Reterritorialisation of agricultural activities in land-use and food planning: comparing the Netherlands and France

ABSTRACT

The reterritorialisation of agricultural activities (RAA) consists of reinforcing local food production and its diversification activities oriented toward local consumers. RAA helps shape the local food system, which is an increasingly studied topic in the planning field. However, institutional impacts on planning approaches for RAA remain unknown. This study examines this question by comparing land-use and food planning in Dutch and French cases, where France defines food planning via national law and the Netherlands does not. Through analysis of planning documents and semi-structured interviews, we identified planning goals and instruments, and analysed governance models. We then linked these three components to understand institutional impacts. Our empirical findings reveal that regarding planning policies on RAA, there are differences between the two countries in terms of focused action fields, planning instruments, and links between land-use and food planning. Our results show that the dominance of state-local relationships in France and civil society-government relationships in the Netherlands has a significant effect on planning approaches. This study supports the need for an emphasis on institutional design for effective planning for RAA.

KEYWORDS:

• Land-use regulations
• local food system
• farm diversification
• farmland preservation
• food policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Article L. 151-11 of the Planning Code.

2 Food hub: a centrally located facility with a business management structure facilitating the aggregation, storage, processing, distributions, and/or marketing of locally produced food products (USDA 2017).

3 CBS: Statistics Netherland. Insee: National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was part of Tianzhu LIU's PhD research supported by China Scholarship Council: [Grant Number 201908310135]. The collection of data in the Netherlands was supported by Université Paris Saclay, Graduate School Sociologie et Science Politique: [project Internationalisation de la recherche – comparaison internationale].