Les pannes de la déconcentration
Résumé
Devolvement breakdowns : the failure to establish closer links between the departmental directorates for urban development and the departmental directorates for agriculture and forestry in 1993. Starting with the failure of the attempt to establish closer links between the departmental directorates for urban development and the departmental directorates for agriculture and forestry in 1993, the article aims to throw light on the delicate situation of devolved services after the decentralisation process begun in 1982 and the difficulty of finding an adequate response in the context of an active reform policy. Given the importance of the services concerned, there is much to be learned from this example. Not only does it make a point of the nature and quality of the piloting process of any reform, but reminds us that devolved services cannot be reorganised without giving serious thought first of all to how the administrative organisation will function, given today's means of public action, and secondly, without defining the missions themselves of the devolved state. Lacking real support, devolved administrations today must bear with the present more than they are able to contribute to their future in a context of action where devolvement is no longer a simple affair. In a country where the now devolved services had been the pillars of a centralised state, "devolvement breakdowns" are revelatory of a deep mutation of the state itself, which neither researchers nor those involved on a practical level can disregard.