Grand atelier des maires ruraux pour la transition écologique, an initiative of the Association des maires ruraux de France
The Great workshop of rural mayors for the ecological transition is an initiative that brings together 100 mayors to set a course and define the roadmap for rural elected officials who are facing this great challenge in their villages. Indeed, rural territories represent 88% of the national territory, one third of the population and hold the natural common goods essential to the good ecological balance.
Faced with the climate emergency, the objective is to strengthen the place and role of rural communities, without which the transitions to come cannot take place. The Great Workshop will meet during 4 working weekends, designed and led by Res publica, during the first half of 2023.
This process is organized under the impulse of the Association of Rural Mayors of France, in particular Fanny Lacroix, Mayor of Chatel-en-Triève (Isère) and Vice President of the association in charge of ecological transition. In this interview, she presents theAMRF, the Grand atelier pour la transition écologique and what she expects from it.
Participants in the Grand workshop of rural mayors for the ecological transition
Res publica: What is the Association of Rural Mayors of France?
Fanny Lacroix: This is an association ofelected officials from municipalities with fewer than 3,500 inhabitants. The issues in rural areas are very different, which is why elected officials wanted to form this association, which addresses the diversity of issues specific to the rural world. Today, it brings together approximately 10,000 mayors. The AMRF is a national association, associated with local associations in each department. The departmental associations work on rural issues. There are really strong links between the local, departmental and national levels.
Res publica: What is the Grand atelier des maires ruraux pour la transition écologique?
F.L.: As vice-president of the AMRF in charge of the ecological transition, I wanted to create a commission to work on the issues of this ecological transition. The first question that we asked ourselves with the members of the commission was "What can the AMRF bring to the field of ecological transition?", knowing that there are already many networks of actors that exist. We said to ourselves that what could be useful and what is missing today is to build a political vision of the ecological transition, as seen by rural communities. Indeed, a rural mayor is often accompanied by a town hall secretary and a multi-purpose technical agent and therefore does not necessarily have the time to build this political vision. So we wanted to help mayors to make this effort and to build this word, which, according to us, is missing in the national narrative. To do this, we thought of a method that would be sufficiently solid to reflect the diversity of rural territories and it is within this framework that we built the Grand atelier des maires ruraux pour la transition écologique (Great workshop of rural mayors for the ecological transition).
The idea was to recruit 100 mayors from all over the country by relying on the departmental associations. We want them to talk to the best climate and environmental experts and to discover all the local innovations that are being implemented in small communities. Indeed, these communities are already doing a lot of things, with diversified methods and approaches, and we believe that these actions should also be promoted. Through this meeting between scientific expertise and the reality of action of rural mayors, we want to build a roadmap for the AMRF, to accelerate the ecological transition in the territories and also better build the support of public policies.
Introductory round table
Res publica: What results do you expect from these debates? How do you intend to use them?
The first one is to highlight the initiatives that already exist: we have very beautiful stories of the ecological transition at the scale of rural communities, which are quite powerful, because they are "small territories", not in terms of space but in terms of population. So we have very involving, inclusive stories that have been built with citizens and that manage to bring everyone into this cultural transition that we need to carry out. I believe that France, including the big cities, have a lot to learn from the ability of a rural community to involve its citizens.
The second point is to succeed in getting more communes to get behind these positive stories. I often use the image of locomotives, we already know a little about the locomotives of very committed rural communes, which have done a lot. The idea is to be able to hook up a lot of new wagons behind these locomotives and to try to make a mass and to go faster in the concrete reality of the implementation of the ecological transition.
Finally, the last objective is to build a fairly unified political narrative - despite the diversity of situations that characterize rural municipalities - for which theAMRF could act as spokesperson over the term that has just begun.
The debates continue until July, and the results of the work will be shared and presented at the AMRF congress in September.
Irene ROSSETTI, Marie CASANELLES and Frédéric FIATTE
