The Rise and Fall of the French Agences de l'Eau: From German-Type Subsidiarität to State Control

Bernard Barraqué, Patrick Laigneau and Rosa Formiga-Johnsson
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Bernard Barraqué: CIRED - Centre International de Recherche sur l'Environnement et le Développement - Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AgroParisTech - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - Université Paris-Saclay - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Rosa Formiga-Johnsson: UERJ - Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro [Brasil] = Rio de Janeiro State University [Brazil] = Université d'État de Rio de Janeiro [Brésil]

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Abstract: The Agences de l'eau (Water Agencies) are well known abroad as the French attempt to develop integrated water management at river basin scale through the implementation of the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP). Yet, after 30 years of existence, environmental economists became aware that they were not implementing the PPP, and therefore were not aiming at reducing pollution through economic efficiency. Behind the purported success story, which still attracts visitors from abroad, a crisis has been recently growing. Initially based on the model of the German (rather than Dutch) waterboards, the French system always remained fragile and quasi-unconstitutional. It failed to choose between two legal, economic and institutional conceptions of river basin management. These principles differ on the definition of the PPP, and on the role of levies paid by water users. After presenting these two contrasting visions, the paper revisits the history of the French Agences, to show that, unwilling to modify the Constitution to make room for specific institutions to manage common pool resources, Parliament and administrative elites brought the system to levels of complexity and incoherence which might doom the experiment.

Keywords: France; River basin agencies; levies; Polluter Pays principle; common pool resources (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04490537v1
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Published in Water Economics and Policy, 2018, The Institutional Economics of Water, 04 (3), pp.1850013. ⟨10.1142/S2382624X18500133⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04490537

DOI: 10.1142/S2382624X18500133

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