SUMMARY

The aim of this paper is to present the regulations which govern in France the relations between the actors in the construction industry - which the English call the "contracting system" - and to identify the principal contemporary developments. Since the beginning of the 1980s, important transformations have taken place, and continue to affect the legal context of the French construction industry, particularly around the regulation of public procurement (engineering, architecture, or site works). They are characterised by a succession of very important reforms from the passage of the law on the public client and its relations with the architect in private practice (called the law MOP of 1985) to the ratification of its decrees of application in 1993, passing by the reform of the public procurement code. The analytic framework which we propose is organised around two main themes: a comparison between the specificities of the regulatory framework for public works, compared to other European countries, and the specificities of its system of actors. an analysis of the reform of the legal framework and the redefinition of the strategies of the actors in the system observed since the beginning of the 1980s. These changes in the market have been accompanied by a tendency of certain actors (clients, construction majors) to move towards a much greater integration of the cycle of production, notably around the critical interface between conception and realisation. In this context, the majority of the construction majors have deployed a strategy of integrating vertically up and downstream in the construction process. We therefore propose to offer an analysis of the transformations of the regulatory framework, and relate them to the changes in the market and the strategies of the actors. This allows us to distinguish three main stages in the dynamic evolution of the French contracting system.