The changing role of French local government

Whatever their limits and internal contradictions, French decentralisation reforms forced a reconsideration of the concept of local government and how it is studied. New conceptualisations of public action emerged which were closer to those found in European scholarship than to the traditional French notion of 'cross-regulation'. The aim of this work was to account for the two main developments at the local level caused by the reforms: first, the rise of multi-level local empowerment, problems of co-ordination and the redefinition of the political capacity of the local state; and, second, the changing political dimension of local government, including the differentiated power structure between levels of local government and the nature of local political legitimacy. In this essay, the adaptation of French local government is examined, concluding that in a European context the French system is now less exceptional than it was previously.