Agricultural land protection on urban fringes around the Mediterranean: justice issues and innovations in land management – JASMINN

JASMINN is a research project coordinated by INRA, Umr Innovation, Montpellier. It associates other researchers at INRA (UMR Sadapt, Paris), IRD (UMR Gred Montpellier), ENTPE (UMR EVS Lyon), ENSA Algiers, CRA Rome and the politecnico of Milan. The project started in January 2015 and lasted 51 months. It received an ANR funding of € 237,000.

JASMINN's research program compared case studies in three Mediterranean countries (France, Italy, and Algeria). It relied on qualitative approaches, mainly interviews and document analysis. The production of more generic results was based on the qualitative comparative analysis of case studies and of a corpus of land innovations.
Via an original analytical framework using the concept of justice, we studied a series of land policies and local public, private, and collective initiatives, as well as regulatory institutions. We clarified the justice issues formulated by various actors and reconstructed innovation processes through longitudinal approaches. In Languedoc-Roussillon, we compiled a database of 48 innovations, making it possible to create a typology and to identify obstacles and levers towards a more just and sustainable farmland management through QCA methodology (qualitative comparative analysis).

The program was the following:
• Task 1: State of the art and building a framework of analysis
• Task 2: Diagnosis for each area of the local issues relating to justice in land protection in France, Italy and Algeria
• Task 3: Inventory and typology of land innovations
• Task 4: Trajectories of land innovations
• Task 5: Territorialization of innovations
• Task 6: Coordination and valorization of the project

In four years, the project mobilized 13 researchers, one post-doc over 21 months and 14 students, including two PhD students.

Based on the two concepts of justice and innovation, the project has produced original theoretical and operational results, opened up perspectives for action research and extension, and made visible the social issues related to the management of agricultural land and buildings.

The main theoretical result concerns the concept of land justice and the proposal of a new analytical framework for assessing the justice of measures to protect peri-urban agricultural land. The project revealed the impact of land tenure systems on inequalities in access to land and building rights, between different types of farmers and with other residents. It also showed in several cases gaps between the social objectives of certain land policies (e.g., favouring farmers who have set up in business or are in difficulty) and their actual implementation (favouring local farmers or the most productive).

The JASMINN project has also produced operational results on land innovations. A book traces the history of a series of public initiatives dealing with the management of farmland and farm buildings in Mediterranean France, Switzerland, Italy and Algeria. Placed in their territorial context, these initiatives bear witness to new spatial arrangements and new relations between urban and agricultural actors. They show the evolution of societal issues and modes of governance of agricultural land. The database of 48 land innovations served to launch a collaborative web platform on these local land initiatives (RECOLTE) with Terre de Liens.

Finally, a role-play (serious game) on peri-urban land tenure arrangements was created within the framework of the project (Foncijeu) and is currently used for training and territorial animation.

The project resulted in 36 national and international presentations and 31 published or forthcoming papers, including a collective book to be released by the publisher Cardère in 2020. It also opened up research-action and societal transfer perspectives through the design of a role play and the formalization of a methodological itinerary to track down, characterize, and evaluate innovations in the management of peri-urban agricultural land.

Baroud K, Colin J-P, Daoudi A. 2018 La politique d’accès à la propriété privée des terres mises en valeur en zones arides en Algérie. Éléments de discussion? », Économie rurale, vol. 363, no. 1, 81-98.
Baysse-Lainé, A., Perrin, C., 2018, How can farmland management styles favor local food supply? A case-study in the Northern Larzac plateau (France), Land Use Policy, Volume 75, 746-756
Branduini P., Perrin C., Nougaredes B., Colli E. (2020). Cultural heritage preservation and resilience in urban agriculture through the lens of social justice: a case study in Milan. In: Alec T (ed.) Urban food democracy and governance in North and South. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Clément, C., Perrin, C., Soulard, C.-T., 2019, Les arrangements pour l’accès au foncier agricole périurbain, Développement durable et territoires Vol. 10, n°3 doi:10.4000/developpementdurable.15933
Perrin C., Nougarèdes B., Sini L., Branduini P., Salvati L. (2018) « Governance changes in peri-urban farmland protection following decentralisation : a comparison between Montpellier (France) and Rome (Italy). » Land Use Policy, 70 : 535 – 546.
Perrin C., Nougarèdes B. Le foncier agricole dans une société urbaine : innovations et enjeux de justice. Cardère éd. 388 p.
Perrin C., Nougaredes B. (2020). Gestion du foncier et du bâti agricoles périurbains : innovations et enjeux de justice sociale. Une comparaison entre Rome (Italie) et Montpellier (France ). In: M. Pouzenc and B. Charlery de la Masselière (eds.), Étudier les ruralités contemporaines. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du midi. p. 341-352
Perrin, C., Baysse-Lainé, A. 2020 Governing the coexistence of agricultural models: French cities allocating farmlands to support agroecology and short food chains on urban fringes. Rev Agric Food Environ Stud doi:10.1007/s41130-020-00105-z
Perrin, C.; Clément, C.; Melot, R.; Nougarèdes, B. Preserving Farmland on the Urban Fringe: A Literature Review on Land Policies in Developed Countries. Land 2020, 9, 223.

Food security issues are causing a new interest in farmland located on the urban fringe, especially around the Mediterranean Sea. In this context, the objective of the JASMINN project is to understand the conditions of preservation of suburban farmland. The central hypothesis is that the lack of efficiency of current protection of suburban farmland comes partly from a lack of consideration of justice issues in such land policies. To test this hypothesis, we intend to build a theoretical framework based on the concept of justice, with which we will analyze various local situations in the Mediterranean, in order to identify barriers and levers to innovations promoting sustainable farmland management on the urban fringe.
How agricultural land is protected will be analyzed through these four complementary areas: public action on farmland, management of agricultural buildings, private initiatives on farmland and authorities in charge of supervision, regulation and consultation. The analysis will focus on three coastal urban areas: Languedoc-Roussillon (France), Lazio (Italy) and Mitija (Algeria). The comparison of case studies located in such different contexts will improve the scope of the theoretical and methodological results.
By focusing on justice issues, the JASMINN project will make a significant contribution to land studies. Protection policies are mainly designed to preserve the economic potential of agricultural land and sometimes the landscape or the environment too. They are not directly motivated by social goals. However, these policies have social consequences because they change the price and conditions of access to the land and because they limit development rights, sometimes allowing exemptions for farmers. They therefore raise questions of justice between different social groups concerning the access to the land, housing or development rights. However, these justice issues in land management have not been closely explored yet. For this purpose, we will build a framework based on the theory of the commons and on various concepts of spatial and social justice. This new theoretical framework will be applied to current protection policies and to emerging alternatives that we will designate as ‘land innovations’. These innovations will be studied to assess their success in terms of farmland protection and their impact on social inequalities, along with their geographical location, and whether or not various types of innovation have been combined.
JASMINN will thus fill a gap in current land research in France. The scientific results will be disseminated in the international communities of planning, regional science and spatial justice. The project will also produce original methodological results on comparison and on qualitative analysis of identified land innovations. It will finally provide valuable information for public decision processes and promote the consideration of justice issues in the protection of agricultural land.
The JASMINN project will be conducted over a period of three years by a team of four early career researchers with expertise in geography, sociology and law. This team, coordinated by INRA UMR Innovation, will be assisted by an interdisciplinary and international committee, and a partnership with two foreign institutions: the CRA (Consiglio per la ricerca e la sperimentazione in agricoltura) in Rome and the ENSA (National School of Agronomy) in Algiers.