Form of organization and environmental profile of the farm: the case of the dairy sector.

Summary This thesis aims to contribute to the analysis of the relationship between organizational forms and environmental performance of farms. It studies the links between, on the one hand, the way in which the farm is organized and governed and, on the other hand, the set of practices that form its environmental profile. It provides a review of the economic literature on the analysis of the environmental performance of farms and its determinants. In the wake of theoretical proposals from neo-institutional economics and evolutionary economics, it proposes an analytical framework for the relationship between farm forms and environmental profiles. This framework is applied to the case of dairy farms around three complementary chapters, which combine both a quantitative approach mobilizing data from the 2010 French Agricultural Census, and a qualitative approach based on farm monographs conducted in Brazil. Thus, this thesis contributes to the empirical literature on environmental performance through its systemic and multicriteria approach of dairy farms that allows the construction of a profile of agro-environmental practices. In the analysis of the determinants of this profile, it shows the importance of a conception of the farm as a complex system with its own structure, governance and capacity to adapt, and evolving in interaction with its external environment. Finally, the thesis shows that there is no strict alignment between organizational forms and environmental performance, but that some forms of operation are more capable than others of taking into account certain agro-environmental practices.