France: A Strong State, Towards a Stronger Local Democracy?

In the political organization of France, the so-called 'Jacobean logic' plays an important role. It stands for a tendency towards centralisation and uniformity. However, since the 1980s there has been a process of decentralisation to sub-national authorities. Grenoble is an example of a city in which new ways of involving citizens in urban policies are being tried out. Since the 1960s government-citizens relations in Grenoble are structured via the local associations, and mainly on the neighbourhood level. The focus of the city government's recent strategy is to adapt the infrastructure of citizen participation to the conditions of modern urban life.This means, for example, that the associations are stimulated to take into account the level of the agglomeration, and that new forms of involving individual citizens have been established.