Is reducing land take so hard? A Discrete Choice Experiment with Local Policy-Makers

France’s 2021 Loi Climat et Résilience establishes a legally binding “net zero land take” (Zéro Artificialisation Nette, ZAN) target by 2050, following four decades of land consumption above the European average. While the environmental rationale for the policy is well-established, its reachability remains uncertain and depends critically on the behaviour of local elected officials, who retain primary authority over land-use planning. Drawing on the political economy of land-use regulation (Fischel, 2001; Hilber & Robert-Nicoud, 2013), I argue that local decision-makers face competing fiscal, demographic, and environmental objectives that may systematically impede the adoption of lower-land-take strategies — an obstacle that more than twenty years of successive anti-sprawl policies have failed to overcome.

To identify these trade-offs, I design and implement a stated preference survey administered to French municipal councillors and mayors. The first instrument is a Discrete Choice Experiment in which participants choose between urban strategies varying in land take, housing density, municipal dynamism, and financial cost, relative to a personalised status quo. The second is a Simulation Task in which participants construct hypothetical urban plans under a binding land-take reduction, enabling a consistency check between elicited preferences and constrained planning behaviour (Jacquemet et al., 2019). Data were collected between September 2025 and April 2026, yielding more than 400 complete responses from officials with direct land-use planning experience.

To my knowledge, this paper provides the first systematic evidence on how local decision-makers trade off competing objectives under a binding no-net land-take constraint, with direct implications for the design of support instruments for ZAN implementation.

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