The Prefect and State Reform

The article intends to explain why although tremendous changes have occurred in the structure of government – especially the laws organizing decentralization since 1982 – the institution of the Prefect is still alive in the year 2000. Created in 1800, the institution of the Prefect derives from the will of the central authority to rely on its own representatives to ensure that public policies will be equally implemented over the whole territory. This objective remains but it has to be combined with the objectives of decentralization which are to transfer a number of responsibilities to elected bodies. Consequently, the task of the Prefect is to co-ordinate locally the action of the representatives of the ministers with the action of the elected body. To study the conditions under which the institution carries out this task the article focuses primarily on the limited capacity of the Prefect to mobilize the relevant actors. The second point concerns the difficulty of bringing together the information produced by field services. The third point considers the valuation of proximity and its impact on the action of the Prefect. The article concludes that the function of the Prefect is still the framing of local action but within the new context this can be done more often through the diffusion of information and less often through authority.