From Policy Regime to Implementation: the Multi-Level Political Work of Supermarket Firms in Paris

The literature on multi-governance has emphasized how interest groups lobby different arenas and forums to further their goals. Yet, research in this area has mainly focused on settings where laws, rules and norms are established rather than where they are implemented. At the same time, research on both territorial governance and street-level organization has emphasized how rules and institutions are interpreted in various ways at the local level. This raises the following question: how do interest groups, having worked to secure a specific policy regime, make sure that its implementation aligns with their objectives? This paper addresses this question by studying the lobbying carried out by large food retail corporations to secure approval for commercial real estate projects in the Paris metropolitan area. It draws upon and extends on Andy Smith’s “Politics of Industry” framework, which bridges institutional political economy and constructivist political sociology. It does so by mobilizing the concept of “political work”, namely operations of problematization, instrumentation and legitimation carried out by firms at different levels of government in order to reproduce their sectoral regulation regime. The paper specifically develops this framework for the study of local politics and urban governance. The case of the French supermarket retail sector reveals a dual-tiered strategy. At the national level, retail firms and their interest groups engage in cognitive work to legitimize specific problematization-instrumentation couplings. This leads to the creation/update of specific institutions and norms to govern urban retail development at the local level. Yet, political work does not conclude with national rule-setting. For these institutions to effectively facilitate supermarket expansion, they must be actively appropriated and implemented by local governments and corporate branches. Therefore, the study uncovers a second tier of political work carried out at the municipal level, where both firms and local politicians conduct relational work within the institutions to further their agenda regarding urban retail. Although shaped by the national sectoral regime, these local lobbying arenas function as spaces where firms and municipal governments collectively produce and legitimize supermarkets as central to urban planning policy. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates how firms orchestrate multi-level political strategies to maintain a favorable national regulatory regime in order to favour the realization of their local lobbying practices.