From ignorance to commitment: how periurban municipalities deal with agriculture?

Key insights: •Agriculture is given consideration in most periurban municipal policies.•Municipal agricultural projects depend on the political will of the elected representatives.•The location of municipalities does not impact upon how agriculture is integrated in municipal policies.•Urban planning documents provide a sound proxy to identify interesting municipal agricultural policies. Urban growth leads to decreases in area of farmland. In France, considerable attention is paid to this problem, including in frequent public policy debates. In this article, we explore issues associated with agriculture in 24 French periurban municipalities. We compare the treatment of agriculture in municipal policies by analysing urban planning documents and conducting in‐depth interviews with elected representatives. Our study reveals a high level of congruence between these two sources of information, confirming that planning documents are a sound proxy to identify municipalities' agricultural strategies. The study also shows both diverse degrees of municipal commitment to agriculture, which range from ignoring it to strongly supporting it, and diverse issues about agriculture that depend on local context and concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]