Petits arrangements entre acteurs… Les voies d'une gestion concertée de l'espace rural

Abstract

In Brittany, local initiatives have been observed, which associate farmers and/or other actors about the management of the rural area : they try to co-ordinate their actions so that farming and multifunctional areas management become coherent. In that way, within networks of farmers, some sectoral agreements are made which aim at the use of practices meeting the requests of the other users of the area: farmers draw common rules, either tacit or formalised in a specification. In other cases, territorial agreements arise following conflicts of use or around projects of rural area management: they are the result of some dialogues which gather different groups of users, and aim at conciliating everyone's interests. Finally, farmers sometimes reject any responsibility about the rural area: some extra sectoral agreements then ratify that the community will assume the maintenance of areas included in farm holdings. The analysis of those processes enables to identify the building factors of the agreement and the organisational and agreement devices at stake. The issue of the agreement Is always to determine the rights and duties linked to the use of the resources and the area. The agreement can be tacit rules, contracts or specifications : it sets a reference point between the rights of the farmers and those of the users, at a territorial or a network scale. Out of that, we draw lessons about the modes and the interest of a governmental support for those initiatives on the one hand, and about the conditions that enable to obtain a compromise between farming and rural area management, within the framework of local forms of concerted management, on the other hand.