Requalified Hedges : An Inquiry into a Greening “Dispositif” of the Common Agricultural Policy (2014-2019) ; La haie requalifiée : enquête sur un dispositif d'écologisation de la Politique agricole commune (2014-2019)

Hedges stand at the crossroads of modernization and greening agricultural policies. In France, hedges were massively destroyed after World War II. Since the 1970s, they are gradually being protected by local policies and replanting programs. The aim of this PhD is to study their juridical requalification by the Common Agricultural Policy’s cross compliance system. Since 2015, the “good agricultural and environmental condition n°7” (GAEC7) prohibits farmers from destroying their hedges. The inquiry is a monograph of this “dispositif” (a French sociological concept which means both “assemblage” and “device”) based on a multi-sited ethnography that probes three groups of actors: administrative authorities, farmers, and associations. The interviews, observations, questionnaires, and archives that are analyzed concern the 2014-2019 period. The work contains five chapters. The first one engages in a literature review in the social sciences to highlight the specificities of the “dispositif” (which is both national and mandatory). The second chapter shows that the hedge’s juridical requalification was a hurried compromise. The third chapter describes the vast digital means needed to identify hedges in an information infrastructure. The fourth chapter documents how farmers’ criticisms of the administration use the red tape engendered by the hedge requalification programs to support their position. The last chapter concludes that the monitoring systems are flawed, and proposes to consider the hedge programs as a “spectral greening”. Nonetheless, it shows that ecological requalification can be successfully accomplished by local agroforester advisers who act as “agroecological diplomats” between the farmers and the administration ; Massivement détruites au lendemain de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale puis progressivement réhabilitées par des programmes de replantation à partir des années 1970, les haies sont à l’exacte pliure des politiques de modernisation et des politiques d’écologisation de l’agriculture. L’objectif de la ...