Lhe current agricultural crisis has revealed the deep dismay of farmers in the face of the standardization that affects them.
Beyond their case, the proliferation of standards is felt as a burden in most sectors in France:
– in local authorities, where the National Council for the Evaluation of Standards continues to denounce this proliferation;
– at the hospital, where caregivers continually point out the excess administrative time that fee-for-service pricing creates;
– in industry, where land access standards block the construction of new sites, thus hindering the reindustrialization of territories.
In a information report of June 15, 2023 on “normative sobriety”, the senators documented this proliferation of standards and demonstrated the failure of the public policy of simplification which was supposed to eradicate it. The volume of standards of state origin alone has thus doubled in twenty years, and the cost of standards for the French economy has soared to between 60 and 120 billion euros per year depending on the criteria considered.
From 3% to 6% of annual GDP
This represents 3% to 6% of annual gross domestic product (GDP) if we take into account the total time spent on additional compliance activities and the abandonment of activities that have become too restrictive. Notwithstanding this obvious failure, the senatorial report concludes that there is a need to continue simplification. This therefore always serves as a deus ex machina to get out of normalization crises, like the one that is hitting farmers today.
However, knowledge of the normative phenomenon such as that proposed by interdisciplinary research networks Law & Management And Tetranormalization show that the proliferation of standards cannot be stopped in a developing human society, except at the margins and very punctually. Organized collective action congenitally calls for normative production that the populations’ appetite for greater risk management and protection makes inextinguishable.
Rather thanan illusory simplificationthese researchers therefore favor the principle of“ balancing »that is to say the search for a satisfactory balance between the expectations of the standard setter and the constraints of the entities concerned, making the standard more applicable in the reality of social, economic and environmental activity.
We thus observe that a standard developed in silos, without negotiation of sufficient proximity with the representatives of the entities to which it applies, in return maximizes the reactions of resistance, or even disobedience, of these entities, and consequently the non- compliance. This defect is at the origin of the phenomena observable today in Europe.
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