Renewing regional economic planning by the ecological justification

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the French regions have benefited from a growing devolution from the central State. In this context, economic competence has become central to their interventions and dedicated budgets. There are several ways of analyzing this intervention. The first examines the positioning of these policies between vertical and horizontal industrial policies (Cohen, 1992). While the regions seem to use these two aspects, the European normative framework, notably through Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3), encourages them to develop focused intervention in economic areas considered strategic (Tödtling and Trippl, 2005; Foray et al., 2009). The second grid of analysis is that of the instruments developed by the Regions, in a context of budgetary weakness and renewal of national instruments and the affirmation of European instrument such as IPCEI. Finally, the third analysis grid raises the question of the justification for the intervention of the regions. If the promise of job creation is attached to any economic policy, the inclusion of this intervention in the ecological transition seems to offer the Regions an opportunity to legitimize and renew their intervention (Desjardins and Estèbe, 2021).

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of ecological transition in the recent renewal of regional economic policies. While all French regions are required to write economic planning strategies, many Regions are articulating them with more global strategies dedicated to the ecological transition. This is the case of the Region Hauts-de-France, which has been rebuilding its economic policy over the past ten years through the concept of third industrial revolution. This is also the case for the Region Occitanie, which has decided to support some economic sectors by embedding them in its REPOS strategy (for Positive Energy Region). However, this new justification raises the question of the sincerity of this objective. Does the introduction of the ecological transition objective offer an opportunity to renew the objectives and instruments of economic intervention (Veltz, 2021)? On the contrary, is the vocabulary of ecological transition being used only to seize the growth opportunities offered by the green economy (Depret and Hamdouch, 2012)?

This paper will be based on a series of interviews conducted in 2022 and 2023 with public stakeholders as part of a thesis work. The aim of these interviews is to question national and regional stakeholders on the construction of regional economic policy in general, and hydrogen policy in particular. Three regions were specifically studied: Hauts-de-France, Pays de la Loire and Occitanie.