Gouvernance et administration locales françaises (document en anglais)

French local governance and administration

Three tiers of local government

In France there are three main tiers of local administration: the commune, department and region. These are both districts in which administrative decisions made at national level are carried out and local authorities with powers of their own. Legally speaking, a local authority is a public-law corporation with its own name, territory, budget, employees, etc. and has specific powers and a certain degree of autonomy vis-à-vis central government. In addition, there are France's overseas territories and regional bodies (collectivités territoriales) with special status (Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Corsica, Mayotte and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon).

The communes

The commune, which dates from 1789, is the lowest tier of the French administrative hierarchy. There are nearly 37,000 communes, many more than are found in the other countries of the European Union. In France the term commune is applied to all municipalities whatever their size – 80 per cent of them have fewer than 1,000 residents. This situation has led the government to encourage smaller communes to merge to form urban communities (communautés urbaines) or group together in associations of several communes (syndicats intercommunaux). In addition, the law of 6 February 1992 suggested new forms of co-operation to rationalise municipal administration by taking common interests into consideration. In reality, the closer links often go no further than pooling a few services and mergers are extremely rare, as both residents and local councillors often retain a strong sense of identity with their communes.

Like the department and region, the commune has a deliberative or decision-making body (the municipal council) and an executive (the Mayor), elected by the municipal council. The number of municipal councillors is proportional to the population. Elected for six years by direct universal suffrage, municipal councillors lay down guidelines for municipal policy, adopt the budget, manage municipal assets, notably primary school buildings and equipment, and decide how the municipal administration is to operate.

The Mayor has two hats, since he or she is both the commune's elected authority and the state's representative in it. As the commune's chief executive, the Mayor carries out the decisions of the municipal council. As the municipality's legal representative, the Mayor proposes and implements the budget, ensures the conservation and management of the commune's natural environment and built heritage and issues building permits. Mayors also have powers in their own right, being responsible for security and public health and having at their disposal the municipal administration, which they head.

As the state's representative, the Mayor is the registrar of births, marriages (at which he/she officiates) and deaths and is an officer of the police ‘judiciaire’ and so entitled to exercise special powers in connection with the repression of crime under the authority of the public prosecutor. Finally, he/she is responsible for various administrative tasks including publicising laws and regulations and drawing up the electoral register. Mayoral acts are unilateral administrative acts, generally orders, whose legality is subject to a control by the courts when they are issued by the Mayor as the commune's chief executive and to the approval of the Prefect (see below) to whom the Mayor is subordinate when acting in the capacity of the state's representative.

So the commune's own powers cover activities which affect its inhabitants' daily lives. Its economic and social brief, long limited to granting aid for job creation and helping needy families, has been broadened to enable it to play an important role in combating unemployment and social exclusion and engage actively in economic restructuring and development of new activities.

The departments

There are 100 departments in France, 96 in metropolitan France and four overseas (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guiana). Established in 1789, the department has developed from a partially decentralised local authority to one with full powers of its own (since 1982). It has played a prominent role in the country's administrative and geographical organisation.

The department essentially has competence in health and social services, rural capital works, departmental roads, and the capital expenditure

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