The co-institution of land management contracts

Abstract

The analysis concerns land management contracts (CTE), which are the main tool of the multi-functional nature of farming as proclaimed by the French Agriculture Act of 1999. In the Maine-et-Loire department, studies were carried out within the Chamber of Agriculture and the departmental agricultural commission (CDOA) because it is there that standard measures are developed and files are taken under consideration. These are the prime sites for co-determination at a departmental level and, as they are essential to the mechanisms for the development of CTE's, they are not only maintaining but are also increasing their activities of co-construction. However, given the diversity of unions and the arrival of representatives from other social groups, it now appears inappropriate to use the term co-determination. Co-institution appears to render more accurately the concepts of processes and of interrelations that have been observed. The fact that environmental concerns are taken into consideration and that other social groups are included leads to the opening up of agriculture and the reciprocal acculturation of society's various players. Those who criticize the slow pace at which the CTE's are set up are not fully taking into account the cognitive functions of the process. On the pretext of bringing about an "indispensable simplification", they run the risk of losing much of the process' pedagogical interest and, in the name of efficiency, of preventing it from being included in the new public land policies, as it should be.