Administrative Courts' Influence on Urban Planning Policies in Mountainous Areas

In France, local governments create their own urban planning documents due to devolved powers. At the same time, however, they must also comply with the same legal framework, shaped by the decisions of the administrative courts. This paper aims at analyzing whether town councils do indeed refer to the same court rulings to implement their policies. To what extent are they influenced by other actors who use the administrative court’s rulings to contest them? Bureaucracies in charge of defining and implementing policy have to comply to judicial rulings. If different local governments, in charge of the same policy, act differently based on a same ruling, I argue that the ideas and interests of these bureaucracies must be shaping the influence of the court, or in other words, mediate those rulings Research has shown, that, in some cases, policy change doesn’t flow directly from the courts’ decisions. It may be influenced by politics, when individuals use the rulings to trigger policy change. Indeed, the influence of courts’ rulings on public policy could be better explained by exogenous factors, because the courts lack implementation power. We will test this hypothesis to better understand how French Administrative Courts influence policy change in the area of urban planning policies. This article argues that the influence of the administrative court’s rulings is conditioned by the use and the implementation of rulings’ by other actors than courts. To study this assumption empirically, this article will compare urban policies of six towns, which are the biggest ski resort in France. The articles will be actor centred in studying the judicial rulings political and administrative actors refer to, the tools they use to change their planning documents, the actors who counsel them, pressure them or sue them.