Prospective territoriale dans le cadre de projets sociaux et solidaires

• Main Authors: Jean-Claude Raynal, Lala Razafimahefa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Lille 1 2014-03-01
• Series: Territoire en Mouvement
• Subjects: consum'actor; AMAP (french CSA); living-basin; rural area; territorial foresight
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/tem/2387

The stakes of sustainable development, health crises, but also economic crisis, have affected consumption patterns in France. Thus, solidarity initiatives to promote short food supply chains, through which the consumer wants to be a “consum’actor”, tend to develop. This is the context where the AMAP (Association for the maintenance of peasant farming - a french version of CSA), which are intended to carry “solidarity” values, and turned towards an “authentic” and “safe” agriculture, spread in.Marginal phenomenon or awakening of civic consciousness, we should question about the emergence of these new practices and those who are their actors. These behaviors are even more interesting to decrypt at a time when rural areas, including the most isolated, are in particular recomposed under the effect of the arrival, in large part, of a population coming from urban space.The present contribution questions about the favorable contexts and conditions for these social and solidarity projects. Does the French countryside have the potential for the growth and sustainability of these projects? To answer these questions, we propose a methodological tool that is a first step to validate the relevance of indicators linked to the presence of AMAP. In a second step, these indicators are used to construct an index for evaluating the potential of emergence of AMAP inside the french rural areas. These indicators relate on one side to the agricultural context and, on the other side, to the demographic, social, economic and associative contexts. The adopted spatial unit of reference is the living-basin.The obtained results show consequent disparities that reflect the differentiated socio-spatial dynamics in rural areas. They also highlight the endogenous character of the potential of these territories, claimed and exploited by local actors in the processes of recomposition actually underway.