The Ministry for Sustainable Development and Environmental Policy Integration in France

Shortly after his election in May 2007, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy takes the initiative of implementing a vast reorganization of several government ministries. The reform fuses the administrative services of the three former ministries for Ecology, Equipment and Industry, which disappear. They are replaced by the ministry for Sustainable development (ministère de l’Écologie, du Développement et de l’Aménagement durables). The competences of the new ministry reach well beyond the realm of environmental protection and climate policy, covering transport, housing, territorial planning and risk prevention. Ministerial reorganizations of this kind, which combine competences for policymaking in several areas of public policy in the portfolio of one ministry, often go along with the claim that governments can thus move away from “siloed” policymaking, towards enhanced coordination and integration of policymaking. Indeed, the literature on policy integration and coordination identifies departmentalism, fragmentation and the “silo” organization of governments as problems when it comes to addressing complex policy challenges that cut across established fields of public policy. Although we know from organization theory that the structure of organizations works as a cognitive constraint that structures interactions, interests and conflict within and between organizations, there is little research about the effects of this bias on policymaking processes in which ministerial bureaucracies play a central role. The proposed contribution combines organizational analysis and policy analysis in order to open up the black box of ministerial organization and explore the politics of policy integration and coordination from a “departmental perspective”. It is a case study that analyses the effects of the creation of the large ministry for Sustainable development on policy integration in the fields of environmental protection and housing policy in France. Following an inductive and comparative approach, it explores the potential of the organizational structure of government for understanding the coordination and integration of policymaking. It analyses how the fusion affects various aspects of the formal and informal organizational structure of the ministry, the relationships between its directorates and levels of hierarchy, as well as its role within government. The empirical analysis of environmental and housing policy integration covers the years 1980 to 2016 and thus allows for comparisons over time as well as between policy fields. The proposed contribution is a short version of a chapter of the author’s PhD thesis (in preparation) that draws on material gathered in the course of several months of field work on the case (semi-directive and biographical interviews and a vast collection of documentary sources (policy documents, administrative reports, organizational charts, budget plans, (auto)biographies, etc.).