From Management Situations to 'Action-Territories': Lessons for Territorialized Policy. the Case of Territorial Farm Contracts in the French Departments Overseas./De la Situation De Gestion Au Territoire Actionnable Des Enseignements En Matiere De Politique Territorialisee. le Cas Des Contrats Territoriaux d'Exploitation Dans Les Departements d'Outre *

Abstract Although public action always uses the term 'territory', it has difficulties in integrating social issues cast in territorial terms. The territory, defined as a space which has a 'sense' and which gives a 'sense' to those who live in it and which acts as a space of coordination at the local scale between civil society and public authority, is the basis of the French agricultural law of 1999. Highlighting the multifunctionality of agriculture, the law proposes a new contract between the State and farmers through the CTE (Contrat territorial d'exploitation--Territorial Farm Contract) which is the tool of choice. It is constructed from the identification of agro-environmental and economic measures developed at the regional level and based on a diagnosis undertaken by project initiators within a local territory. Today, the Agricultural Sustainable Contracts (CAD--Contrats agricoles durables) have replaced these. In order to study the territorialization of public policies, the application of the CTE was analyzed in Reunion (Indian Ocean) and in Guadeloupe (French West Indies--FWI) (two Overseas French Departments) using comprehensive surveys. In this article, we argue that public policies would gain in effectiveness if they can integrate the action system at the local level (an action system being a structured human unit able to coordinate the actions of those who participate in it and manage the stability of its actors and their interrelationships at a given time and place). We show, indeed, that modes of appropriation and practices of use of a public policy instrument (here, the CTE) are different according to the action systems in the two islands. In Reunion, where the agricultural profession is more active and better organized, where the institutions and organizations of producers are more numerous and the forms of coordination more diversified than in Guadeloupe, the professional organizations seized the tool quickly and used it to reinforce their projects, contrary to Guadeloupe where the public institutions have maintained an important role throughout the process. In terms of results, socio-technical and organizational innovations are more important and more diversified in Reunion than in Guadeloupe. But in both cases, it has not led to a questioning of the regional development model focused on exports, and there are thus still difficulties. The territory or area of the initiators of local projects, which is the territory or action space of collective action under the law, was also weak in both situations even though both have quite strong local social and ecological diversity. In order to better take account of the territorial dimension in public policies, we have drawn upon concepts from management sciences. Thus, we show that, under the injunctions of public policies and in the context of the action system in place, local actors do construct and participate in management situations. To associate a management situation with a territory, it is pertinent to focus on the process of development of consensus, on the actors' strategies, and the tools and instruments they mobilize, and on the space delimited by the actors in order to respond to a particular problem. We show that in Reunion, the public policy related to the CTE introduced a management situation initiated by the State at the regional level. It allowed a collective action between actors who did not share the same vision of the development of the island but who shared the broad goals of the CTE tool. Common tools and particular devices were thus created. If the actors succeeded in giving a direction to the application of the CTE, it was because they knew perfectly well that they were going to be the subject of very strong external or internal social assessments. On the other hand, the management situations were much rarer at the local level, and practically non-existent. This reveals the difficulty for actors in translating regional policy to the level of the territory of local actors' projects. …

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