• Understand land issues, different property types and the procedures for transferring these properties to municipalities.
• Produce a shared diagnosis at the scale of the four municipalities.
• Define and implement a medium or long-term municipal land policy by integrating and enhancing the most attractive properties into the municipal estate.

The methodology developed with these territories is intended to be transferable to other areas.

Activities

The project activities in the four pilot municipalities included:

• Elaborating a territorial and shared diagnosis to identify the gaps and needs related to land use and forestry.
• Organising several meetings with elected representatives and civil servants from the ELAN group of municipalities to support them in managing agricultural and forest lands.
• Creating a serious game to test the pedagogical tools developed for the municipalities in real-life situations.

• A guide was developed that outlines all the steps needed to formulate a relevant policy and strategic approach regarding forestry and agriculture. It serves as a decision-support tool for elected representatives and civil servants. The guide includes information on land management, methods for land inventories, the transfer of private lands to public authorities and the management of agricultural lands. It references all the legal texts and important publications related to the topic.
• A serious game was designed to test the training tools developed, with a game exercise organised on 2 July 2020. The aim was to simulate the RENFORT approach through a mock municipal council composed of employees from the municipalities and the chambers of agriculture. The actual project team presented a support proposal, just as it would have done at an actual meeting, including resources, diagnostic elements, maps, development paths, a vademecum of commonly used terms and a demonstration of geographic information system (GIS) tools.

Key lessons

• This project led to a renewal of methodologies commonly used by the chamber of agriculture of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. It fostered a pedagogical and interactive approach (serious game), which was particularly useful in the COVID-19 context and enabled the creation of valuable tools for municipalities.
• The guide is also a valuable resource for the chamber of agriculture. The objective was to create a tool that could be disseminated and replicated by other counties or regions. From this work, they were able to identify what was useful to municipalities and the type of information they would need (operational data, description of implementation steps, etc.).
• This project was born from a need identified among municipalities and local stakeholders, which explains the strong participation despite the challenges posed by COVID-19 and remote working.