Fuelwood as an indicator of inconsistencies in a national forest policy: a case study in two French regions
Résumé
In France, since 2005, national energy policies have been started to promote fuelwood. The
point of the paper is to investigate how fuelwood is a boundary object which forces traditional
forest actors to change their management by confronting them with new actors. Three groups
are involved in elaborating new policies for fuelwood: forestry, energy and territorial actors.
The aim of the policies is to develop what is presented both as an opportunity to enhance
harvesting economics and to develop a renewable and local energy, necessary to achieve the
European Union climate and energy package targets for 2020. However, in France it appears
that these actors have considerable difficulties to work together, even with the intervention of
public authorities. These difficulties are reinforced by decentralization processes which had
been at work for the last 25 years.
Historically centralized, forest policy has been impacted by the increasing importance given
to environmental and agricultural problems, the growing power of European over national
policies and the introduction of new public policy instruments. Hence, the importance of the
State has been decreased and sectoral forest actors empowered. Priority was given to timber
during the 19 th and 20 th centuries. Therefore, forest actors consider fuelwood as the ultimate
promotion for wood products. To the contrary, the top-down approach of energy actors
considers energy as the foremost issue, supported by national policies promoting renewable
energies to meet the EU 2020 targets. The tension between these decentralization processes
and the top-down approach of energy actor suggest that scale is a key issue between these
actors. This issue was studied by an important geographic literature for the last 30 years
(Herod, 2011).
Methodologically, the research uses semi-structured interviews conducted with different
stakeholders in two French regions (Rhône-Alpes and Auvergne) and information collected in
meetings of actors from local to national scale.
The paper starts with the changes implied in forest governance by the development of
fuelwood. Secondly, the cohabitation between different users and different sizes of heating
system is analysed, then briefly illustrated through two case studies. Finally, we discuss the
importance of scale and how fuelwood highlights specific scalar structuration.
Domaines
GéographieOrigine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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