French Case Study Research Articles

Horses and rangelands: perspectives in Europe based on a French case study

AbstractThe horse industry has soared in Europe in the last decades. This article analyses the existing and possible interactions between horses and rangelands, by taking horse feeding as well as environmental and socio‐economic issues into consideration. Due to the amount of recent data available for France, this country serves as a case study for the EU. Even though rangeland‐based feeding is common in traditional horse‐farming systems and still exists today on some pastoral farms, most horses are fed on conserved forage and concentrates, especially when the economic value of the horse is high. Scientific literature and recent field data suggest that rangelands can be used as the main feed source for mares and growing horses, providing not only nutrition but also a suitable environment for training and welfare. Horses can contribute to the sustainable development of rangelands, if they are well integrated into the local agricultural context and if horse grazing is carefully managed. To achieve this, a better integration of horses in the agricultural sector (from the field to research activities) is needed. An issue of utmost importance is the access of horse owners to land and technical support, taking into account that horses are herbivores similar to ruminants, as well as the peculiarities of the horse industry.

Biodiversity offsetting as a commodification process: A French case study as a concrete example

Biodiversity offsetting is now a widespread tool in industrialised states, especially in North America and the European Union where it forms a regulatory requirement. In principle, environmental assessment and the implementation of offsets mainly require ecological knowledge. However, in practice, by relying upon the equity and exchangeability of the habitats concerned, biodiversity offsetting creates some difficulties and contradictions that planners have to overcome. I make the assumption that, because of its exchangeability principle, this process also requires accounting and, more specifically, market exchange accounting. By analysing a French biodiversity offset management plan (BOMP), together with guidelines and regulations, I show that the assessment – reducing habitats to what they have in common – and equity – reducing habitats to an exchange value – proceed from market accounting and ontologically transform habitats into commodities. This viewpoint suggests that biodiversity offsetting should be endorsed very cautiously by conservation biology as it produces strong normative outlines compatible with a commodification process.

The Role of Engos in Environmental Litigation: A French case study

AbstractBoth lawyers and economists are enthusiastic about the role of environmental non‐governmental organizations (ENGOs). However, when dealing with ENGOs, most academic studies focus only on their actions as interest/pressure groups and no systematic empirical research exists addressing the question of how ENGOs use environmental litigation and courts to fill their goals. In this article, we try to observe whether ENGOs have specific goals and specific strategies in trials. We do this on the basis of a unique database consisting of the entire set of environmental cases judged by the French Supreme Court during 1956–2010. We conclude that ENGOs' legal actions encourage compliance with regulation and help solve civil liability failures, especially causal uncertainty and victims' apathy. Finally, we observe that ENGOs act as latent interest groups that become active only under specific circumstances to ask for more stringent regulation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Optimization of cascade-resilient electrical infrastructures and its validation by power flow modeling.

Large-scale outages on real-world critical infrastructures, although infrequent, are increasingly disastrous to our society. In this article, we are primarily concerned with power transmission networks and we consider the problem of allocation of generation to distributors by rewiring links under the objectives of maximizing network resilience to cascading failure and minimizing investment costs. The combinatorial multiobjective optimization is carried out by a nondominated sorting binary differential evolution (NSBDE) algorithm. For each generators-distributors connection pattern considered in the NSBDE search, a computationally cheap, topological model of failure cascading in a complex network (named the Motter-Lai [ML] model) is used to simulate and quantify network resilience to cascading failures initiated by targeted attacks. The results on the 400 kV French power transmission network case study show that the proposed method allows us to identify optimal patterns of generators-distributors connection that improve cascading resilience at an acceptable cost. To verify the realistic character of the results obtained by the NSBDE with the embedded ML topological model, a more realistic but also more computationally expensive model of cascading failures is adopted, based on optimal power flow (namely, the ORNL-Pserc-Alaska) model). The consistent results between the two models provide impetus for the use of topological, complex network theory models for analysis and optimization of large infrastructures against cascading failure with the advantages of simplicity, scalability, and low computational cost.

Modelling cause-of-death mortality and the impact of cause-elimination

AbstractThe analysis of causal mortality provides rich insight into changes in mortality trends that are hidden in population-level data. Therefore, we develop and apply a multinomial logistic framework to model causal mortality. We use internationally classified cause-of-death categories and data obtained from the World Health Organization. Inherent dependence amongst the competing causes is accounted for in the framework, which also allows us to investigate the effects of improvements in, or the elimination of, cause-specific mortality. This has applications to scenario-based forecasting often used to assess the impact of changes in mortality. The multinomial model is shown to be more conservative than commonly used approaches based on the force of mortality. We use the model to demonstrate the impact of cause-elimination on aggregate mortality using residual life expectancy and apply the model to a French case study.

Innovation in low-energy residential renovation: UK and France

In both France and the UK, low-energy renovation of housing is an important part of wider climate change mitigation strategy. Policy directed at householders and building professionals aims to increase the number and ambition of low-energy renovations. However, persistent problems exist for delivering genuine energy reductions at scale, including the design–performance gap, which can be understood as a problem for industry related to three factors: knowledge and skills; uncertainty over who has responsibility; and poor communication. This paper reports two case studies, focusing on the practices of innovative construction firms – one in the UK and one in France. The UK case concerns a social housing organisation that developed innovative ways of working and delivered high-quality results at lower than expected costs. The French case study profiles a new start-up company with a co-operative governance structure offering guaranteed performance contracts to clients for its renovation services. Key common themes for these innovative firms are: new configurations of traditional roles and responsibilities on site; new ways of responding to the needs and behaviours of building occupants; and the integration of different feedback mechanisms to provide learning.

Microsimulation – a robust technical planning method with strong visual output

Planning of urban spaces and mobility has become a demanding task. All modes of transport have to be granted their very own right of way. Stakeholders of particular modes, tourists and commuters, old and young have their own needs and ideas and they all demand to be involved in the planning process of transport projects without having to dig into the words and numbers produced by traffic engineers. Microsimulation is a tool which accommodates both: the requirements that are set by the complexity of such projects, as well as the needs to produce easy-to-understand information and communication material. This paper demonstrates the capability of microsimulation through a French case study, including the planning and design of transport schemes for a busy city centre and urban area where all modes of transport are being used and there is a strong focus of public attention.

Phosphorus recovery and recycling from waste: An appraisal based on a French case study

Phosphate rocks, used for phosphorus (P) fertilizer production, are a non-renewable resource at the human time scale. Their depletion at the global scale may threaten global food and feed security. To prevent this depletion, improved P resource recycling from food chain waste to agricultural soils and to the food and feed industry is often presented as a serious option. However, waste streams are often complex and their recycling efficiency is poorly characterized. The aim of this paper is to estimate the P recovery and recycling potential from waste, considering France as a case study. We assessed the P flows in food processing waste, household wastewater and municipal waste at the country scale using a substance flow analysis for the year 2006. We also quantified the P recycling efficiency as the fraction of P in waste that ultimately reached agricultural soils or was recycled in the food and feed industry. Efforts were made to limit data uncertainty by cross-checking multiple data sources concerning P content in waste materials. Results showed that, in general, P recovery in waste was high but that the overall P recycling efficiency was only 51% at the country scale. In particular, P recycling efficiency was 75% for industrial waste, 43% for household wastewater and 47% for municipal waste. The remaining P was discharged into water bodies or landfilled, causing P-induced environmental problems as well as losses of nutrient resources. Major P losses were through food waste (which amounted to 39% of P in available food) and treated wastewater, and the findings were confirmed through cross-checking with alternative data sources. Options for improving P resource recycling and, thereby, reducing P fertilizer use were quantified but appeared to be less promising than scenarios based on reduced food waste or redesigned agricultural systems.

On the Joint Use of Safety Regulation and Civil Liability to Promote Safe Management of Hazardous Operations: A French Case Study

The aim of this article is to analyze the precise role of environmental civil liability in France. We do so by focusing on data from France, and claim that judges in fact seize hold of the possibility of combining regulation and civil liability. In other words, civil liability and regulation are complementary because they promote a duty of care in different ways. Moreover, judges and regulators interact; they provide each other with relevant information that is mutually beneficial for the maintenance of standards. Based on a unique database – that gathers all the litigations concerning environmental accidents judged by the French Supreme Court (Cour de Cassation) from 1956 to 2010 – we conclude that judges heavily rely on prior regulation, especially in cases of causal uncertainty. We argue that particularly in those cases where liability would traditionally be weak, courts tend to rely on breaches of regulation as evidence of increased risk of an activity by the perpetrator. On the other hand, judges can hold regulators liable when regulators did not monitor a regulated plant and this threat provides regulators with incentives to design and to apply stringent standards over risky activities. For these reasons, we conclude that regulation and civil liability should be jointly used to promote smart interdependencies that mitigate civil liability and regulatory failures.

On the joint use of safety regulation and civil liability to promote safe management of hazardous operations: a French case study

The aim of this article is to analyze the precise role of environmental civil liability in France. We do so by focusing on data from France, and claim that judges in fact seize hold of the possibility of combining regulation and civil liability. In other words, civil liability and regulation are complementary because they promote a duty of care in different ways. Moreover, judges and regulators interact; they provide each other with relevant information that is mutually beneficial for the maintenance of standards. Based on a unique database – that gathers all the litigations concerning environmental accidents judged by the French Supreme Court (Cour de Cassation) from 1956 to 2010 – we conclude that judges heavily rely on prior regulation, especially in cases of causal uncertainty. We argue that particularly in those cases where liability would traditionally be weak, courts tend to rely on breaches of regulation as evidence of increased risk of an activity by the perpetrator. On the other hand, judges can hold regulators liable when regulators did not monitor a regulated plant and this threat provides regulators with incentives to design and to apply stringent standards over risky activities. For these reasons, we conclude that regulation and civil liability should be jointly used to promote smart interdependencies that mitigate civil liability and regulatory failures.

The prerequisites of talent management: a French SME case study

Our study concerns action research (Dubost and Levy, 2004) undertaken within a small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) operating in the building supplies sector wishing to implement a talent management policy. Like many companies today, the aim is not only to acquire fit, qualified or competent people, but also creative and innovative people with high added value who are able to guarantee the competitiveness of the company in the future.

Valuing welfare impacts of climate change in coastal areas: a French case study

Beach protection has become a major issue in reducing coastal risks (erosion and flooding). It is thus advisable to study residents’ preferences for mitigation strategies. Willingness-to-pay (WTP) by permanent and secondary residents for flood protection provided to properties by Languedoc-Roussillon beaches (French Mediterranean coast) is investigated by a contingent valuation study. Results show that WTP is more influenced by risk perception variables than by socio-economic ones. The WTP is then extrapolated on the basis of different adaptation strategies (laissez-faire, managed retreat, denial etc.) which provided information about expected damage associated with sea level rise at the 2100 time horizon.

Anticausatives compete but do not differ in meaning: a French case study

In French as in many other Romance and Germanic languages, verbs undergoing the causative/anticausative alternation divide into two morphological and three distributional classes. With verbs of class A, the anticausative (AC) is morphologically unmarked (∅-ACs), cf. « brûler ». With verbs of class B, the AC is marked with the reflexive clitic se, cf. « se briser ». ACs of class C allow both markings (∅/se-ACs) allow both markings, cf. « (se) casser ». Several authors have proposed that the presence vs. absence of the reflexive clitic goes along with differences in meaning, see e.g. Labelle 1992, Doron & Labelle 2011, Labelle & Doron 2010, according to which se-ACs express externally caused events while ∅-ACs express internally caused events (claim 1) and se-ACs focus on the achievement of a result state while ∅-ACs focus on a process (claim 2). To derive these alleged differences in meaning, fundamentally different syntactic structures have been proposed for se-ACs and ∅-ACs: Labelle 1992 argues that se-ACs are unaccusative while ∅-ACs are unergative, whereas Doron & Labelle 2011 and Labelle & Doron 2010 (henceforth DL) propose that se-ACs and ∅-ACs are both unaccusative but differ substantially in their event decomposition and the position where the lexical root is merged in the structure. The goal of this paper is to show that most of the meaning differences proposed to hold between se-ACs and ∅-ACs are either not existent or idiosyncratic/verb-specific. In particular, they cannot be generalized to the presence/absence of morphological marking. This makes a structural explanation of these meaning differences unfeasible: the presence vs. absence of se cannot be associated with syntactic differences driving meaning differences. To the extent that meaning aspects can be robustly associated with either marked or unmarked ACs, we argue that this holds only for verbs of class C (optional marking; cf. also Legendre & Smolensky 2009). We derive these within a pragmatic account: with verbs of class C (i.e. if a choice is possible), a pragmatic reasoning on the possible interpretations of the string [DP se V] (AC or also semantically reflexive) leads the speaker to prefer one version over the other. Note that we do not deny any syntactic differences between ∅-ACs and se-ACs: the presence of se suggests a syntactic extra- layer on top of vP, a middle or expletive Voice (Doron 2003, Alexiadou et al. 2006, Schäfer 2008). The presence of this expletive Voice projection triggers (morpho-)syntactic differences (e.g. auxiliary selection) but does not add any semantics.

The Impact of Governmental Policy on the Effective Operation of CSOs: A French Case Study

AbstractWorldwide, civil society organizations (CSOs) are an integral component in the complex network that comprises the public sphere improving the welfare of our communities. In the second half of the twentieth century French CSOs’ contributions to their citizens’ welfare have become increasingly valued. Nevertheless, radical changes to employment policies during the Sarkozy regime (2007–2012) impacted social services to unemployed migrants. In addition, central government constrained local governments’ ability to fund social services, pushing a shift from a culture of “granting subsidies” to one based on “public procurement contracting” (Langlais 2008). These environmental changes are likely to transform CSO-government relationships.This research asks two questions: what is the impact of such radical changes and what possible responses can organizations make, if they are to survive? To answer these, we utilize a case study of a French CSO (Association), which is highly dependent on public funding to deliver its urban-based migrant programs. We utilize the lens of resource dependency, focusing on the interrelationships and interactions that impact CSOs’ legitimacy and support. Effects of the reforms include a change from relatively cooperative relationships with government to adversarial exchanges. Moreover, this CSO’s activities are apprehended by public funders as short-term single projects considered in isolation from one another so that its overall outcomes are not quantitatively measured. As a result, the CSO’s overarching and long-term social and economic contribution to the territory’s public sphere is in jeopardy.

Transition in practice and action in research. A French case study in piloting eco-innovations

Transition in practice means that diverse organizations – from private foundations to citizen-led movements for “cities in transition” – are experiencing ways to bring about sustainable transitions at the system level. While academic thinking on sustainability transitions can efficiently inform transition in practice, these organizations' initiatives can enrich the analytic understanding of transitions. It is this mutually beneficial trade-off that became the purpose of the action research project with the French private foundation Fondaterra, and which led to the drafting of Fondaterra's own model in piloting eco-innovations towards transition. This paper outlines the main features of the Fondaterra model: the territorial perspective, the idea of piloting change, espousing prospective visions, creating new chains of value, implementing demonstrators and monitoring. The comparison of this model with the transition management model suggests that the latter may resonate with other intervention methodologies that have been developed with strong concern for governance strategies, and that many configurations of transition in practice led by intermediary organizations could achieve tangible results in triggering transitions.

Agroecological principles for the redesign of integrated crop–livestock systems

Combining crops and livestock within integrated crop–livestock systems (ICLS) represents an opportunity to improve the sustainability of farming systems. The objective of this paper is to analyse how agroecological principles can help farmers to redesign and improve the resilience, self-sufficiency, productivity, and efficiency of ICLS. Relying on case studies from Brazil and France, we examine how the transformation of two conventional, specialised systems into more integrated-production systems illustrates the different dynamics towards agroecological ICLS. The French case study, based on self-sufficient farming systems belonging to a sustainable agriculture network, highlights that cost-cutting management led to a win–win strategy comprising good economic and environmental performances. The farms decreased their dependence on external inputs and had only a limited loss of production. The past trajectories of the farms illustrate how increasing the interactions between subsystems improved the self-sufficiency and efficiency of the farms. The Brazilian case study compares slash-and-burn agriculture in the Amazonian region with the recovery of degraded grazing area by ICLS. A small increase in chemical inputs linked to a diversification of productions led to a large increase in production and a large decrease in environmental impacts (deforestation). The Brazilian case study also illustrates how the diversification of production increased the resilience of the system to market shocks. Reconstructing the links among soil, crops, and animals following agroecological principles could improve the different performances of ICLS. New agroecological ICLS, benefiting from diversified productions and increased interactions between subsystems, are likely to offset the trade-off between agricultural production and environmental impacts observed in current ICLS.

Quota management in a context of non-transferability of fishing rights: The French case study

The Common Fisheries Policy reform proposal is aiming to generalise the principle of individual transferable fishing concessions (TFCs) to all EU member states. In France, the transfer of quotas is prohibited by law. This paper considers the quota management system being implemented in this context. It demonstrates the originality of the French system as regards quota management, and how it has evolved to adapt to constraints associated with non-transferability. We show how the current system in practise allows producers to manage and exchange their landings track records while giving significant prerogatives to Producer Organisations (PO) in the collective management of quotas. The pooling of quotas by Producer Organisations in fact allows them to compensate to a large extent for the absence of transferability. The allocation of vessel quota is still quite limited insofar as many quotas are still under-utilised.

Valuing the benefits of beach protection measures in the face of climate change: a French case-study

The objective of this article is to increase knowledge of the understanding, expectations, preferences and behaviour concerning beach functions and adaptation measures addressing increasing beach vulnerability due to climate change. Surveys were carried out on 881 full-time and secondary residents, tourists and day trippers affected by the maintenance and protection of beaches within a pilot zone in the French Mediterranean. A contingent valuation method was used, based on a scenario which put the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) hypotheses into context. Various questions elucidated uses and practices, perceptions of risk and preferences concerning management and allowed the estimation of willingness to pay. The latter showed the relative significance of perception variables compared to economic characteristics. Over and above perception differences between sub-populations, this finding is crucial for the development of adaptation policies.

A systemic method for evaluating the potential impacts of floods on network infrastructures

Abstract. Understanding network infrastructures and their operation under exceptional circumstances is fundamental for dealing with flood risks and improving the resilience of a territory. This work presents a method for evaluating potential network infrastructure dysfunctions and damage in cases of flooding. In contrast to existing approaches, this method analyses network infrastructures on an elementary scale, by considering networks as a group of elements with specific functions and individual vulnerabilities. Our analysis places assets at the centre of the evaluation process, resulting in the construction of damage-dysfunction matrices based on expert interviews. These matrices permit summarising the different vulnerabilities of network infrastructures, describing how the different components are linked to each other and how they can disrupt the operation of the network. They also identify the actions and resources needed to restore the system to operational status following damage and dysfunctions, an essential point when dealing with the question of resilience. The method promotes multi-network analyses and is illustrated by a French case study. Sixty network experts were interviewed during the analysis of the following networks: drinking water supply, waste water, public lighting, gas distribution and electricity supply.

Social infomediation of news on Twitter: A French case study

Social infomediation is an emerging phenomenon that sees growing numbers of Internet users share and comment on news items on Facebook and Twitter. This study analyses a large sample of French-speaking Twitter users over a period of two months. First, we study some general characteristics of our sample’s usage of Twitter, such as timescale, productivity, hashtag, and URL distribution. We then compare the French online media agenda to the most shared and discussed news items in our sample in order to highlight similarities and differences. Our findings show that even though they depend on mainstream media coverage, Twitter user preferences often push political and technological stories that have been overlooked or even ignored to the forefront.