This final draft of the WP2 report for France is organised in three sections. The first section emphasises the historical perspective with insights on the main explanatory factors of the emergence of agri-environmental policy. The second section focuses on regulation 2078/92 and provides a comprehensive description of its implementation. An overview of the many evaluation studies made is also given. The last section deals with the rural development programme and the road ahead. Its implementation mainly relies on the farming territorial contract which has been introduced in the French legislation in 1999. It is a new farm-oriented policy instrument which targets the integration of the economic, social and environmental dimensions in a single framework.