The everyday work of farm advisors as interface bureaucrats in greening French agricultural policies

Résumé 0

For the last three decades, public agricultural policies in France and in Europe have progressively integrated environmental objectives through a wide range of instruments. In this research, we have explored how farm advisors from different types of organisations deal with the tensions that they may face when navigating between policy goals, professional norms, and their personal beliefs and values. Drawing on plural qualitative methods, we focus on the implementation of two national public agroecological schemes in southwest France, which support the emergence and facilitation of farmers’ groups engaged towards agroecology. We find that organizational strategies and professional values vary across organisations and affect the tensions that advisors face and their ability to manage these tensions. The type of policy instrument also matters in the forms of creative bricolage that farm advisors develop. It is even more critical for farm advisors to maintain relationships with farmers in the case of organizational-based instruments based on farmers' participation. If such instruments enlarge the creative space of farm advisors, compared to their role of "subsidy optimizer", the schemes we examined also hold in-built limitations in empowering farm advisors as they fail to address the structural constraints that shape agroecological transitions.