(03 December 2015) – Marjorie Jouen, adviser at the Jacques Delors Institute and a ‘friend’ of AEIDL, analyses the impact and challenges of the French regions’ reform, from a European standpoint.
The French Government has been pursuing a sweeping reform since 2012, which it has called Act III in the decentralisation process. The reform’s most visible impact is going to be a change in the boundaries of several regions as of January 2016. By the end of the process, France will have only seventeen regions rather than the twenty-six that it has today.
Marjorie Jouen’s paper studies the impact of this territorial reform measure from three different European standpoints:
– The immediate impact of the merger and the birth of the “mega-regions” from an economic, political-and-institutional and cohesion policy standpoint.
– Setting the French reform in the current European political and institutional context.
– Assessing the scope of the reform in relation to the multi-level system of governance that is a characteristic of the European Union.