipulated in article two of its
statutes and approved by interministerial decree) of transformation into a Compagnie
nationale de la Loire or Compagnie d’aménagement du bassin de la Loire (CABAL)
equivalent to that formed for the development of the Rhône, but also that successive
preliminary programmes were drawn up on the basis of strict financial independence from the
state. Yet only with the Defferre reforms of 1982, some twenty years after the creation of the
SEMECLA, did this possibility become a reality.
The way in which the sectoral water policy community came to be reconstituted as a result of
the decentralisation reforms centres therefore not on the introduction of a pluralist system of
representation into the policy-making process, but on a wider dynamic strengthening the
interests of established elites. It is in this context, as well as that of the fruition of a long
process of lobbying undertaken by regional economic and political elites, that the birth of the
EPALA should be considered.8 Created in November 1983, the EPALA federates six regions,
fifteen départements, and nineteen town councils throughout the Loire basin, plus a further
ten intradepartmental syndicates regrouping municipal authorities of less than 30,000
inhabitants (known as SICALA). Officially an établissement public, the EPALA in fact offers
no place in its decision-making structures for either representatives of the various
administrations of the state, or for those of any of the interested consumers’, industrial,
environmental, or agricultural organisations operating within the Loire basin. Thus although
the EPALA has relied on the technical services of the state (the DDE in particular) in order to
The ANECLA had dissolved itself at its Assemblée Générale of 16 June 1979 to be replaced by LIGER, under the
presidency of Jean Royer. See Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 143, July 1979, p1.
8
10
ensure policy delivery, and is placed under prefectoral tutelle, it is composed entirely of local
élus at municipal, departmental, and regional level. Such developments therefore place the
Loire programme within a new institutional context, one shaped by a decentralising dynamic
long advocated by regional elites.
Yet if policy sectorisation and decentralisation were fundamental to the authorisation of the
programme, then these same structural factors would also ultimately be central to the
successful organisation of dissent against the scheme. Indeed, it is contended here that
institutional factors structure the terrain on which protest is carried out, creating and
restricting the availability and success chances of actions and discourses. This paper will
therefore now turn to the organisation of dissent to the dam programme, situating the
strategies deployed by the main challenging groups in terms of these elements of the political
opportunity structure.
The organisation of dissent
The organisation of dissent to the programme was initially dictated by the rhythm of the
formal authorisation process. Resistance to the protocol was rapidly established by Loire
Vivante, with SOS Loire Vivante organising localised resistance to Serre de la Fare, which –
at an estimated cost of 460MF, and with a projected capacity of 74 million cubic metres – was
scheduled to be the first of the dams. The first task of SOS Loire Vivante was to mobilise
protest at the scheme’s public enquiry, held from 1 March to 15 April 1988; it organised the
first substantial public demonstration against the dam in Le Puy in October 1988. On 11
February 1989, construction work was authorised to begin when the Haute-Loire
departmental prefect signed the dam’s public utility certificate (DUP); six days later, activists
from SOS Loire Vivante occupied the construction site, an occupation which was ultimately
to last 1825 days. This was not the association’s only response to the DUP, however: SOS
Loire Vivante’s Martin Arnould, Régine Linossier, and Gilles Brun were elected onto Le
Puy’s town council in March 1989 on a platform of opposition to the dam; the association
lodged a legal appeal against the DUP; and a mass rally was organised in Le Puy for the last
weekend in April. Likening the campaign to one of the great environmentalist causes of the
1970s, Le Monde greeted the announcement of the demonstration with the front-page headline
11
‘Larzac sur Loire’;9 ten thousand protesters marched through the town to show their
disapproval of the scheme.
From this point on, the authorisation procedure began to be dictated by the pace and extent of
the protest movement. On 28 April 1989, the day before the demonstration, environment
minister Brice Lalonde wrote to Christine Jean, coordinator of Loire Vivante, to tell her that
‘j’ai toujours souhaité, et vous le savez, qu’une large concertation et une véritable information
du public, et notamment des associations, soit engagée autour de ce programme
d’aménagement.’ In the letter, Lalonde announced the temporary suspension of construction
work on the dam, pending further studies.10 On 7 February 1990, the government formally
announced that it was considering a number of alternative options for Serre de la Fare. A local
referendum on these options was cancelled in January 1991 after the municipal council
refused to include an alternative put forward by SOS Loire Vivante. On 7 February 1991, the
Clermont-Ferrand administrative tribunal upheld the appeal against the project’s DUP.11 On
31 July 1991, Cresson’s government confirmed the cancellation of Serre de la Fare. Following
the defeat of the Socialists at the 1993 legislative elections, Edouard Balladur’s government
definitively laid the prospect of a dam in the Haute-Loire to rest with the renegotiated Plan
Loire Grandeur Nature (PLGN) of 4 January 1994.
Confrontation and litigation, moderation and consensus
As previously underlined, the political opportunity structure literature emphasises the
confrontational nature of social protest in France. Given the minimal opportunities for
challenging groups to set or influence the policy agenda, protest will tend to radicalise, calling
into question not simply the specific project but, beyond that, the very legitimacy of the state
to make policy. Certainly, many of these traits are to be found in the Serre de la Fare protest,
particularly in a number of confrontational incidents, such as the vandalism of construction
vehicles in spring 1988. Later, SOS Loire Vivante was to argue:
Le Monde, 30 March 1989, p1.
Letter from Brice Lalonde, secrétaire d’état à l’environnement, à Mme Christine Jean, coordinatrice du comité
Loire Vivante, reproduced in L’Éveil, 29 April 1989, p7.
11 See ‘La construction d’un barrage sur la Loire semble compromise’, Le Monde, 13 February 1991, p28; ‘Exit la
DUP!’, SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 8, March 1991, p1.
9
10
12
Dans un pays qui n’accorde qu’une place ridicule à la défense de son patrimoine
naturel, il faut savoir provoquer les électrochocs salutaires: nous devons, en France,
découvrir les vertus de la désobéissance civile.12
The goal of action such site occupation was clear: beyond symbolic presence and media
attention, protesters aimed to enforce lengthy delays and impose escalating costs. ‘Le chantier
va être difficile, très long, très cher: le prix du mètre cube stocké va exploser!’, claimed the
association;13 by late 1992, the estimated cost of the dam had spiralled to 700MF. SOS Loire
Vivante and allied groups systematically challenged administrative approval through the
courts, thus reinforcing the tactic of open, public, confrontational resistance. By summer
1991, in fact, SOS Loire Vivante estimated it had read 40,000 pages of legal documents.
EPALA meetings were, again systematically, picketed by protesters, with technical as well as
political staff being chased by placard-waving environmentalists. Scuffles were common.14
Despite these tactics, however, it would be far from accurate to characterise the campaign led
by SOS Loire Vivante as confrontational. In response to the vandalism of construction
vehicles near Collandre, the group immediately issued a press communiqué condemning the
action.15 The association consciously drew on protests against dams elsewhere in Europe,
forging links with groups in other countries in order to establish effective peaceful
campaigning methods.16 After a visit by two members of the association to Hungary and
Austria, the physical, non-violent resistance tactics used by protesters against the Hainburg
and Nagymaros dams were directly copied by SOS Loire Vivante.17
Moreover, as shall become clear, the relationship between protesters and the state was far
from conflictual. According to Martin Arnould, SOS Loire Vivante’s campaign
n’a jamais été un combat contre les institutions, l’État […] il y a aussi la volonté de
prendre le réel comme il est, et de savoir qu’a priori le ministère de l’environnement
est plus notre allié que notre adversaire, en tout cas plus notre allié que le ministère de
l’agriculture et l’industrie… Renverser l’État, ça nous intéresse pas du tout.18
SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 10, September 1991, p2.
SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 19, December 1993, p1.
14 See for example ‘Une bousculade avec les écologistes’, La Nouvelle République du Centre, 28 June 1990.
15 ‘Le sabotage des engins sur le site du barrage: “SOS Loire Vivante” le condamne’, L’Éveil, 15 May 1988.
16 ‘Un membre de SOS Loire Vivante à la rencontre des verts autrichiens: “Là-bas, ils ont gagné”’, L’Éveil, 6
January 1989.
17 Interview with Martin Arnould, Le Puy, 4 April 1996.
18 Interview with Martin Arnould, op.cit.
12
13
13
The organisation avoided wider anti-regime arguments and presented itself as apolitical.
Indeed, when Arnould, Brun, and Linossier were elected to the municipal council running on
the Les Verts list, SOS Loire Vivante amended its statutes such that anyone standing for
political office could not also be a member of the group’s committee; the association ‘ne
prétendit jamais organiser quiconque sur des bases étroitement politiques’, according to one
supporter.19 The scheme, according to SOS Loire Vivante, did not call into question the
legitimacy of the state to decide and implement construction projects, but the legitimacy of
the EPALA to represent the popular will or to aggregate interests along the whole of the Loire
basin. ‘À Naussac,’ asserted Jean-François Arnould of a dam scheme which attracted
concerted opposition in the mid-1970s, ‘ils parlaient du fascisme de Giscard. Ici rien de tel. Si
le barrage se fait, on résistera sans violence’ (in Boddaert 1990: 119).
Resistance to the Naussac dam had been characterised in 1977 by, variously, battles between
protesters and police, site occupations, the blocking of the Paris-Nîmes express, the burning of
construction vehicles, the bombing of the headquarters of the project managing organisation,
the theft of project documents, and the sabotage of EDF equipment.20 In the words of Le
Monde, Naussac was
un lieu symbolique pour ceux qui veulent ‘vivre au pays’, qui refusent la mort des
montagnes au profit des vallées, et qui dénoncent l’État centralisé et technocratique.21
The contrast with the opposition to Serre de la Fare is therefore instructive. Both the local and
national press emphasised the moderate tendencies of SOS Loire Vivante; L’Express found
the opposition movement to be ‘[b]ien implantée localement, modérée, argumentant,
cherchant le contact avec les élus, les chasseurs, les pêcheurs’,22 whilst L’Éveil highlighted
the non-violent nature of the site occupation,23 and devoted large spaces to articles from
opponents to the dam virtually from the beginning of the campaign; in fact, the local press
throughout the Loire basin acted as important relay points for protesters (Rodier 1993: 155-7).
The EPALA, by contrast, was obliged to vote an extra 300,000FF onto its budget for a
communications campaign as early as autumn 1988 in order to counteract the effectiveness of
the opponents’ information campaigns.
Fabrice Nicolino, ‘Une victoire culturelle’, Les Réalités de l’Écologie, 50, February 1994, p22.
‘Les agriculteurs déclarent avoir épuisé tous les moyens légaux’, Le Monde, 11 May 1977, p9.
21 ‘Un barrage pour quelques arpents de Lozère’, Le Monde, 7 August 1977, p5.
22 ‘Laissez le long fleuve tranquille’, L’Express, 11 November 1988, pp81-84.
23 ‘Des tentes sur le site et une chaîne humaine devant les bulldozers’, L’Éveil, 20 February 1989.
19
20
14
The use of confrontational strategies thus needs to be contextualised. Firstly, it should be
emphasised that SOS Loire Vivante deployed a range of strategies, including such consensual
actions as the circulation of petitions against the scheme. By the end of 1989, 45,000
signatures had been collected and sent to President Mitterrand; by the end of 1993, the
petition against the dam had been signed by a further 115,000 people.24 Similarly, the
association organised the participation of the local population in the 1988 public enquiry,
where nearly 4,000 comments were registered against the scheme.25 Membership of the
organisation doubled between June 1989 and January 1990; by the end of 1990, SOS Loire
Vivante boasted 3,000 members. The ‘European demonstration’ of spring 1989 was
overwhelmingly composed of local people; Le Monde registered only several Swiss and a
hundred or so Germans mobilised by WWF and Robin Wood.26 The second-round vote of
21.87% gained by Arnould, Brun, and Linossier was by far Les Verts’ best performance in
any town of over 30,000 inhabitants at the 1989 municipal elections.
The defining aspect of this local protest is therefore rather its pursuit of legalism and
construction of responsibility, as challenging groups sought to construct as wide a coalition as
possible by presenting themselves as legitimate representatives of mainstream local opinion.
Furthermore, the association’s organisation of local information meetings and numerous trips
to remove detritus from the river bed and clear pathways along the banks of the Loire had
both practical and symbolic effects, highlighting the constructive and consensual nature of the
anti-dam protest. The association viewed physical obstruction as a last but necessary resort,
and as a specific response to the the practice of the fait accompli which has traditionally
characterised construction projects in France, most notably the Ile de Ré bridge. 27 Indeed, all
avenues of protest were pursued, including, as shall become apparent, intensive lobbying of
the state administration.
The importance of political allies
See ‘SOS Loire Vivante ne veut pas vendre la peau de l’ours’, L’Éveil, 27 January 1990, and ‘The Loire Vivante
Campaign’, online at www.rivernet.org/loire/camp4_e.htm (accessed 6 July 1999).
25 See ‘Le rapport de la Commission d’enquête souligne de grosses lacunes’, L’Éveil, 8 June 1988, p11, and
‘Barrage: 6000 pétitions adressées au président de la République’, L’Éveil, 27 September 1988.
26 ‘Barrage au barrage!’, Le Monde, 3 May 1989, p11.
27 See ‘Barrage au barrage’, La Tribune, 27 November 1989, and SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 10, September 1991, p2.
24
15
Although success in the 1989 local elections did not enable environmentalists to affect
directly the decision-making of the municipal council or of the EPALA, it did demonstrate the
legitimacy of the organised dissent and provoked concessions at a national level seemingly
influenced by medium-term electoral considerations. The way in which national political
considerations affect local struggles, in fact, can be seen from the position of the Parti
Socialiste on the Loire project. The EPALA, it should not be forgotten, was established under
the auspices of the commitment to decentralisation of a Socialist government prominently
featuring ministers from the Loire basin; yet the performance of Les Verts at the Le Puy
municipal elections had all but enabled a PS-PCF coalition to take the town hall, as the joint
Left list gained only thirty-one votes fewer than the right-wing RPR-UDF coalition. A
remarkable result in a traditional conservative stronghold like Le Puy.
It is thus perhaps not surprising that, in the wake of the results of the municipal elections, the
contrast between different imperatives at national and local level initially produced a state of
confusion and contradiction within the departmental Socialist party. Roland Casanova, the
leader of the PS list, pushed for a moratorium; Louis Valentin, the departmental party
secretary, argued that the party was not against a dam at Serre de la Fare per se, but rather
against the project such as it was designed. Jean-Pierre Brossier, the Socialist mayor of
Cussac and departmental councillor for Solignac, declared himself opposed to the project as
an individual, but in favour of a flood-breaking dam in his capacity as an élu.28 In the HauteLoire, the PS endorsed the April 1989 demonstration, requested that the government study
other alternatives, and supported the appeal lodged by SOS Loire Vivante against the DUP. 29
Casanova publicly reaffirmed his opposition to the dam following the government decision of
7 February 1990.30 Nonetheless, the signals from national politicians were decidedly mixed.
Thus Pierre Bérégovoy, mayor of Nevers and then ministre de l’économie in Michel Rocard’s
government, would only be drawn into saying that ‘il y a des barrages qu’il faut faire, et
d’autres qui ne sont pas indispensables.’31 By 1991, the Haute-Loire federation remained the
only PS branch to have taken a firm stance against the EPALA programme.32
See Le Monde, 30 March 1989, p13 and 3 May 1989, p11, op. cit.
‘Le Parti Socialiste demande de suspendre le début des travaux et un réexamen’, L’Éveil, 10 April 1989.
30 See ‘Barrage: sept mois pour réfléchir aux solutions alternatives’, L’Éveil, 8 February 1990, and ‘Barrage de
Serre de la Fare: l’occupation du site a un an’, La Tribune, 19 February 1990.
31 Quoted in ‘Barrage sur la Loire: les élus socialistes hésitent à mouiller’, Libération, 7 February 1990.
32 ‘Loire: ils sont contre cet EPALA-là’, La Nouvelle République du Centre, 28 January 1991.
28
29
16
Yet two blocs were beginning to emerge out of the seventy-two local élus sitting on the
EPALA’s deliberative assembly, or comité syndical. Thus one bloc supporting the dam
programme chiefly united Communists and conservatives. Since the cancellation of Serre de
la Fare, in fact, the PCF and CGT have, in alliance with the FNSEA (the dominant, and very
conservative, agricultural union), emerged as the main sponsors of the remaining elements of
the dam programme. Indeed, despite the removal of the Chambonchard dam from the
development programme by Cresson’s decision of July 1991, the following year the dam was
re-approved by her successor… Pierre Bérégovoy, in a reported deal whereby the PCF would
support the government in a parliamentary vote of confidence.33 In the run-up to the following
year’s legislative elections, alliances between Communists and Socialists at local level were
less easily detectable, however.
At national level, the growing political importance of environmental questions and
progressive loss of popular support experienced by successive governments during the second
Mitterrand presidency was reflected in the spectacular decline of the Socialists in the 1989
European and 1992 regional elections, matched by the equally spectacular emergence of the
Greens. Against a background of governmental ouverture, Prime minister Rocard had
appointed former ecologist presidential candidate Brice Lalonde as environment minister in
1988; in 1990, Lalonde established his own Green formation, Génération Écologie, with the
apparent benediction of President Mitterrand.34 Such manoeuvrings were translated within the
EPALA comité syndical as Socialists started to ally with Greens within a bloc critical of the
original programme. The twelve Socialist and ecologist EPALA representatives abstained on
a vote in December 1989, called to authorise EPALA president Jean Royer to demand a firm
go-ahead from the government for the programme, thus marking the first time that division
had clearly manifested itself within the organisation. Further, in January 1991, approximately
150 Socialist and Green élus from across the basin formed the CABLE, Comité pour l’avenir
du bassin de la Loire, to act as a political lobbying organisation for the revision of the
protocol and implementation of a sustainable development scheme for the basin. Jean-Claude
Demaure of Génération Écologie, assistant mayor of Nantes and vice-president of the
EPALA, summed up the specificity of the CABLE: ‘Pour l’EPALA, c’est toujours plus. Pour
nous, c’est toujours mieux.’35
See ‘La construction du dernier grand barrage du bassin de la Loire est contestée’, Le Monde, 11 August 1998,
p8; ‘Remous autour de la gestion de l’eau’, Le Monde, 12 December 1998, p11.
34 For a detailed account of the attempts of the PS to harness the Green vote, see Sainteny (1994).
35 Quoted in ‘Loire: ils sont contre cet EPALA-là’, op.cit.
33
17
In Le Puy, the overtures of the left towards the Greens almost paid off at the 1995 municipal
elections. At the second round, the joint PS-PCF-Green list led by Casanova gained 49.84%
of the vote, losing out to the RPR-UDF list by the barest of margins – twenty-seven votes –
for the second time in succession. Across the basin, the effects of the formation of the
CABLE are less easily quantifiable, as attempts to influence the direction of the EPALA from
within have generally proved negligible. Yet the formation of the CABLE has been
significant to the extent that it has countered the EPALA’s claims to cross-political
legitimacy. Legitimacy, indeed, proved to be one of the main points of dispute in the Serre de
la Fare campaign.
Decentralisation and peripheral resistance
From the early stages of the protest, the arguments put forward against the dam were heavily
flavoured with the defence of local customs, traditions, and economies in the face of the
unwelcome imposition of outside authority. ‘Ne laissons pas voler ce choix de société par les
technocrates bornés et intéressés de l’EPALA: ils n’habitent pas en Haute-Loire et n’auront
pas à supporter le barrage!’ argued SOS Loire Vivante.36 Yet unlike the discourses which had
typically dominated the environmental protests of the 1970s, such arguments here were not
levelled at the state but at the EPALA. Technocratic choices were therefore not perceived by
opponents to the dam as benefiting the central state, but rather the economic interests of the
towns situated on the lower and mid-sections of the Loire. According to opponents, the
scheme – rather than representing the interests of the entire basin – sought simply to promote
certain highly focalised local interests over others. Martin Arnould, for example, argued from
an early date that the real beneficiaries would be not the people of the Haute-Loire, but those
who lived further downstream
Est-il par exemple nécessaire, pour éviter les crues, de noyer 13km de gorges
exceptionelles? Est-il vital, pour alimenter en eau Tours et sa région, de créer un
gigantesque réservoir qui va défigurer une des plus belles richesses de notre
département, un de ses paysages les plus remarquables?37
That the protocol was eventually signed can be partly explained by a flood which hit BrivesCharensac, a suburb of Le Puy, on 21 September 1980. Eight people died; a further twenty36
37
SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 6, October 1990, p3.
See ‘Barrage: l’illusion du tourisme’, L’Éveil, 15 May 1988.
18
one were seriously injured; the total bill for damage to property ran to an estimated 500MF.
The flood protection vocation of Serre de la Fare, in fact, reflected growing concerns shared
by the state and regional elites, and which were translated in the planning agendas of the
1970s. Yet if flood protection was to provide the catalyst for the dam programme, it was also
ultimately to provide its central weakness.
Prior to the flood at Brives-Charensac, emphasis on flood protection had focused on the areas
of the Loire historically affected by serious flooding, and where the industrial and economic
development plans for the basin were also concentrated. In successive ANECLA submissions,
Serre de la Fare is rarely cited as one of the dams needed to protect the people from the river;
flood control was clearly intended for the protection of the urban conurbations of the Loire
valley, whose industrial expansion required the exploitation of areas prone to flooding. This
emphasis is present throughout the arguments of local elites lobbying for the Loire dam
scheme; even in 1978, Royer was still contending that, should the type of flooding which
notoriously occurred in the mid-nineteenth century return, it would be the inhabitants of the
Val-de-Loire who would be unable to forgive their elected representatives.38 Moreover, whilst
the ANECLA had argued that only a comprehensive series of dams upstream could
adequately protect the mid- and lower-Loire,39 the capacity of 160 million cubic metres it had
proposed for Serre de la Fare in 1970 was nonetheless designed for water stockage only, with
no additional flood control facility.40 Likewise, the 1979 Rapport Chapon – the reference
document which served as a template for the 1986 protocol and the subsequent Plan Loire
Grandeur Nature – had endorsed Serre de la Fare as a river flow maintenance facility only.
Faced with such a quantitative rationale for the Loire programme, protesters adopted two
interlinked discursive strategies. Firstly, protest groups sought to re-frame the policy
problematic by concentrating on qualitative issues. Secondly, groups identified the EPALA as
an adversary embodying a set of interests perceived to be private and therefore illegitimate.
Changing the policy agenda: water quality and the salmon
See ‘Les riverains de la Loire pressent le gouvernement de définir une politique d’équipement du fleuve’, Le
Monde, 3 October 1978, p39.
39 Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 98, July 1971, p7.
40 Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 92, December 1970, pp1-2.
38
19
If indicative planning constitutes what we might term the first phase in the ‘sectorisation’ of
water policy, the second is a consequence of the growing public perception of water as a
problem in the late 1960s. In common with widespread concern in other western industrial
democracies, growing awareness in France over environmental degradation, coupled with a
number of serious environmental disasters such as the wreckage of the Torrey Canyon oil
tanker off the Brittany coast in March 1967, stimulated more concerted governmental
attempts to prevent pollution. Initially tentative governmental responses were soon overtaken
by the appointment of France’s first environment minister in January 1971.
From this point, water resource management as a policy sector has increasingly come under
the direction of the environment ministry, concerned above all with qualitative issues.
Although water was initially constructed at national level as an essentially technocratic
exercise in economic decision making, the deterioration in water quality has lain at the heart
of the development of policymaking in this domain at national, sub-national, and European
levels; the introduction of catchment plans in the 1992 reform established qualitative
objectives as the cornerstone of French water resource management (Buller 1996: 300-1).
Of course, the French environment ministry has suffered throughout its existence from a lack
of status; Buller (1998: 77) argues that it ‘often appears more as an internal government
pressure group than a central focus of a major sectoral policy domain’. Yet its constitution as
an administration de mission with the twin concerns of regional planning and nature
protection has gradually created a stronger, more coherent basis for policy coordination,
definition, and implementation. In particular, its initial inter-departmental coordinating role
with responsibility for water management and supply projects of national relevance, and
authority over the basin agencies and the interministerial and national water committees (FAO
1975: 72, Larrue and Chabason 1998: 61), has enabled a water management policy
community with a defined sectoral remit to evolve.
The creation of the Direction de l’eau was one of the measures outlined by the new 1992
legislation, drawn up following a national consultation process in decentralised Assises de
l’eau across each of the six basins, and culminating in the Assises nationales of 19-20 March
1991 at La Villette (Paris) to establish new priorities and structures for water policy (Dubosc
1992, Rousseau 1991). The subsequent reforms recognise the influence of the environment
ministry in two important areas. Firstly, the ministry’s hand is visible in the introduction of
20
integrated planning documents (see below), and secondly in the prioritisation of ecosystem
protection over resource distribution (Barraqué et al 1995: 137, Gazzaniga 1992: 29). The
institutional reorganisation of water policy under the wing of the environment ministry has
served to emphasise the importance of environmental protection and water quality
maintenance (Barraqué et al 1995: 137-8). Yet perhaps the greatest contributory factor to such
policy re-framing has originated from what we might consider to represent a reduction of the
influence of national policymakers. The European Commission’s role in setting the domestic
water policy agenda and legislation of its members states has been central to the changing
basis of resource planning, and to the re-framing of water policy in terms of quality rather
than of quantitative distribution.
European construction has by now had a significant effect on the agenda-setting and policy
formulation of water resource management across the EC’s member states. The very fact that
legislation exists at EC level is frequently enough to influence the direction of policy in
member states (Richardson 1994: 146). European environmental legislation has consistently
imposed more stringent norms and standards for air, noise, and water pollution, chemical
substances and industrial hazards, and indeed nature conservation, than those that were
previously to be found on the statute books of, for example, France. Yet it is not only the
direct transposition of European into domestic law which is significant, but also the indirect
effects of EC legislation. Indeed, EC directives tend to strengthen the hand of the French
environment ministry when negotiating with industrial partners or rival national ministries
such as industry, agriculture, or finance (Larrue and Prud’homme 1993: 74-8, Larrue and
Chabason 1998: 66). What is true of environmental policy as a whole is acutely so in the case
of water resource management; as in other European member states, French domestic water
policy has increasingly been determined by European directives.
The specific form that the development of European legislation has taken has not only
affected the extent of domestic policy in the field, but has dictated the definition of the sector.
As Kaczmarek (1997) points out, the EC has not so much developed policy in water resource
management as in water quality protection, as key directives have privileged setting reference
norms over quantitative issues (such as water resource distribution, basin management,
recycling, irrigation, flood control or drought response).
21
Given this context, arguably the most striking aspect of the Loire dam programme is its
exclusively quantitative conception of water resources. The objectives of the ANECLA
programme had concentrated on distribution problems, lamenting the under-exploitation of
‘une eau dont la majeure partie allait se perdre dans l’Océan sans profit pour personne’,41
whilst advocating ‘une utilisation totale des eaux et une satisfaction prioritaire des besoins de
ses habitants’.42 Thirty years later, little had changed. According to Royer,
Par aménagement de la Loire, il faut entendre la correction par l’homme des excès de
la nature en général et du fleuve en particulier… C’est-à-dire, d’une part les pénuries
excessives de l’eau et d’autre part les crues catastrophiques du fleuve.43
The EPALA programme thus seeks to address problems of resource distribution through a
construction and development programme. In contrast to the quantitative problematic
constructed by the EPALA, protest groups sought above all to underline the importance of
water quality to the development of the basin. Symbolic acts such as the Marcheurs de l’eau
of August and September 1989, when protesters walked from the source of the Loire to the
estuary, collecting water samples at each stage of the route, not only stressed the unity of
water resources across the hydrographic basin but highlighted the deterioration in quality
produced by damming and urban and agricultural development. According to Loire Vivante,
changing the agenda to water quality was its ‘objectif No. 1’.44
A potent symbol of this qualitative agenda was provided by the emphasis placed by protest
groups on the migratory patterns of salmon on the Loire river basin. The upper Allier is the
last major European river where large salmon breed, yet population numbers have steeply
declined across the twentieth century; in 1997, only 389 salmon were recorded upstream of a
weir at Vichy on the mid-Allier, the primary spawning ground for the fish.45
Consequently adopted as its symbol by SOS Loire Vivante, the salmon functioned as a
metonymic signifier for opposition to the Serre de la Fare dam on two counts. Firstly, in
contrast to a conception of river basin solidarity promoted by the EPALA which required
Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 32, July 1964, 3; see also 1, July 1961, p1.
Bulletin de l’ANECLA, 13, September 1962, p2.
43 Parliamentary Commission 3134, Rapport de la Commission d’enquête sur l’aménagement de la Loire, le
maintien de son débit, la protection de son environnement, 11 December 1992, pp151-68. Royer is quoted from
his participation in the parliamentary hearings of 1 September 1992.
44 ‘Editorial’, SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 4, October 1989, p1.
45 Figures cited in SOS Loire Vivante communiqué de presse of 6 November 1998, ‘Bassin de la Loire: un
deuxième barrage, démantelé pour les saumons’. Online at www.rivernet.org/stvig_f.htm; accessed 29 October
1999.
41
42
22
construction upstream in order to enable the development of areas downstream, the emphasis
placed by protest groups on water quality worked towards creating solidarity in the opposite
direction. Secondly, the maintenance of the fish population on the Allier and Loire was
central to the alternative economic development strategies proposed by the association.
Instead of accepting the proposed dam as the key to economic regeneration therefore, SOS
Loire Vivante attributed the decline in the salmon population to the presence of some nineteen
construction works on the river, and emphasised the ‘natural’ Loire gorges as a major
resource for developing green tourism in the region, even comparing the upper Loire and
Allier to the estimated 30,000 people employed in fishing tourism in Scotland.46 Departmental
and national angling associations were to form significant allies for protest groups.
Local economic development and the north-south divide
SOS Loire Vivante’s campaign against Serre de la Fare therefore aimed not just to protect a
site which it argued to be of great natural beauty, but also to re-orient the economic
development of the area. Indeed, much of the association’s work following the decision to
cancel the dam scheme consequently centred on the promotion of local sustainable
development projects.47 The primary goal of the EPALA, the association argued, was to stock
water in the poor regions of the Massif Central to enable the irrigation of the plains of the
mid-Loire, which had been converted over the previous twenty years to the water intensive
maize growing. Furthermore, the departmental council’s proposal to create an integrated
tourist resort with swimming pools, a golf course, and hotel on the banks of the future
reservoir, was exploitative of and irrelevant to the needs of the area (SOS Loire Vivante 1989:
9).
Such arguments became a familiar refrain for the association, especially as these concerns
were widely shared by other groups participating in the coalition against the dam. For JeanLouis Courriol, president of L’Association de remise en valeur et de défense de la Loire, the
tourist development project was nonsensical, given that the fluctuating water levels of the
reservoir would only enable bathing on a handful days per year. In summer, when tourist
demand was highest, the water would be lowest, thus forcing prospective bathers to negotiate
several metres of stinking mud before reaching the water. Moreover, use of the reservoir
SOS Loire Vivane Infos, 21, June 1994, p2.
See for instance ‘Pour un développement soutenable en Haute-Loire’, Les Réalités de l’Écologie, numéro
spécial, December 1991, pp18-19.
46
47
23
would only be possible for other water sports for between one and one and a half months per
year.48 Even L’Express agreed that flood control was only a secondary function of a dam
principally intended to benefit the lower Loire valley.49 It is thus significant that, beyond the
identification of a number of consequences for the upper Loire considered to be inimical to its
cultural and economic development, challenging groups specifically highlighted the towns of
the lower and mid-Loire as the principal beneficiaries of the scheme. The most prominent of
these adversaries was Tours, of which Jean Royer was the long-serving mayor.
The reinforcement of the position of traditional political elites implied by the manner and
timing of the decentralisation reforms is perhaps best exemplified by Jean Royer’s dominance
of the EPALA. Royer, indeed, appears the very model of the cumulard notable; first elected
député in 1958 and mayor of Tours in 1959, Royer was to remain leader of the municipal
council until 1995, when he also lost the presidency of the EPALA, a position he had
occupied since its creation. Royer’s autocratic style, and particularly his celebrated vigorous
defence of conservative sexual mores, was to make him a prime target for the derision of
protest groups. Indeed, Royer’s plans to develop a technological park in Tours to rival similar
schemes in Metz and Nice, announced in November 1988, were symptomatic of the growing
fracture between different areas of the Loire; the technopole’s proposed site lay on 60
hectares of land prone to flooding by the Cher, thus requiring the construction of a number of
works, including dams, to control the flow of the river. Not only did such plans seemingly
justify protest groups’ critique of the effects of decentralisation, but brought into relief the the
quantitative and qualitative conceptions of the water resource management which
fundamentally opposed the conceptions of river development proposed by the social and
institutional actors involved. The position of a decentralised class of élus rather than the state
as the project managing body thus dominated the perception of the scheme in the Haute-Loire,
and was subsequently critical to the development of a mutually productive relationship
between protesters and the state administration. A key element in the construction of this
relationship was the organisation of a local referendum – officially, in fact, a consultation
pour avis on the issue of security only – in Le Puy in late 1990.
See also the contemptuous reaction to the tourist scheme by Lucien Bernard, president of the Association des
sinistrés de Brives, an organisation representing people and business forced to relocate because of the danger of
flooding, and which might therefore have been expected to support the EPALA project, in ‘Aménagement de la
Loire: les élus barrent le référendum’, Libération, 17 December 1990.
49 ‘Laissez le long fleuve tranquille’, L’Express, 11 November 1988, pp81-4.
48
24
The Le Puy local referendum and the 4th solution
The opportunity structure literature, in its accounts of the formal closure of the French state to
challenging groups, typically stresses the absence of direct democratic procedures. Although
the referendum was constitutionalised in 1958, it is elite-initiated; the Fifth Republic has no
formal constitutional provision for a référendum d’initiative populaire, the citizen instigation
of local or national public consultations on specific policies or projects which, Giugni
contends (1995: 217), enable challenging groups to influence or even set the political agenda
without having to rely upon allies operating within the political system. Thus even though
instances of the use of public consultations for construction projects abound, from local
referendums on nuclear plants at Lire, Golfech, Flamanville and Port-la-Nouvelle in the 1970s
to the consultation publique held in Alsace and Franche-Comté in 1996 on the Rhine-Rhône
canal, such procedures remain rather toothless. They have never been binding (the nuclear
siting votes had, more or less, nil practical effect), a status unchanged by the 1995 Pasqua
reforms, which stresses their purely consultative function and sets strict limits on their
instigation (Piechaczyk 1997: 9).
Whilst creating a space for societal pressures, therefore, the local consultation as practised in
the Fifth Republic simultaneously sets clear limits to the state’s openness. Against this
background, then, how should we interpret the Serre de la Fare referendum of winter 1990-1?
Diani and Van der Heijden argue that the willingness to experiment with new participatory
forms of democracy is a key element of the action repertoires used by elites to limit and
contain protest, subsequently creating possibilities for policy pre-emption and/or the co-option
of protest groups or actors (1994: 370-1). Yet the logic of Lalonde’s decision to consult the
population of Le Puy on the dam project appears to be altogether different. Indeed, the salient
element of the procedure is its indication of the developing mutual relationship between
protest groups and the sectoral state administration.
Following Lalonde’s decision of the previous April to postpone the start of construction work
on Serre de la Fare, the government proposed a seven month period to consider alternative
proposals to the water-stocking reservoir sought by the EPALA, in the light both of the
project’s cost and its negative impact upon the environment. Two alternative solutions were to
be studied. These were, first, a ‘dry’ dam, without a reservoir, to be activated in extremis to
contain rising flood waters, and second, a system of dykes along the river bank, primarily in
25
Brives-Charensac. The government statement ended with a rather vague commitment to take
local opinion into account (‘L’État n’arrêtera sa position qu’après information et consultation
des populations et des autorités locales’),50 although Lalonde had suggested in the days
leading up to the cabinet meeting that a referendum could be organised.51
Vague though this statement was, it clearly points to Lalonde’s influence within
interministerial negotiations, and of the environment ministry’s capacity to reclaim decisional
power at the centre despite the supposed decentralisation of the policy process. Indeed, the
organisation of a local referendum was duly formally announced by the Haute-Loire prefect at
a press conference on 29 November 1990, but with an additional solution added to the three
alternatives already discussed. This solution proposed the improvement of flood forecasting
and warning systems, the strict enforcement of the legislation governing construction in floodrisk zones, the completion of small-scale protection work, the broadening of the river bed and
the removal of obstacles hindering the flow of the river (such as the remodelling of road
bridges in Brives to provide a wider arch), and perhaps most importantly, the creation of a
local surveillance and study network bringing together political, economic, administrative,
associational, and civic actors (SOS Loire Vivante 1992). Proposed by SOS Loire Vivante,
this alternative (known as the Quatrième solution, or 4th solution) did not include a dam.
After consultation with the ruling group on the municipal council, Pierre Philibert, the mayor
of Le Puy, announced on 21 December 1990 that, faced with the inclusion of the 4th solution,
he would not organise the referendum unless formally compelled to do so by the state. Whilst
not opposing the referendum per se, local élus – primarily L’Association des maires de la
Haute-Loire – initially opposed Lalonde’s initiative on numerous procedural grounds;
subsequent events hardened their resolve. Of the 1,000 or so comments made at the public
display held in Vals-le-Puy (7-13 December 1990) illustrating the different proposals, over
900 favoured the 4th solution.52 Then, to the evident anger of the EPALA, an opinion poll
sponsored by the environment ministry was published in L’Éveil on 30 December 1990;53
Communication du Conseil des Ministres du 7 février 1990: l’aménagement de la Loire. Reproduced in annex
to report of Parliamentary Commission 3134, op. cit., pp127-8.
51 ‘Référendum sur la Loire’, Le Journal du Dimanche, 4 February 1990, p1, p7.
52 See ‘En accord avec SOS Loire Vivante’, La Tribune, 15 December 1990.
53 ‘Le barrage de Serre de la Farre [sic]: les opinions des habitants de la Haute-Loire’, IFOP (Institut français
d’opinion publique et d’étude de marché), étude no. 1,316, December 1990. Published in ‘Le ministère de
l’environnement rend public un sondage IFOP à propos du barrage de Serre de la Fare’, L’Éveil du Dimanche, 30
December 1990, p13.
50
26
revealing little support across the Haute-Loire for either the EPALA or its proposals, the poll
found that 60% of those interviewed in the communes at most risk supported the 4th solution.
Local notable Jacques Barrot, president of the departmental council, député for Le Puy and
former government minister, having already issued a communiqué deploring that ‘un pouvoir
parisien’ had imposed the form of the public consultation without any prior discussion with
local politicians,54 reacted to the publication of the opinion poll by arguing that the
government had let the environment ministry use ‘des méthodes inacceptables de la part des
hautes autorités de l’État dans la France décentralisée’.55 For Jean Proriol, Gaullist député for
Le Puy’s other constituency, president of the Maires de la Haute-Loire, and vice-president of
the Auvergne regional council, the decision to hold the local consultation represented ‘une
crise d’autorité de l’État’.56 The departmental branch of the PCF reacted similarly:
M. Rocard et son gouvernement s’était donné 7 mois de réflexion. Le delai est
désormais largement dépassé. Aucune décision n’est prise. Si ce n’est celle de décider
soudainement de manière bureaucratique et autoritaire une consultation de la
population.57
Faced with such reactions, the referendum was definitively abandoned at the end of January
1991.
The inclusion of the 4th solution can thus perhaps best be understood as part of the
development of dialogue between the environment ministry and environmental associations,
resulting in the latter’s participation in informal policy-making discussions. Against a
backdrop of informal meetings, the environment ministry offered Loire Vivante a 350,000F
grant to fund a study of the 1980 flood. Delivered in June 1990, the study underlined
throughout the importance of the river in cultural constructions of local identity, particularly
the affective nature of the relationship between the river and the riverains (GRRM 1990: 7).
On the other, it highlighted the insufficiency of the application of planning regulations, with
local élus adopting a pragmatic approach to the granting of planning permission. Furthermore,
the study argued that the conversion of the local political class to the scheme in the early
1980s, having been opponents of the project when it was initially proposed in the 1970s,
Quoted in L’Éveil, 8 December 1990, p9.
Quoted in ‘Le ministère de l’environnement rend public…’, op.cit.
56 ‘Aménagement de la Loire: les élus barrent le référendum’, Libération, 17 December 1990.
57 Presumably intended as criticism rather than approval… Communiqué de la Fédération de la Haute-Loire du
PCF, published in L’Éveil, 22 December 1990, p5.
54
55
27
could be ascribed to a progressive refusal on their part to accept responsibility for the
consequences of a possible future flood (ibid: 90). These findings enabled SOS Loire Vivante
to draw up the 4th solution’s five-point programme, which was subsequently to form the basis,
after modelisation by the environment ministry and further study in the Pierron report, of the
solution retained by the government in July 1991 and authorised three years later by the
PLGN.
Such inclusiveness not only contributed to the construction of the legitimacy of the
associations as responsible actors, but further produced the complementary effect of
weakening the legitimacy of established elites. Indeed, it is a measure of the extent of the
legitimacy enjoyed by the protesters that Michel Barnier, environment minister under the
1993-95 Balladur government, not only continued this process but also formally visited the
Indiens of SOS Loire Vivante camped on the construction site.
The Plan Loire Grandeur Nature and the recognition of protest groups
The emphasis on quality and re-calculating quantitative needs in the PLGN represents an
important stage in the application of the principles of integrated water resource management
established by the 1992 water reforms. A ten-year sustainable development programme, the
PLGN applies to the whole river basin many of the principles outlined in the 4th solution.58
Arguably the most notable of these are the improvement of the CRISTAL flood warning
system operated by the EPALA, the prohibition of further construction work in high floodrisk zones, and the publication of detailed maps of areas prone to flooding. Yet the PLGN is
also remarkable for the manner of its elaboration and the principles of partnership it
establishes. Its production was the result of a wide consultation exercise including associative
as well as established political and economic actors, reproducing the process conducted at
national and regional level by the environment ministry in 1990-91.
In similar fashion to the re-negotiated 1992 water law, the PLGN has been used by the
ministry to re-affirm the dominant role of the state in water resource management. ‘Pour les
grands cours d’eau,’ argued Lalonde, ‘l’État s’est désengagé à tort.’59 For Royer, the role of
58
59
Charte État, Agence de l’Eau, EPALA d’exécution du Plan Loire Grandeur Nature, 5 July 1994.
Lalonde at the parliamentary hearing of 22 September 1992, Parliamentary Commission 3134, op.cit., p270.
28
Lalonde was clearly decisive;60 yet the dual principles of state direction and openness to
environmentalist associations were also central to the procedures implemented and imposed
by each of his successors, Ségolène Royal and Michel Barnier. ‘La Loire’, announced Barnier
when presenting the Plan in January 1994, ‘est une affaire d’État’.61
For SOS Loire Vivante, the recognition of the role to be played by environmental associations
in eco-system protection represents ‘une petite révolution’, as the Plan’s emphasis on
concertation establishes challenging groups as legitimised, semi-institutional actors, in
partnership with the state administration, the basin agencies, and the EPALA.62 To this effect,
SOS Loire Vivante has entered into partnership with the DDE in the implementation of the
proposals originally made in the 4th solution, and environmental associations have participated
in numerous study groups on river system management and protection. ‘L’association,
jusqu’ici organisée en contre-pouvoir, est reconnue comme un organisme responsable qui
participe aux décisions locales’, celebrated SOS Loire Vivante.63
The PLGN delayed a decision on the Le Veurdre dam pending further studies, and authorised
the construction of Chambonchard with a reduced capacity of 50 million cubic metres,
subsequently increased to 83 million cubic metres by the EPALA in order to develop tourist
facilities on the reservoir. Yet the Plan also ordered the ‘decommissioning’ of two dams with
the specific goal of re-introducing 6,000 salmon into the river basin within ten years. In late
1994, the state therefore declined to renew the operating licences of two EDF-managed
hydro-electric dams constructed between the wars, at St Etienne du Vigan on the upper Allier
and Maisons-Rouges on the Vienne. Despite the continued resistance of local political actors
(including Royer and René Monory), the dams were subsequently demolished in June and
October 1998 respectively. The desire of the environment ministry firstly to re-assert its
authority, and secondly to establish a methodology of partnership, is also present in the
PLGN’s commitment to a 170MF programme of environmental works, the creation of an
interministerial ‘Plan Loire’ coordinating body presided by the basin prefect, and the
partnership between the state, Loire Vivante and the EPALA in the implementation of a
European LIFE programme to preserve biodiversity on the Loire and Allier.
Royer at the parliamentary hearing of 1 September 1992, Parliamentary Commission 3134, op.cit., p157.
‘Aménagement de la Loire: le gouvernement donne le feu vert pour la construction de deux barrages’, AFP press
communiqué, 4 January 1994.
62 ‘La Loire est une affaire d’état’, SOS Loire Vivante Infos, 23, December 1994, p1.
63 ‘Quand la Loire reprend son cours’, Les Réalités de l’Écologie, 67, September 1995, p37.
60
61
29
The negotiation and re-negotiation of the dam programme must be thus seen as part of a trend
to greater openness and democratisation of decision-making in the water policy sector,
fundamentally altering both the composition of the policy community and the definition of the
water problematic. In contrast, although the EPALA was specifically invited to participate in
the implementation of the alternative proposals for the Haute-Loire, it ultimately declined this
invitation. For the EPALA, the purely local character of the project effectively prevented the
involvement of subnational authorities from other parts of the basin.
Water policy outcomes
The victory at Serre de la Fare thus needs to be understood in procedural as well as
substantive terms. The entry of protesters into decisional structures and the devolution of
policy responsibility for an alternative scheme point to a significant reversal of the
expectations about environmental protest in France generated by a reading of the political
opportunity structure model. The emergence of the environment ministry as lead
administration not only increased state water policy coordination, but has also produced the
re-framing of the policy issue. As Brénac (1988: 144) has argued, the primary function of the
environment ministry has, given its budgetary and regulatory weaknesses, been essentially
‘intellectual’. In other words, its presence has secured the re-framing of trans-sectoral issues,
establishing the primacy of environmental requirements within issues of water-resource
management, even though the ministry does not command sufficient resources to develop and
implement policy itself; a key result of such re-framing has been to erode much of the
legitimacy of the original EPALA project.
Not only does the water policy sector appear strikingly different from the Jacobin ideal
therefore, but it is also the case that in this domain the French state appears to be less and less
the exception it is often held to be. As observers have shown, in common with similar
developments in France, the tight post-war water policy communities of Holland (Bressers,
Huitema and Kuks 1994), Germany (Rüdig and Kraemer 1994), England and Wales (Maloney
and Richardson 1994), and the United States (Heilman et al 1994) have given way to more
plural policy networks, featuring representatives of consumers’ and environmental
associations. EC legislation has contributed to the strengthening of these associations by
setting publicly visible standards for water quality against which national peformance can be
measured (Buller 1996b: 474-5), and has in France been a major factor in the shift from the
30
technical management of drinking water to a more integrated approach to water management,
negotiated between public, private, associational, and industrial actors.
Qualitative concerns are directly treated in article 2 of the revised French water law of 1992,
which aimed to integrate the changes brought about by decentralisation and the European
directives into the national regulatory structure. The law introduced three principle reforms:
the establishment of resource management as a function of ecosystem protection and
sustainable development programmes; the clarification of the regulatory structure for different
classifications of water course; and the introduction of a common strategy document,
negotiated by representatives of the state, users’ groups, and sub-national authorities, to
improve the coordination of basin-level planning.
From 1996, each of the six basin agencies has been obliged to draft an agreed strategy
document; the resultant integrated planning document, or Schéma directeur d’aménagement et
gestion des eaux (SDAGE), sets out the priorities and financial regime for water policy in
each basin for a fifteen year period, in accordance with European directives and nationally
defined regulations. The process has two tiers: the localised planning and implementation of
the strategic objectives set out in the SDAGE is carried out on the basis of negotiated
catchment plans based on local hydrographical structures, known as Schémas d’aménagement
et gestion des eaux (SAGE). In response to the lack of dialogue between users and local
authorities at local level (Godard 1992: 29), the SAGE are drawn up in each basin by a
number of local water commissions (Commissions locales de l’eau) composed of local élus
(50%), water users (25%), and the state (25%).
The central point of the 1992 law, therefore, governs resource planning. In a climate of
tension between state-centred and decentralised approaches to water management, the
integrated planning documents significantly increase the coherence of policy-making in both
horizontal and vertical terms (Barraqué et al 1995: 139). At basin level, public policy
coordination is therefore increased through the establishment of a sectorised consultation
process which essentially reproduces the structures of the basin committees. This is a ‘new
territoriality’ (Buller 1996a: 296), preserving the localised character of water policy whilst
reinforcing the role of the state in policy definition and coordination.
31
Nevertheless, for France at least, it is important not to over-state the case. Whilst water
resource management is subject to greater pluralism, the system remains essentially
corporatist. Thus whilst the role of the basin committee and local authorities has been
considerably reinforced within the formulation of water policy – local authorities in particular
have sought to make basin committees a dynamic tool of decentralised policy-making –
environmental associations remain marginalised. If environmental associations have gained
access to basin committees since the early 1980s (Capoduro 1997), then it is also the case, as
Feldman (1991) points out, that they are whistle-blowers rather than fully-fledged decisional
actors with significant input into the formulation of policy choices. Despite the trend to
pluralism, therefore, interest group representation remains dominated by industrial users; the
basin committees are still dominated by ‘les lobbys habituels’ (Gouverne 1994: 119). The
water users’ college of the basin committees remains far from representative of all interested
parties; at best, environmental and consumers’ associations represent only 8% of users. In
1997, there were only nine consumers’ group representatives amongst the total 535 basin
committee members.
Agences de l’eau
Agence de l’eau
(all)
Loire-Bretagne
number
%
number
%
regions
33
6
8
7
départements
130
24
28
25
communes
34
6
6
5
total
197
37
42
37
industry
84
16
17
15
agriculture
25
5
7
6
consumers
9
2
2
2
environmental
15
3
3
3
anglers
24
4
5
4
other
40
7
8
7
total
197
37
42
37
Local authorities
Users’ representatives
32
State
prefects
37
7
10
9
other representatives
72
13
12
11
socio-professionals
32
6
8
7
total
141
26
30
26
total (all)
535
100
114
100
Table 1: membership of basin agency committees as of 1 January 1997. Figures for all basin
committees, and for the Loire-Bretagne basin committee. Adapted from CGP (1997: 35, 198).
Pluralism therefore remains limited and, in the eyes of environmental associations,
insufficient; it is telling that the greater the strategic nature of decisions to be taken, the lesser
the openness to associational actors. No member of any environmental associations sits on the
conseil d’administration of any of the six basin committees.
Final conclusions
What final conclusions about local environmental protest can we then draw from the
investigation of the Serre de la Fare protest? First, it appears the case that, direct action has in
general been less violent and less confrontational in the late 1980s and 1990s, and that the
range of tactics used by environmental protesters has awarded an increasingly large place to
judicial and institutional channels. Clearly, these methods have a number of consequences,
not least that they require significant financial resources; SOS Loire Vivante has, for example,
secured sponsorship from Patagonia, an American outdoor clothing firm. Second, as groups
resort to legal action, the ground over which conflicts are played out becomes increasingly
technical as well as expensive; associations have correspondingly become increasingly reliant
on the lobbying, legal, and scientific expertise that can be provided by the national and
regional arms of such organisations as FNE; correspondingly, WWF and Greenpeace,
comparatively and historically weak in France (Van der Heijden 1997: 36-44), have become
increasingly important, given their expertise and organisational capacity. The WWF, as we
have seen, has played a major role in the opposition to the Loire scheme at all levels, whether
33
promoting river protection at national and international levels or funding and coordinating at
local and basin levels.
Third, it is clear that each stage of the development programme has been the fruit of a multilevel process, involving networks of public and private actors at national, European, and
subnational levels. Indeed, the increased importance of European and subnational tiers of
government in public policy-making in France provides one answer to the paradox of the
persistence of environmental protest in an institutional climate held to be highly unresponsive
to such mobilisations. On the one hand, the development of policy-making at European level
has been central to the form and content of water resource policy-making in France. On the
other, as the traditional context for policy formulation and implementation has changed,
subnational political actors have adopted new roles in politico-administrative arenas. The
decentralisation reforms, far from democratising local politics, concentrated economic and
formal powers in the hands of traditional elites anxious to demonstrate their new prestige both
to the electorate and to competing subnational territorial units. The delay in the initial
elections for regional councils, coupled with their timing to coincide with the 1986 legislative
elections, disadvantaged the region and bolstered the département; traditional elites were thus
able in the first instance to strengthen their hold on the policy process. In the case of the Loire
dam programme, the Defferre reforms had a decisive effect, enabling local established
political elites to proceed to the implementation of a vast construction project for which they
had already been lobbying for over twenty years.
Of course, decentralisation is limited in extent, and is frequently confined by observers and
academics to its administrative component. Yet, not to appreciate the importance of the
changes in policy networks produced by decentralisation is to ignore their effect on the public
policy process. Indeed, it is hard to see how analyses which do not take into account the
development of public policy as a negotiated multi-level process can explain the pattern and
mobilisation of environmental protest in France, given the emphasis on infrastructural
development apparent in decentralised policy choices. If it ever was, the state is no longer the
sole progenitor of public infrastructure projects; increasingly, environmental conflict is being
waged with subnational as well as, or even instead of, national power centres.
34
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