Abel Brodeur
email: abel.brodeur@parisschoolofeconomics.eu.

Marie Connolly
email: connolly-pray.marie@uqam.ca

Andrew Clark

Sarah Flèche

Pierre Fortin

Pierre Lefebvre

Do Higher Childcare Subsidies Improve Parental Well-being? Evidence from Québec's Family Policies

Keywords: Childcare, Labor Supply, Subjective Well-being, Life Satisfaction, Happiness, Work-life Balance I31, J20, J28 Childcare, labor supply, subjective well-being, life satisfaction, happiness, work-life balance

. Using data from the Canadian General Social Survey, we estimate a tripledifferences model using differences pre-and post-reforms between Québec and the rest of Canada and between parents with young children and those with older children. Our estimates suggest that Québec's family policies led to a small decrease in parents' subjective well-being. Of note, though, we find large and positive effects for poor household families and high school graduates and negative effects for middle household income families. We find similar negative effects on life satisfaction for both men and women, but different effects on satisfaction with work-life balance. This suggests that fathers' life satisfaction could be influenced by their wives' labor supply while their work-life balance is not.

1

Section I. Introduction

The question of whether technological changes, higher real wages, rising educational attainment and lower fertility can cause an increase of women's well-being are basic concerns for economists. Over the past few decades, women's rights in areas such as child custody and labor force participation improved considerably, leading to a social change that objectively should have made women better-off. Yet puzzlingly, women in the United States were reporting lower levels of happiness in the 2000s than in the 1970s, both absolutely and relative to men [START_REF] Blanchflower | Well-Being Over Time in Britain and the USA[END_REF][START_REF] Stevenson | The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness[END_REF]. Using answers to subjective well-being questions from the American General Social Survey (AGSS), 1 [START_REF] Stevenson | The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness[END_REF] showed that women are now reporting happiness levels that are similar or even lower than those of men. They called that phenomenon "the paradox of declining female happiness." The authors also claimed and showed empirical evidence that this trend holds across much of Europe. Unfortunately, while they offer some possible explanations of this paradox, they fall short of providing definitive answers. By their own admission, they "do not purport

to offer an answer to what is driving the decline in subjective well-being among women." (Stevenson and Wolfers, 2009, p. 194) Many factors could have contributed towards a decline in women's well-being. For instance, women might have a new reference group when evaluating their life satisfaction and thus compare their situation to men or to an ideal state. Another explanation is simply that there are divergent social roles and expectations for women, as existentialist and early feminist Simone de Beauvoir noted over half a century ago: "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilisation as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine." (de Beauvoir, 1949, p. 283) 1 [START_REF] Stevenson | The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness[END_REF] also used other data sets such as the Virginia Slim Survey of American Women's Opinion Polls to look into life satisfaction. Results were quite similar than those about happiness but the overall downward trend is larger for both sexes. On the other hand, [START_REF] Herbst | Paradoxical' Decline? Another Look at the Relative Reduction in Female Happiness[END_REF] showed that men and women reported the same decreases in life satisfaction and other indicators of well-being since the mid-1980s (using the DDB Needham Life Style Survey).

One of the most remarkable social changes over the last decades is the rise in the labor force participation rate of women. In the 1970s in Canada, less than half of women aged 25 to 64 had a job compared to around 65 percent in the 1990s [START_REF] Beaudry | Evolution of the Female Labour Force Participation Rate in Canada, 1976-1994: a Cohort Analysis[END_REF]. This increase is larger when considering participation rates (from 50 percent in the mid-1970s to 70 percent in the 1990s), and even more so when looking at mothers of at least one child under 6, whose employment rates rose from 31 percent in 1976 to 67 percent in 2004 [START_REF] Baker | Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being[END_REF]. The [START_REF] Akerlof | Economics and Identity[END_REF] identity model aids in understanding the impact of women's movement on the labor market.

Declining gender associations from tasks have two opposing consequences on the identity of men and women. While women's utility from homemaking is decreasing, payoffs for traditional men occupations are rising. The decision to enter in the labor market is then a function of women's identity. The upward trend in the female labor participation could be viewed as a switch in the payoffs of being employed. This lifestyle choice is obviously also driven by other factors like wages and fertility.

In this paper, we aim to contribute to the growing research on the determinants of well-being by investigating how subjective well-being was affected by a drastic change in the childcare subsidies policy of one of Canada's provinces, Québec. In 1997, the Canadian province of Québec launched a major program of subsidized daycare. At the time, barely 74,057 childcare spaces were available at a reduced fee for Québec's more than 445,000 children under the age of 5, for a coverage of less than 17%. By 2007, the number of subsidized spaces was nearly 200,000 for a total of 389,661 children under 5 in the population, equivalent to a 51% coverage (see Table 2 of [START_REF] Lefebvre | Child-Care Policy and the Labor Supply of Mothers with Young Children: A Natural Experiment from Canada[END_REF]. This policy was combined with $5-per-day before-and after-school day care for kindergarten and primary school children ($7 since 2004). As a result of the policy, women's labor force participation increased by 13% and their annual hours worked increased by 22% [START_REF] Lefebvre | Child-Care Policy and the Labor Supply of Mothers with Young Children: A Natural Experiment from Canada[END_REF]). Québec's childcare policy is particularly interesting to study because it goes to the heart of one of the possible explanations of the declining female happiness paradox: that increased labor force participation has a negative net effect on well-being. When not coupled with a decrease in household production, more work time for women results in effect to working a Second Shift, as argued by sociologist Hochschild and co-author Machung (1989). They explained that: "[…] even when husbands happily shared the hours of work, their wives felt more responsible for home and children." (Hochschild and Machung, 1989, p. 8) This extra burden, whether counted in minutes or in responsibility, could reasonably be expected to decrease subjective well-being. As discussed by Stevenson and Wolfers, "women may simply find the complexity and increased pressure in their modern lives to have come at the cost of happiness." (Stevenson and Wolfers, 2009, p. 224) A large body of literature investigates the balance between work and family [START_REF] Beja | Who is happier: The housewife or working wife?[END_REF][START_REF] Wright | Are working women really more satisfied? Evidence from several national surveys[END_REF]. Men and women react differently to their labor force status. As argued by [START_REF] Booth | Hours of Work and Gender Identity: Does Part-Time Work Make the Family Happier?[END_REF], looking at part-time work and partner's well-being gives us a clear portrait of the interaction within the family. In Australia, women report higher levels of life satisfaction if their partner works full-time while it is not the case for men. Gender differences have also been found in the relationships between work-family conflicts and life/job satisfaction [START_REF] Kossek | Work-Family Conflict, Policies, and the Job-Life Satisfaction Relationship: A Review and Directions for Organizational Behavior-Human Resources Research[END_REF]. This linkage is relatively stronger for women than for men because of the gender role socialization. Moreover, studies suggest that men segment their family and work more than women do [START_REF] Andrews | Segmentation and Synergy: Two Models linking Work and Family[END_REF][START_REF] Rothbard | Enriching or Depleting? The Dynamics of Engagement in Work and Family Roles[END_REF].

Investigating the causal impact of labor force participation on subjective wellbeing is difficult because of the endogenous character of labor supply: factors that make one happier may be correlated with decisions regarding work, which would bias estimates of the causal impact of interest. To get rid of this bias, it would be tempting to use Québec's childcare policy change as an instrument for labor force participation.

Unfortunately, we cannot ascertain the exogeneity of such an instrumental variable: the change in policy itself might be correlated with factors influencing women's well-being.

In this paper, we propose to circumvent the issue and estimate the overall impact of a generous childcare policy change on the subjective well-being of Québec's parents of children under the age of 5 (the children targeted by the childcare subsidies). We study men as well as women to highlight potential gender differences. While we are not able to distinguish the precise mechanisms that influence parents' well-being, we believe that knowing the effect of such a policy on well-being is of interest to policymakers and economists alike. Our study could also help to point future research in adequate directions by documenting an association between childcare subsidies and subjective well-being. Further studies could aim to disentangle the relationships between childcare policies, labor force participation and subjective well-being, which we do not allege to do in this paper.

The identification strategy in this article uses the fact that Québec was the only province to change its childcare policy, following the Québec's government wish to fight family poverty by increasing mothers' labor force participation and to enhance child development. 2 Other provinces had a relatively small number of children attending subsidized daycare centers and this number did not change much over the period studies (see [START_REF] Lefebvre | Child-Care Policy and the Labor Supply of Mothers with Young Children: A Natural Experiment from Canada[END_REF], Table 3). Hence, we may verify if the subjective well-being of parents in Québec increased or decreased compared to parents elsewhere in Canada after the program, but the difference should be larger for parents who have a child under 5 years of age. This technique has been used to explain different phenomena using the same quasi-natural experiment by [START_REF] Lefebvre | Child-Care Policy and the Labor Supply of Mothers with Young Children: A Natural Experiment from Canada[END_REF] and [START_REF] Baker | Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being[END_REF]. On the one hand, availability of childcare services has been shown to be positively correlated with maternal labor supply by [START_REF] Lefebvre | Child-Care Policy and the Labor Supply of Mothers with Young Children: A Natural Experiment from Canada[END_REF]. On the other hand, [START_REF] Baker | Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being[END_REF] confirmed that result and tried to identify the consequences of an increase in the use of childcare and labor supply on the whole family.

Mothers were reported to have more depression, there was a negative effect on their relationship satisfaction and there appeared to be, at least in the short term, a deterioration of young children's outcomes.

Our estimates suggest that Québec's family policies led to a decrease in parents' subjective well-being independently of the metric used (life satisfaction or happiness).

Respondents with a child aged less than 5 who were living in the province of Québec saw a very small decrease in life satisfaction equivalent to 1/20 th of a standard deviation after the introduction of the policy. Even though the effect is quite small, it is statistically significant and robust to many specification checks. The negative impact of Québec's family policies is found for both mothers and fathers. We also explore these findings by socioeconomic group, finding large and positive effects for poor household families and high school graduates. We also find that Québec's family policies affected negatively married people while unmarried individuals were positively affected. We find similar negative effects on life satisfaction for both men and women, but different effects on satisfaction with work-life balance. This suggests that fathers' life satisfaction could be influenced by their wives' labor supply but that their work-life balance could respond to an income effect.

The remainder of this article is structured as follows. After this introduction, we describe the data with detailed information on the particularity of the questions used.

Section III presents Québec's childcare policy and related literature. Section IV presents the methodology. In section V, we present our findings of the impact of the program on parents' well-being. Section VI concludes.

Section II. Data

This paper proposes to use self-reported subjective well-being data. Kahneman and Krueger (2006) reported that, according to a tabulation of EconLit, over 100 papers were written analyzing well-being data in 2001-2005 compared to only four in 1991-1995. Many economists worry about the validity of subjective data. The order of the questions and the instantaneous mood at the time of the survey have been shown to affect the respondents' answers. However, measurement error is found in most of the variables commonly used by economists and there is evidence that subjective well-being contains valuable information. For example, Kahneman (1999) reported that heart rate, activity levels in the left versus right prefrontal lobe, digestive disorders, and headaches are found to be correlated with subjective well-being. Moreover, friends' and family's assessments of a person's well-being are also positively correlated with self-reported well-being, as is the assessment of the person administering the interview. This empirical evidence justifies our choice to use subjective happiness and satisfaction data. which are repeated every five cycles or so. For instance, Family has been the General Social Survey Program for cycles 5, 10, 15 and 20 (1990, 1995, 2001 and 2006). In this study we use only some of the cycles (1986, 1989, 1991, 1996, 1998, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2009 for the satisfaction question; 1989, 1990, 1991, 1996, 1998, 2003, 2005 and 2008 for the happiness question) because questions concerning life satisfaction and happiness are not asked every year. We do not use 2007 because the target population of that survey was individuals 45 years of age and older.

A possible limitation in the interpretation of the results is the language used in answering the surveys. More than 20% of the population in Canada speaks French (living mainly in the province of Québec). Hence, we have to be careful and verify if the evolution of the "French" questions is the same as the "English" ones. For instance, before 1998, the question on life satisfaction in the French questionnaire asked your feeling about "life in general" as opposed to "your life" in the English questionnaire (see Appendix Table 1). However, while this may be a serious concern when comparing time trends across provinces, it should be less of an issue given that we use a triple-differences methodology.

We restrict our sample of the CGSS to respondents aged 20 to 49 since they are the most likely to be affected by the policy change. To harmonize the datasets, we rescale the individual sampling weights from each cycle to sum up to one for each year. Life satisfaction and happiness questions changed over time both in their scale and syntax.

Appendix Tables 1 and2 give the exact wording and possible answers for each question used in our analysis. The life satisfaction question is generally worded "How do you feel about your life as a whole right now?" Unfortunately, in 1991 and 1996, the question switched to "Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your life in general? Is that somewhat or very?" The scale started with a 4-point scale in 1985 and moved to a 10-point scale in 2003. Similarly, the happiness question (usually worded "Would you describe yourself as very happy, somewhat happy, somewhat unhappy, or very unhappy?") changed over time and its scale switched from 4 to 5 possible answers for the years 1991, 1996 and 2008. For this reason and for the sake of comparability across time, we standardize life satisfaction and happiness for all respondents within each cycle to have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. We also verify the robustness of our findings by estimating alternative specifications like ordered probit models. Finally, well-being measures are coded as variables for which higher values indicates greater well-being.

Section III. Québec's Childcare Policy and Related Literature

In this section, we review the evidence on the effects of Québec's childcare policy provided in previous research; for a more detailed review, see [START_REF] Baker | Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being[END_REF] and [START_REF] Lefebvre | Child-Care Policy and the Labor Supply of Mothers with Young Children: A Natural Experiment from Canada[END_REF]. The provincial government of Québec initiated a childcare policy via the Ministry of the Family in 1997. Children who were 4 years old could go, by October 1997, to any accredited childcare facility where subsidized day care ($5-per-full-day fee policy) was provided. Progressively, accredited childcare facilities offered subsidized day care to younger and younger children until all children under 5 were eligible to attend subsidized care by 2000. 3 The exact cost of this program is difficult to estimate but direct public subsidies to childcare services were around $1.4 billion for [START_REF] Frey | What Can Economists Learn from Happiness Research?[END_REF][START_REF] Sousa-Poza | Gender differences in job satisfaction in Great Britain, 1991-2000: permanent or transitory?[END_REF][START_REF] Lefebvre | Québec's Childcare Universal Low Fees Policy 10 Years After: Effects, Costs and Benefits[END_REF]. The provincial government aimed to provide 200,000 spaces by 2006. In contrast, the number of subsidized-fee daycare spaces in the rest of Canada was relatively small compared to the province of Québec and barely changing over the period considered (see [START_REF] Lefebvre | The Québec's Experiment of $5 per Day per Child Childcare Policy and Mother's Labor Supply: Evidence Based on the Five Cycles of the NLSCY[END_REF] for a description of childcare use in the rest of Canada). This childcare policy was combined with many other programs related to the family. Full-time publicly provided kindergarten replaced half-day kindergarten, a new unified tax benefit contingent harmonized with the federal government's child tax benefit, and also a subsidized before-and after-school day care for kindergarten and grade school children. Finally, formal qualifications were raised for the staff working in accredited childcare facilities.

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY), [START_REF] Baker | Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being[END_REF] estimated that the rise in childcare was associated, for women in two-parent families, with an increase of 7.7 percentage points in employment in the province of Québec relative to the rest of Canada. This means that many women are using subsidized care without working since the impact of the program on labor supply is not as large as the impact on childcare utilization. [START_REF] Lefebvre | Child-Care Policy and the Labor Supply of Mothers with Young Children: A Natural Experiment from Canada[END_REF] reported similar findings concerning the increase in labor force participation. Using the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID), they also found that the policy increased the annual number of hours worked by 114 hours for better educated and by 133 hours for less educated mothers. The pattern for annual weeks worked and annual earnings was quite similar. 4 Lastly, [START_REF] Lefebvre | Dynamic Labour Supply Effects of Childcare Subsidies: Evidence from a Canadian Natural Experiment on Low-Fee Universal Child Care[END_REF] analyzed the dynamic labor effect of the program.

Their study provided empirical evidence that the policy had long-term supply effects on mothers who benefited from the program.

Section IV. Methodology

Since subjective well-being measures are observed for Québec and the rest of Canada for years before and after the policy change, we use a triple-differences approach. 4 One exception is the increase in earnings which is very small for the less educated mothers. The authors mention that measurement errors could be large since earnings included net self-employment income.

The simplest setup is where we compare young parents' life satisfaction in Québec and in the rest of Canada, before and after the policy changes, to non-parents and parents of older children. The age of respondent's youngest single child living in the household (which is not available in 1985) and the respondent's province jointly determine a parent's exposure to the program. One specific concern that is not fully addressed by our use of the Québec's policies as a natural experiment is that we possibly capture only different trends between our control and treatment groups. One obvious advantage of the CGSS is that we do know the age of respondent's youngest single child living in the household (between 0 and 25 years old). Hence, we are able to verify that families who do not benefit from the childcare policies are not influenced by it. For instance, all children born in 1992 or before were too old in 1998 when the first wave of the policies started. Thus, their parents did not take advantage from the program.

Studies using the NLSCY have to exploit a reference group that was only less affected, which might lead to a bias [START_REF] Lefebvre | The Québec's Experiment of $5 per Day per Child Childcare Policy and Mother's Labor Supply: Evidence Based on the Five Cycles of the NLSCY[END_REF][START_REF] Baker | Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being[END_REF].

The identification assumption may be tested because parents that do not have a child in the age group 0-4 are not exposed to the program and should not differ from parents in a similar situation in other provinces. This technique will give more credibility to our results since we show that life satisfaction of families from Québec with a child in the household who is more than 4 years old (non-treated group) has not significantly changed after the policy change. Furthermore, the question of whether the language used by respondents could bias this study should not be an issue when using this framework.

Our econometric model is as follows:

SWB it = α + β 1 Québec it + β 2 Child04 it + β 3 Post1998 i + β 4 Québec it × Child04 it + β 5 Québec it × Post1998 i + β 6 Child04 it × Post1998 i + β 7 Québec it × Child04 it × Post1998 i + ζX it + t t + ε it (1)
where SWB is the outcome variable (standardizes life satisfaction or standardized happiness) for respondent i in year t, Québec is an indicator which is set to 1 if the respondent lives in this province, Child04 indicates whether the individual is a parent of a child who is less than five years old, and Post1998 is a variable that takes the value 1 if the year of the survey is after 1998. The interaction of Québec and Child04 determines the treated group, while the additional interaction with Post1998 shows the effect of the treatment. The coefficient of interest here is thus β 7 . X it is a vector containing additional regressors known to be predictors of subjective well-being such as the age group, educational attainment, declared religion, religion attendance, marital status, household income level group and immigrant status. A time trend is added to the specification in case other time-varying factors correlated with the implementation of the program would explain our results. The interpretation relies on the identification condition that there are no other time-varying shocks that affect the life satisfaction of young parents in Québec or in the rest of Canada. All regressions are weighted using Statistics Canada's sampling weights, rescaled as described in the Data section.

Section V. Findings

A. Main Results

In this section, we report estimates of equation (1) using ordinary least squares (OLS), but alternative specifications like ordered probit models yield similar findings and for brevity are not presented here. Columns 1 and 3 of Table 1 first show the relationship between life satisfaction and the variables that will allow us to determine the treated group and the effect of the treatment. Both columns corroborate the finding of Barrington-Leigh (2010) that respondents in Québec report historically lower levels of life satisfaction compared to the rest of Canada. This relationship is statistically significant both in column 1 where socioeconomic characteristics are not taken into account and in column 2 where they are controlled for. Barrington-Leigh (2010) reported that subjective well-being in the early 1980s was much lower in Québec than in any other province, but has since converged with the rest of the country. Québec's economic performance does not seem to explain this evolution adequately. The author argued that cultural norms and social context could explain what he dubbed the "Québec

Convergence" but demanded further investigation.

Other results in columns 1 and 3 show that having at least one child in the agegroup 0-4 is positively associated with life satisfaction. Adding controls reduces the size of the coefficient but a positive and significant relationship still holds. In column 3, women report higher levels of life satisfaction. Being married, being born in Canada, attending church, and being young are all positively associated with the dependent variable. Since a part of the effect of childcare is to increase household income, we do not control for it in our specification. 5 Columns 2 and 4 of Table 1 present our estimates of the effect of Québec's family policy on the life satisfaction of parents of young children (less than five years old) living in this province. These columns present our basic estimates of equation ( 1) by introducing all possible interactions between Québec, Child04 and Post1998. The coefficient of interest, β 7 , is on the seventh row. Columns 2 and 4 show respectively the impact of the program without and with control variables. In both cases, the estimated coefficient is negative and statistically significant at the 5% level. This means that respondents with a child aged less than 5 who were living in the province of Québec saw a very small decrease in life satisfaction equivalent to 1/20 th of a standard deviation after the implementation of the policy. 6 The introduction of socioeconomic controls does not change the estimated coefficient.

B. Specification Checks

Table 2 repeats the exercise for life satisfaction but includes a variable indicating if the respondent has a child older than 4 years old. This is a good way to verify that Québec's families who are not beneficiaries of the childcare policies are not influenced by it. The first column of Table 2 reports the findings of the fourth column in Table 1.

Column 2 shows that respondents with a child aged more than 4 who were living in the 5 However including household income as a control variable has no effect on the findings presented in this paper. There is a positive relationship between respondents' life satisfaction and household income. Many surveys have reviewed the relationship between income and subjective well-being [START_REF] Clark | Relative Income, happiness, and Utility: An Explanation for the Easterlin Paradox and Other Puzzles[END_REF][START_REF] Di Tella | Some Uses of Happiness Data in Economics[END_REF][START_REF] Frey | What Can Economists Learn from Happiness Research?[END_REF]. While there is no clear conclusion as to whether more income brings more happiness, the social context and the reference group are among factors determining this relationship. 6 Another way to gauge the size of the effect is to contrast it with other predictors of well-being (see Table 1 for the coefficients of the control variables).

province of Québec were not affected by the programs. The estimate on the interaction between Québec, Child04 and Post1998 (on the eleventh row) is close to zero and not statistically significant.

Turning now to a different explained variable, Table 3 shows the effect of the family policies on self-reported happiness. The layout is the same as Table 1. As in Table 1, the coefficients on the Québec variable indicate that, historically, Quebeckers reported lower levels of happiness compared to the rest of Canada. Having a child is positively correlated with well-being, and there is no clear relationship between happiness and the variable Post1998. The coefficients that interest us the most here are those on the seventh row in columns 2 and 4. The estimated coefficients on the interaction between Québec, Child04 and Post1998 are negative and statistically significant and once again quite small. Since happiness is likely highly correlated with life satisfaction, this finding is to be expected.

In Table 4, we turn to disaggregating the estimated triple-differences by sex, household income, education levels and demographic groups. To do so, we estimate separate regressions for each sub-group of interest. As a reference, the first row of Table 4 reports the findings of Tables 1 and3 for the effect of the family policies on the whole sample (β 7 ). Then, the next two rows (Panel A) show the impact respectively on women and men. Our a priori is that mothers are the ones who are most affected from these family policies: according to the theory of The Second Shift, men segment their family and work more than women do, and women experienced the largest changes in labor supply. The estimated coefficients on the interaction Québec, Child04 and Post1998 are statistically significant when the sample is split by sex and the dependent variable is life satisfaction. This means that, when controlling for socioeconomic characteristics, the family policies affect negatively the life satisfaction of mothers and fathers with a young children living in Québec. Surprisingly, the size of the effect is larger for men, but the gender difference does not appear to be statistically different from zero. This is the opposite when considering the happiness specification: mothers of young children in Québec experienced a statistically-significant drop in happiness of about 1/10 th of a standard deviation, whereas the effect for fathers is positive but small and not statistically different from zero. Once again, the estimated coefficients are quite low.

Evidence for the role of women's labor force participation in the paradox of declining female happiness remains elusive. The negative effect for both genders seems to indicate that the increase in labor force participation of mothers affect also the lifestyle of fathers. Our results indicate that if increased maternal paid work is a channel through which higher childcare subsidies decrease well-being, then it must be that a husband's life satisfaction is partly determined by his wife's labor supply, or at least by her own well-being. It is possible that childcare policies bring more stress to both parents and that this makes children less satisfied which would cause negative externalities on parents.

Indeed, [START_REF] Baker | Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being[END_REF] found that children affected by Québec's subsidies policy are worse off in terms of health, motor, social, anxiety and aggressiveness indicators. Even if our estimated effect of the program on parental well-being is small, our results do go in the same direction as those of [START_REF] Baker | Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being[END_REF]. In their study, mothers reported more depression because of the program and there was a negative effect on the relationship satisfaction. One advantage of the CGSS is the size of the dataset, which allows us to investigate in more details these findings by estimating separate regressions for several subgroups.

So far, the childcare policy appears to have been ineffective in increasing the well-being of parents in Québec. One of the goals of this policy was to fight poverty among parents with young children. One might thus argue that the absence of a positive effect for all parents is not surprising since the effect should be on poor households, who otherwise would not be able to afford decent childcare. Panel B examines this hypothesis by separately estimating our baseline model for low income household (bottom quartile), middle income household (second and third quartiles) and high income household (top quartile). 7 The results for middle income households, presented in the second row of Panel B, go in a similar direction to those for the whole sample: the effect on life 7 Household income of respondents is available in categories in the CGSS. The number and value of categories change over the waves. The quartiles are calculated for each year.

satisfaction is a highly statistically significant decrease of about 0.12 of a standard deviation, while that on happiness is a much smaller (and not statistically significant) decrease of 0.005. The first row of Panel B shows a clear and positive impact of the policy on poor households. The estimated coefficient on the triple interaction between Québec, Child04 and Post1998 is positive and statistically significant at the 1% level.

The effect is quite large and is equivalent to a change in life satisfaction of around 0.15 of a standard deviation (a change in happiness of around 0.19). The effects of the program on parents in top household income are also positive and statistically significant for the life satisfaction specification. However, the effect is negative for top household income when turning to the happiness variable. These two findings are difficult to reconcile. Note that similar numbers are found when estimating Panel B separately by gender (results not presented here).

These results emphasize the role of women's labor force participation, given that poor households are the ones who benefit the most from the program. One interpretation of this finding of a large and positive effect for the bottom household income quartile may come from the reduction of poverty among Québec's parents. The $5-per-day-perchild policy reduced the cost of raising children and increased significantly the labor supply of mothers, resulting in increase in disposable income. Our findings of a positive effect of the policy change could thus be imputed to an income effect. Readers should however be aware that income is endogenous to the labor force participation which could bias our estimates if the impact of the policies goes through the increase in labor force.

One way to solve this problem is to look at the impact of the program by education group instead of by income quartile. [START_REF] Lefebvre | Dynamic Labour Supply Effects of Childcare Subsidies: Evidence from a Canadian Natural Experiment on Low-Fee Universal Child Care[END_REF] reported that the policies had long-term labor supply effects on mothers who benefited from the program (with a young child) and that this change was driven mainly by less educated mothers. This calls for one more specification check which is presented in Panel C. Each row restricts the sample to a particular education group (less than high school, high school diploma, some postsecondary schooling, and postsecondary diploma). For instance, the first row presents our model estimated only for respondents who did not graduate high school: the effect is negative and slightly larger than in the full sample. The second row estimates our model for high school graduates. If the program affects parents' well-being through the increase in employment of mothers, then we should expect a large impact on less-educated women as their labor force participation is lower to begin with. And indeed, the coefficient is large (one-fourth of a standard deviation in life satisfaction), positive and statistically significant at the 1% level. Rows 3 and 4 report the impact of the childcare policies on parents who have some postsecondary education or a postsecondary diploma. The effect of the program is negative in both rows and statistically significant. Findings are somewhat different in column 2. The impact on self-reported happiness is small and insignificant when the sample is restricted to high school graduates.

Panel D presents the effect of the program by marital status. The sample is restricted respectively to married (first row) and unmarried (second row, divorced, single and widowed). The signs of the coefficients of interest are dissimilar. We find a positive impact for unmarried parents but a negative effect for married parents. The standard error is bigger for unmarried parents which explains why the impact is not statistically significant for the life satisfaction. For married individuals, the size of the coefficients is small and similar to the ones estimated on the whole sample. The positive effect for unmarried parents could be interpreted as an income effect in a similar fashion as the positive effect found for parents with low levels of education or low incomes.

In a further set of robustness checks, we verify whether the question order has an effect on our findings (results not shown but available from the authors upon request).

We keep only three years (1998, 2003 and 2005) where the question before happiness is the same (a question on stress). This is also a good way to check if the standardization affects our findings since the scale is the same for these years. First of all, the findings are similar when using either the raw happiness or the standardized happiness variable.

Secondly, when the sample is restricted to respondents who did not graduate high school and to respondents who did graduate high school, we find large and positive impact (both statistically significant). The effect is very small for the whole sample and not statistically significant.

We also test whether our main findings are affected by the fact that the personal sampling weights from each cycle are rescaled to sum up to one for each year. Sampling weights are used in this study to have nationally representative samples. The number of observations varies from wave to wave which explains our decision to rescale each year equally. Our choice to include sampling weights has no impact on our analysis. Similar findings are obtained when sampling weights are not included. Additionally, alternative methods of statistical inference do not alter the main findings of this paper. Clustering either on year or pre/post policy do not give statistically significant results that differ from those presented in this paper (clustering on province does not assume a temporal break in the dependence). As a final test, we also tried dropping years of data one by one, both before and after the policy change, and found no significant differences in our estimates.

C. Balance Between Job and Home Life

Up to now, we have documented a generally negative effect (albeit small) of the low-fee childcare policy in Québec on life satisfaction of both mothers and fathers. Since it is primarily women who changed their labor force participation following the policy change (men's labor force participation remained relatively stable), the relationship between childcare policies, labor supply and well-being must be different for men or women, or must take into account total household labor supply rather than individual labor supply. To shed light on the issue, we now look at self-reported work-life balance.

Table 5 shows that the childcare policies in Québec changed significantly the way fathers and mothers appreciate the balance between their job and their home life. This table presents the estimates of equation (1) using standardized answers to the question "How satisfied are/were you with the balance between your job and home life?" as the dependent variable. The sample here is restricted to individuals having a job which means that there is a sample selection.

Column 1 first shows the findings for the whole sample while columns 2 and 3 restrict the sample to women and men respectively. The results suggest that the childcare policies in Québec have led to a decrease of mothers' satisfaction with the balance between their job and home life, but to an increase for fathers. The findings for women are thus consistent with the Second Shift theory: higher childcare subsidies facilitate work, but work in itself does not mean less work at home, so women actually experience a net decline in their satisfaction with their work-life balance. The findings for men appear consistent with literature results showing that men are better able to segment their family and work life. Increased childcare subsidies and childcare spaces could make life easier for men, and coupled with their wives working could induce an income effect. A positive effect on men's work-life balance also implies that men do not take into account their wives' labor supply or well-being when answering questions regarding their own work-life balance, whereas they appear to do so when considering their overall life satisfaction.

Section VI. Conclusion

Using a triple-differences framework, we investigated the effect of a very generous change in childcare subsidies policy on subjective well-being and found that Québec's family policy led to a small decrease (1/20 th of a standard deviation) in parents' self-reported well-being. While we acknowledge that our results are driven by more than one mechanism, we are struck by the heterogeneity of the effect when looking at separate subcategories of our data. We find no significant gender differences in the impact of the policy change on mothers' and fathers' life satisfaction. We also find larger and positive effects of the policy for low income households, for parents with a high school diploma and for unmarried individuals, suggesting the possibility of an income effect. Indeed, the generous childcare policy increased disposable incomes of poor households relatively more than those of richer households.

The findings of this paper have possible political implications for governments and policy makers. In particular, they highlight some consequences related to childcare policies and, more generally, labor force status of women. One intriguing aspect is that both fathers and mothers are affected by these social policies in terms of their reported life satisfaction. We did however uncover interesting gender differences when looking at the impact of the policy on happiness or on self-reported satisfaction of work-life balance. Consistent with Hochschild's Second Shift theory, mothers appear to be negatively affected by a policy which facilitated increased labor force participation.

Fathers reported more satisfaction with their balance between job and life at home, perhaps revealing an income effect. Our results are consistent with men taking their wives' labor supply or well-being into account into their evaluation of their own life satisfaction, but not when considering their work-life balance. Future research should try to disentangle the mechanisms affecting parents' well-being through childcare subsidies. . All estimates are weighted and the personal sampling weights from each cycle are rescaled to sum up to one for each year. Robust standard errors are in parentheses, clustered by province. Each block shows the results of one regression. The first column presents the coefficients on the interaction "Québec*Child0-4*Post1998" when the dependent variable is life satisfaction. The second column presents the coefficients on the interaction "Québec*Child0-4*Post1998" when the dependent variable is happiness.

Significant at the ***[1%] **[5%] *[10%] level. Survey (1990Survey ( , 1998Survey ( , 2003Survey ( , 2005Survey ( and 2008)). All estimates are weighted and the personal sampling weights from each cycle are rescaled to sum up to one for each year. Robust standard errors are in parentheses, clustered by province. This Table shows estimated coefficients from estimating an OLS on a standardized variable (Satisfaction between job and home life). Significant at the ***[1%] **[5%] *[10%] level.

  Our data come from Statistics Canada's Canadian General Social Surveys (CGSS), the first wave of which appeared in 1985. The surveys had a target sample of 10,000 individuals until 1998, subsequently increasing until reaching about 22,000 for the 2010 survey. There are eight different Survey Programs (Health, Time Use, Victimization, Family, Social Engagement, Social support and Aging, Access to and Use of Information and Communication Technologies, and Education, Work and Retirement)

Table 1 -Relationship Between Childcare Policies in Québec and Life Satisfaction

 1 Authors' calculations from the Canadian General Social Survey (1986-2009). All estimates are weighted and the personal sampling weights from each cycle are rescaled to sum up to one for each year. Robust standard errors are in parentheses, clustered by province.

	OLS	Life Satisfaction (1)	Life Satisfaction (2)	Life Satisfaction (3)	Life Satisfaction (4)
	Québec	-0.0217**	-0.147***	-0.034***	-0.164***
		(0.007)	(0.008)	(0.007)	(0.013)
	Child 0-4	0.147***	0.117***	0.009	-0.025
		(0.006)	(0.010)	(0.012)	(0.017)
	Québec*Child 0-4		0.026**		0.031**
			(0.010)		(0.012)
	Post 1998	0.000	-0.072	0.012	-0.061
		(0.025)	(0.042)	(0.023)	(0.045)
	Québec*Post 1998		0.258***		0.261***
			(0.026)		(0.027)
	Child 0-4*Post 1998		0.060***		0.066***
			(0.009)		(0.011)
	Québec*Child 0-4*Post		-0.047***		-0.047***
	1998		(0.009)		(0.011)
	Time Trend	0.003 (0.406)	-0.006 (0.403)	-0.010 (0.460)	-0.040 (0.460)
	Female			0.015 (0.005)**	0.015 (0.005)**
	Age [20-24]			0.124 (0.017)***	0.123 (0.017)***
	Age [25-29]			Omitted	Omitted
	Age [30-34]			-0.032 (0.014)**	-0.033 (0.015)*
	Age [35-39]			-0.084 (0.010)*** -0.085 (0.011)***
	Age [40-44]			-0.116 (0.021)*** -0.117 (0.022)***
	Age [45-49]			-0.118 (0.022)*** -0.118 (0.022)***
	Born in Canada			Omitted	Omitted
	Not Born in Canada			-0.141 (0.021)*** -0.142 (0.022)***
	Less High School			-0.120 (0.013)*** -0.122 (0.013)***
	Grad. High School			Omitted	Omitted
	Some Postsecondary			-0.024 (0.013)	-0.024 (0.015)
	Postsecondary Diploma			0.043 (0.020)*	0.040 (0.021)*
	Catholic			0.074 (0.024)**	0.067 (0.020)***
	United Church			0.139 (0.025)***	0.122 (0.020)***
	Protestant			0.045 (0.020)**	0.034 (0.014)**
	No Religion			Omitted	Omitted
	Never Att. Church			Omitted	Omitted
	Att. Church Once a Week			0.163 (0.035)***	0.173 (0.029)***
	Att. Church Once a Month			0.085 (0.025)***	0.094 (0.021)***
	Att. Church Once a Year			0.057 (0.019)***	0.061 (0.017)***
	Married			0.348 (0.017)***	0.348 (0.017)***
	Divorced			-0.168 (0.018)*** -0.166 (0.018)***
	Single			Omitted	Omitted
	Widowed			-0.132 (0.077)	-0.134 (0.078)

Table 2 -Childcare Policies and Life Satisfaction

 2 All estimates are weighted and the personal sampling weights from each cycle are rescaled to sum up to one for each year. Robust standard errors are in parentheses, clustered by province. Significant at the ***[1%] **[5%] *[10%] level.

	OLS	Life Satisfaction (1)	Life Satisfaction (2)
	Québec	-0.164***	-0.173***
		(0.013)	(0.012)
	Child 0-4	-0.025	-0.008
		(0.017)	(0.021)
	Québec*Child 0-4	0.031**	0.040**
		(0.012)	(0.015)
	Post 1998	-0.061	-0.045
		(0.045)	(0.051)
	Québec*Post 1998	0.261***	0.261***
		(0.027)	(0.020)
	Child 0-4*Post 1998	0.066***	0.049***
		(0.011)	(0.008)
	Québec*Child 0-4*Post	-0.047***	-0.047***
	1998	(0.011)	(0.008)
	Child Older than 4		0.036*
			(0.019)
	Québec*Child Older than 4		0.024
			(0.019)
	Child Older than 4*Post 1998		-0.041
			(0.025)
	Québec*Child Older than 4		-0.001
	*Post 1998		(0.025)
	Control Variables (see Table 1)
	Age, Native and Gender		
	Socioeconomic Controls		
	Time Trend		
	N	90,265	90,265
	R 2	0.047	0.047
	Note: Authors' calculations from the Canadian General Social Survey
	(1986-2009).

Table 3 -Relationship Between Childcare Policies in Québec and Happiness

 3 Authors' calculations from the Canadian General Social Survey. All estimates are weighted and the personal sampling weights from each cycle are rescaled to sum up to one for each year. Robust standard errors are in parentheses, clustered by province. Significant at the ***[1%] **[5%] *[10%] level.

	OLS	Happiness (1)	Happiness (2)	Happiness (3)	Happiness (4)
	Québec	-0.136***	-0.164***	-0.142***	-0.172***
		(0.006)	(0.008)	(0.008)	(0.012)
	Child 0-4	0.157***	0.132***	0.035*	0.008
		(0.016)	(0.020)	(0.016)	(0.025)
	Québec*Child 0-4		0.066***		0.070***
			(0.019)		(0.018)
	Post 1998	0.005	-0.012	0.012	-0.005
		(0.029)	(0.023)	(0.027)	(0.020)
	Québec*Post 1998		0.051**		0.054**
			(0.017)		(0.017)
	Child 0-4*Post 1998		0.030*		0.036**
			(0.014)		(0.014)
	Québec*Child 0-4*Post		-0.030*		-0.040***
	1998		(0.014)		(0.011)
	Control Variables (see Table 1)
	Age, Native and Gender				
	Socioeconomic Controls				
	Time Trend				
	N	67,985	67,985	67,985	67,985
	R 2	0.007	0.007	0.041	0.041
	Note:

Table 4 -Estimates by Sex, Household Income Group, Education Group and Demographic Group Estimated Triple-Differences

 4

	OLS	Life Satisfaction (1)	Happiness (2)
	Whole Sample	-0.047***	-0.040***
		(0.011)	(0.011)
	Panel A. By Sex
	Women	-0.039**	-0.095***
		(0.016)	(0.017)
	Men	-0.057*	0.019
		(0.029)	(0.019)
	Panel B. By Household Income Group
	Low Household Income	0.151***	0.185***
		(0.043)	(0.045)
	Middle Household Income	-0.116***	-0.005
		(0.011)	(0.025)
	High Household Income	0.102***	-0.262***
		(0.029)	(0.035)
	Panel C. By Education Group
	Less than High School	-0.088*	-0.016
		(0.047)	(0.071)
	Grad. High School	0.223***	0.0029
		(0.054)	(0.017)
	Some Postsecondary	-0.125***	0.137
	Education	(0.035)	(0.075)
	Postsecondary Diploma	-0.084***	-0.137***
		(0.020)	(0.039)
	Panel D. By Demographic Group
	Married	-0.045***	-0.038*
		(0.013)	(0.017)
	Unmarried: Divorced, Single,	0.040	0.073**
	and Widowed	(0.054)	(0.029)
	Control Variables (see Table 1)
	Socioeconomic Controls		
	Time Trend		
	Note: Authors' calculations from the Canadian General Social Survey

Table 5 -Satisfaction with the Balance Between Job and Home Life OLS

 5

		Balance	Balance	Balance
		Job/Home	Job/Home	Job/Home
		Both Genders	Women Only	Men Only
		(1)	(2)	(3)
	Québec	-0.225***	-0.186***	-0.261***
		(0.017)	(0.028)	(0.010)
	Child 0-4	-0.064***	0.009	-0.122***
		(0.007)	(0.038)	(0.031)
	Québec*Child 0-4	-0.023**	0.056	-0.068**
		(0.008)	(0.033)	(0.030)
	Post 1998	-0.067	-0.004	-0.130
		(0.048)	(0.029)	(0.076)
	Québec*Post 1998	0.292***	0.260***	0.321***
		(0.029)	(0.033)	(0.030)
	Child 0-4*Post 1998	-0.032	-0.145***	0.060***
		(0.024)	(0.042)	(0.014)
	Québec*Child 0-4*Post 1998	0.032	-0.088**	0.112***
		(0.021)	(0.039)	(0.010)
	Control Variables (see Table 1)
	Socioeconomic Controls			
	Time Trend			
	N	39,265	20,502	18,763
	R 2	0.015	0.019	0.0176
	Note: Authors' calculations from the Canadian General Social

These two objectives are not the only ones that this program wished to achieve. This province had a very low fertility rate during the 1990s, which could explain the desire to help families.

The program has not been able to satisfy the demand for low-fee spaces. A large number of children were on waiting lists with no access to a subsidized space.

Financial support from the Fonds Québécois de la is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks to participants of the


THE SAHARAN OASIS PUT TO THE TEST OF ITS LANDSCAPE: THE JERID

Oases of the Sahara can be seen as landscapes, but can we reduce the oasian landscapes to simply what can be apprehended visually' I will introduce the notion of socioecologicallandscape to support the double dimension of these oasian landscapes as ecological and social products and constructions. Such an approach can be applied to the notion of landscape in general, not only to deserts.

For millennia, Saharan oases have been the centers of human presence in the biggest desert areas, which are a priori hostile places for people. These oases are built environments. As they have an anthropic origin, so they are living landscapes, shaped by local inhabitants, but also increasingly by tourism. The case of the jerid region (in the southwest of Tunisia) offers a valuable example of these built environnments, and that of the Siwa oasis (in the northwest of Egypt) provides an interesting counterpoint.'

DEFINING OASES' ECOSYSTEMS: ARTIFICIALITY

Oasis landscapes excite the imagination and evoke multiple images as soon as we think about them: colonial-era illustrations (postcards, novel covers, colonial exhibitions' catalogs), comic strips (often featuring desert extremes), and scenes from movies (such as Lawrence of Arabia, by David Lean in 1962).

We can most simply define an "oasis" as a fertile spot in an arid environment.

I suggest calling an "oasis" a combination of both settlement and cultivation, and a "palm grove" the specific cultivated zone of an oasis. This short definition, however, runs counter to the common Western sense of an oasis as a quiet, Edenic places of

• 105
Battesti, Vincent, 2012 -« The Saharan oasis put to the test of its landscape, The Jerid » in Virginie Lefebvre & Aziza Chaouni (eds.), Desert tourism, Tracing the fragile edges of development, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, GSD, The Aga Khan Program, p. 104-117en ligne: http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00569247 I Tint in au pays de l'or noir (Land of Black Gold, Herge 1950) relaxation, where you can gather fruit from trees by stretching out your hand or kicking the trunk of a date palm (see the comic strip Land of Black Gold, by Herge in 1950).

Oasian landscapes suggest an easy lifestyle, perhaps because the oasis itself is a kind of a miracle in opposition to desert landscapes.

FACTORS NEEDED TO CREATE AN OASIAN LANDSCAPE

The miracle of the oases' ecosystem reflects their total artificiality. There is no oasis without human labor: an oasis is an exception in the desert, a kind of fragile bubble offering a specific landscape. And before everything else, it is agriculture. To exist, this agriculture requires the presence of three factors: water, plants, and labor.

It is rare that water rises by itself to the surface in the desert. For oases to bloom, it is generally necessary that people have the knowledge and means to use elaborate hydraulic equipment. Varied techniques have been implemented in the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East: wells-foggara, or qanat respectively, in North Africa and Iran-a system of kilometers of underground channels that collect drippings of water, and small dams. Sometimes water collected from distant mountains flows in rivers (wadi)-in south Morocco, for instance. The mere presence of water, however, does not guarantee the existence of oases. That is the case for the Kalahari Desert, where there is no big oasis despite the many streams from neighboring countries flowing into that vast basin.

The second factor is the presence of cultivated plants. In an oasis, plants need to be imported. The subsistence of local communities depends on cultivated cereals, vegetables, and fruit trees, all organized in mixed gardens. These plants have been domesticated from plant populations of nondesert regions that were originally adapted to different climatic and cultural situations. Even the emblematic date-palm tree, Pha:nix dactylifera, was probably introduced in oases.

The third factor is human labor. Palm groves are a puzzle of small overlaid gardens. When oasian gardeners of the Nefzawa region (south Tunisia) prize the beauty of the neigh boring jerid oases, they refer immediately to the local agricultural skills and expertise: the oasis is understood as the outcome of know-how. Agricultural practices may vary from place to place, but permanent features remain, defining the oasis and contributing to the drawing of its landscape. For example, gardeners usually have to dig their plot of land by turning it upside-down with a hoe. In jerid, a quarter of the garden is worked every year, which means that the entire surface of a palm grove is dug to a 50-70 centimeters' depth every four years. The essential irrigation also requires hours of labor and proficiency.

Work on the date-palm tree alone requires the careful planting of a female palm tree and its irrigation for years; the climbing of the trunk three or four times during the spring to open each inflorescence, and then pollination; the climbing of the trunk again during the summer to clean old palms, and to hang down the fragile date clusters so that they do not break; and finally the climbing of the trunk several times during fall to harvest the dates. We have to bear in mind that there are at least 200 date palms in a small half-hectare garden, in addition to other cultivation. The average garden plot is about half a hectare in the important Jerid palm groves (which total around 1,ooo hectares). The oases of the jerid region host the ideal type of palm grove, in the form of thousands of overlaid gardens, structured vertically. In most cases, a three•level structure is adopted: in the shadow of the palm trees grow fruit trees, which in turn cover vegetable or cereal cultivation. This structure creates its own microclimate, and along with the major components of the oases (irrigation system, etc.), it responds to the pedoclimatic conditions. These approaches were selected and implemented by generations of gardeners. The result of centuries of daily practices can be seen and analyzed today as the oasian landscape.

So, is the palm grove still a place of relaxation and ease� a site of visual enchantment for Romantic contemplation? I find strange the idea of tourism agencies inviting tourists to spend their holidays in what is in essence a kind of "plant factory."

This mixed farming and intensive irrigated agriculture shapes the landscape; the spatial boundary of the cultivated zone is directly linked to the concern with maximizing water effectiveness and garden output. Oasian landscapes are "built nature." But the question remains: by whom were they built? Are they only the construction of these generations of gardeners? We can reformulate the question "What is a landscape?" into "Who is talking about landscape, how, and why?" A social anthropologist studies "local practices," but we should not limit our analysis to indigenous practices but broaden it to include all effective actors in these spaces. This means, in the Tunisian jerid, actors of tourism and development. Those actors, with local people, converge to define what is an oasis, what "it is for," and how to read these spaces. This polyphony is not without effect on the share of resources: water, land, labor, and even ideas about the environment. Tourism affects many daily local aspects: first, use of scarce water, to be used by hotels or to embellish the scenery, then labor, diverted from agriculture, and even the definition of the oasis-a place for work or a place for a stroll? I suggested earlier the notion of "socioecological landscape"; I have elsewhere discussed "socioecological resources" that form and define landscapes as being "classical," "instrumental," and/or "relativist." 2 The tourist modality in the jerid dates to the Orientalist infatuation; tourism was first a luxury or adventure enterprise (at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth) before turning to mass tourism. In 1922, LeGrand Hotel de I'Oasis was built in Tozeur, the biggest oasis of the Jerid; since 1980, Tozeur has had an international airport. The preoccupation and modalities shifted from the picturesque and ethnocentric to the pursuit of authenticity and cultural relativism.

Strangely, the Edenic idea of the oasian landscape that minimizes its labor component prevails among European middle-class tourists. Facing or inside the palm Tourists In the Netta palm grove grove, they do not see gardens, or cultivated small plots, but a forest-a forest of palm trees. This can be partly explained by a European-centered historic mechanism:

Europeans have their own history of the landscape and of "natural nature." According to jean-Claude Chamboredon,

The genesis of the countryside as an idyllic social setting results from a long process of progressive disappearance of the rural proletariat ... since the second part of the 19th century .... The countryside can be perceived as a natural space after the accomplishment of the process of neutralization (depoliticization and homogenization) that erases the social oppositions and historic contradictions that are embodied in its spatial organization and practices. Then, the "de-socialized nature" can seem the place of a life subjected to natural rhythms, the haven of a traditional civilization, the decor of a direct contact with a transcendence (aesthetic or religious).3

Because European tourists of the oases do not see the obvious (to local eyes) social inequity in the resource division (land, water, workforce) embodied in the palm groves, these agricultural lands can turn into nature and "naturalized landscape."

We left the idea of defining the landscape to focus on the identity of the actors invoking the landscape. In doing so, we noticed that "landscape" is a congruent notion with the tourist practices of the oasian spaces:

Landscape is the product of the view of someone who is foreigner to it. Man doesn't think of elaborating a landscaped representation of the place to which he is attached and where he works or lives. He maintains that space, preserves it and submits it to an order already registered in his mind. He decorates that space and embellishes it. But the conceptual schemes that guide his view .. . and that insert a value judgment in his visual analysis do not produce a mental click that instantly transforms a place into a landscape.4

Does this mean that the concept of landscape does not exist in cultures other than

Western ones? We should once more reframe the question Indeed, it is less important to know if a space is perceived as a landscape or not than to understand what is regarded as valuable in these spaces.

Gardens in the Jerid are tidied-up places, carefully designed. In one place we find beds of cultivation, irrigation networks, sometimes a sheep barn, and often the hut of the gardener. The garden is often small and is private property. It is enclosed by a fence of palms, to prevent people outside from seeing the intimacy of this "domestic nature."

Tourists retain the idea that they are in a "forest" when strolling along the main paths of the palm grove (always the same paths, as they aren't comfortable on smaller ones because they feel that they are violating the locals' privacy).

Tourists often agree with national (and sometimes international) agricultural service officials. For example, both would call the agricultural landscape of the oases The agricultural services did not succeed in reforming old palm groves despite extended efforts. But, using the colonial pattern, they succeeded in creating ex nihilo palm groves of deg/et en-nOr date palms. Why did they fail with the old palm groves' I think it is first because of misunderstanding of the function of gardens, the practices in the spaces of the palm groves, and the nature of this landscape.

OASIAN LANDSCAPES: FOR WHICH INDIGENOUS PURPOSES?

1 used the phrase "domestic nature" to designate gardens It is not only to underline the anthropic quality of the garden but also to emphasize the living, inhabited quality of these spaces. More than a workplace, these are an inherited patrimony for many generations, a place where gardeners spend the day even if there is no necessity of working. It is the place where gardeners express their aesthetic, their idea of beauty.

These gardens are invested of an almost Epicurean aesthetics, wholly in keeping with the Arab traditional garden. The five senses are engaged: watermelons in summer or broad beans in winter, the perfume of roses and jasmine, color touches amid the profusion of green elements, birdsongs, songs of the gardeners climbing the palm trees during pollination or in the evening, drinking palm wine. Ambiance is one essential component of aesthetics. An aesthetics that included any more than the visual appreciation of an environment always prompted incomprehension in agronomist engineers, both Tunisian and European, who, facing these gardens, saw only a vegetal confusion that was necessary to reform. The aesthetic quality of the oasian gardens, however, partakes of more than what is seen. This is the limitation of the use of the notion of "landscape"-a concept that usually rests on a visual definition ("all the visible features of an area of countryside or land," according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2d edition).

For the local gardeners, living off their plots in the old palm groves, to appreciate the garden is to share it. The garden is a center where constructions of space surround the gardener. The garden is an intimate center and nevertheless a communal space. This conception is not exclusive to the jerid; one finds it, for example, "in the japanese culture, [where] the appreciation of the beautiful sites is inseparable from human commerce (exchange of poems, banquets, tea ceremonies)."S Perhaps between the jeridi gardener and the tourist, one identifies the opposition that Augustin Berque made between "the sociable landscape" and the "solitary contemporary landscape" inspired by Romantic literature and painting.

The oasian garden is private property, but also a place for collective presence: working together in long and difficult labor, and in idle moments, sipping tea during the day or drinking alcoholic beverages from the palm sap at night-talking, sharing experiences, stories, songs, news. In the oases of jerid, one can always find men An oasis garden gathered in "halga" or "ga' ada." The halga term means "circle" in the local dialect and comes from ha/aqa in literary Arabic (when a sheikh teaches his disciples), and ga' ada refers to the seated position (dialect verb ga' ad, "to sit down"). During these moments, men tell the stories of 'antriya (the tale of 'Antara-"Anter" locally, pre-Islamic poet and warrior), but it is especially a time when things can be said about politics, the police, and women. These masculine meetings are certainly occasion of verbal transgression, but also of exchanges of knowledge. The aesthetic standards are communicated, the collective sanctions the individual, knowledge is transmitted: tests and comments are exchanged in the common agricultural context; one listens, one remembers accounts and local stories. A part of collective existence takes place there, in the garden.

According to Jeridi tradition, gardens of palm groves are thus not only productive areas but recreational ones as well. The palm-grove gardens produce more than a biomass: they produce social fabric. In contrast, the modern technicist paradigm represented, for instance, by agricultural engineers-views the oasian nature as an object of technical exploitation The "salvation" of the agricultural future of the region, from this perspective, will be indebted to the importation of modern technical support: drills, tractors, and other technologies. This movement brings along other ways of thinking and practicing in the environment. If the oasian nature is an object of technical exploitation, building this object is possible insofar as the oasis is seen as a resource to be appropriated Nature is to be colonized, desert to be fertilized: this constant "exteriority" toward the object legitimizes the scientific study, presumed to be the only means of rational exploitation .

•I . I BUILT NATURE: TOURISM IS SHAPING LANDSCAPE

What is true with the obvious intrusion of modern agriculture is true with tourism as well: the oasis represents scenery, an exotic landscape. The practices of modern agricultural and tourist actors make them keep their distance from the oasian space, which is a lived space for its inhabitants. This constant distance or exteriority toward the desired object legitimizes neither their colonization nor the scientific study, but a Romantic posture with respect to nature and a relativist reading with respect to local communities. For tourists, the exploitation of nature is less technical than ideological, but the effects are nevertheless considerable.

With a posture of distance, oases are islands in a mineral ocean. Maritime imagery is frequently used in dealing with the desert. The oases would be islands or ports, the desert a sea of sand, and camels the desert vessels. This is a particularly dominant metaphor in the Western imagination; many tourists are disappointed not to find oases always immersed in the sands, although sandy zones represent only one seventh of the Sahara.

Displaying the outward dimensions of oases is no longer sufficient; tourists demand at least functionalist explanations of "how it works," of the natural and social machinery that operates behind the decor. However, the landscape remains two-dimensional, guarding its third dimension: local daily life and its details. In the Jerid, a popular tourist attraction is a ride in a hot-air balloon, offering the possibility of a comprehensive view that remains exotic. In Siwa (Egypt), where a similar bird's eye view is achieved by climbing a mountain that overlooks the oasis, I asked a local if enjoyed such a viewpoint; he replied, "Why should I go to see from above things I already know from below?"6 This is enough to shake the universality of the concept of landscape. Nevertheless, this contrast between local peoples' and tourists' ways of perceiving the oasian environment and qualifying spaces does not ensure that the local environment or local interactions with nature will not change. All facets of the local economy are intimately interlinked with the environment. Let us approach this issue by dealing with water, a key factor of life in the oasis. The competition for water is obvious: water is needed for agriculture, but is also needed for the tourism sector. Tourism service officers and hotel architects align their view with international standards and maintain that a swimming pool is required to satisfy European tourist expectations. In the jerid, the mayor of Tozeur (the capital of the region) and owner of Dar Chralet hotel (bearing his name) went even further: he offered a so-hectare golf course in the desert. Along with thalassotherapy and cultural tourism, golf is part of the new measures adopted by the Tunisian government to diversify the tourist product.

According to the Tozeur golf website, the course "overlooks Tozeur's palm grove which is one of the most beautiful in Tunisia. And its 25 hectares of greens are irrigated with recycled waters to preserve the water table" (emphasis mine). In two sentences, you have two major imperatives toward local nature: a posture of domination (overlook it), and, for the sake of tourists' consciences, a response to ecological concern (recycle water). We can easily imagine that this recycled water could have been used for agriculture, which is suffering from lack of water.

Even if tourist guidebooks still mention, "over 200 springs" (as in the last edition of Lonely Planet Guide), no springs naturally irrigate the oasian gardens in the jerid.

Instead, deep drillings in the ground are used. They were dug first by French colonial farmers and administrators to free themselves of the complex indigenous negotiations for this resource, and then by the Tunisian Ministry of Agriculture. It was a progressive evolution over the last fifty years from "natural" springs, maintained by the local workforce, to water drilling maintained by the administration.

To say that the exploitation of water is a "mining" operation is not inaccurate, as the exploited resources are nonrenewable. Tube wells draw from the deep water table, which is insufficiently renewed? Nobody knows if the water reserve will last ten or fifty years. The dried-up springs were compensated for by more drilling in the deep water table. Because of continuous depletion, those artesian drillings became increasingly less effective, and more energy (for motor pumps) is needed to draw the same quantity of water8 Deep drilling has removed the capacity for the old oases to live on natural springs. Thus there was no true profit: the drilling provided a temporary increase of surface area for agriculture, but now the upkeep of these new plots, and even the maintenance of the old ones, is increasingly difficult.

How can an economy of tourism be inserted in such a difficult context? Ironically, by building a golf course and encouraging the development of more hotels with swimming pools. In Tozeur, eighteen hotels and five residences offer 3,500 beds. The government aimed to ease congestion of the littoral sea-and-sun tourism with the construction of Tozeur's international airport.

NEW IDEAS FOR LOCAL RELATIONS TO THE ENVIRONMENT

Tourism shapes oasian lands indirectly through services and infrastructure, but also through the concept of landscape. Tourism offers new ways to "read" nature. We saw that "The 'landscape' is the product of the view of someone who is foreign to it."9The local importance of ideas brought in the tourists' baggage cannot be gauged by the

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amount of time spent in the region (in Tozeur, tourist hub of the jerid, it is only one and-a-half days per person on average-partially because of the difficult weather).

Nor it can be gauged by the mere presence of tourists, this mobile mass of foreigners.

The gap between visitors and the local population is designed by the local society to preserve itself from uncontrolled contacts. Some informal interactions are tolerated, often represented by the class of young candidates to emigration called "beznesa." The government also reinforces the gap, to maintain both strong political control over the Tunisian population and the benefits of a tourist open-door policy (but it drives out the beznesa, to privilege more official interactions). The result of these two confluent strategies is a strange kind of tourist apartheid, where contacts are motivated mainly by business, sex, and emigration. However, borders separate as much as they bring together, according to one of the famous paradoxes of Edgar Morin/0 and interactions of the local and the global are always more complex than simple "culture shock": local communities haltingly give evidence of their desire to partake of the contemporary world, of the "global circulation of material and cultural flows." There is a perceptible "development of aesthetics of the 'furja', of the panorama and the beautiful sight"11 This aesthetic feeling that the space confers is only visual. It comes with neither a physical relation to the place nor with sociability. This local variant of aesthetics is implemented mainly for remote landscapes, especially displayed via television. The media is one way to hold the object at bay. This abstraction of the environment can be called "taby'a" (nature), a concept apart from the daily experiences of oasian people of the jerid. Today, the young beznes vigorously refuse to set foot in the pepper beds of their fathers, but they will defend the oasis and argue for the safeguarding of its aesthetics.

Here is an example: to address farmers' complaints about the lack of water for irrigation, in 1996 the agricultural administration undertook a project to pave the beds of the main wadi of the Tozeur palm grove to reduce losses due to infiltration.

Young people experienced this event very negatively. "The scenery is spoiled," they said. "The Government should have done it only in the hidden places of the oasis" meaning the places where tourists do not go. This criticism relates to the loss of its "authentic quality" (which usually merges "traditional" and "old"). These beznes stand up for the "landscape" object, as it brings the tourists, of course-in which they have a vested interest. However, they also develop a real feeling for the need to safeguard an inheritance. This preoccupation with the environment or the landscape does not arise from the local categories of environment perceptions or practices. This operation was made possible only by the exteriorization of the oasian object for local actors supposed to be from the "inside." First, they have had to imagine which representation of "nature" the foreigners have. Palm dates are no longer, for them, just the most common and obvious cultivated plant (in local interiors, a contrasting representation is often displayed: big pictures of snowy Swiss mountain forests): no, they learned to behold date palms as exotic features. And substantial consequences emerge: some gardens undergo renovation. Where agriculture services failed to reform them, tourism succeeds, and some gardens are transformed into a camping site or a cafeteria.

The date harvest

In the same way, young people learned to not consider their local customs archaic (although many still want to emigrate to Europe, in part to escape from them), but as valuable components of the local cultural package-not to live it, but to display it. The tradition is a point of convergence between tourism and the local society: the 'adat wa taq,jl/d ("local customs") are in both cases perceived as a heritage-fixed, timeless, and vouching for the true local oasian identity. In this respect, the local interface with tourism goes further in forestalling touristic desires: they even claim in the jerid a local Berber heritage (a very recent claim) when such connection is unthinkable by the local community as a whole; to the contrary, local identity is built on Arab (and Muslim) affiliations. Tourists' demands (especially French and German tourists) to see Berbers is strong enough to be relayed and reified locally (French colonial discourse highlighted the Berber component of North Africa to legitimize its annexation to Europe, given the presumed Latinity of Berber culture). Concerning the palm-grove spaces, young people operate a "purification" by excluding the compromising practices-living the oasis from the inside, like their forefathers-and by bringing out only its aesthetics.

The Jerid municipalities (Tozeur, Nefta, EI-Hamma, etc.) will probably accentuate this patrimonialization of the agricultural land in support of tourism. Despite the water deficiency for agriculture, drilling was undertaken in the palm grove of Nefta to put water in the dry beds of the main wadi. In view of the expected rate of flow, water will have infiltrated and evaporated before reaching the gardens. The goal, however, was rather a "visual and sound reenchantment" of the oasis-to restore its picturesque attributes according to presumed tourist expectations. The municipality has the same schizophrenic duties as the state: to take care of two poles of activity-agriculture and tourism-even if the most effort goes clearly toward tourism. Beyond the natural landscape, tourism has an efficient role in the arrangement of settlements. In Tozeur, the municipality decided that the local mud brick is the "authentic" feature of the traditional settlement; ai-Hadawif, the most remarkable area in the old town, is actually made of local yellow mud bricks, but other parts of the old town, even older, are made using a different technique.n But the best way to promote tourism is to define the simplest visual identity, as in marketing: the mud brick has been widely spread everywhere in the tourist town circuit, to the extent that even some mud brick walls were built to hide nonconforming architectures along main pathways. An architect, as early as 1991, was able to talk about a "folklorization of the space" and emphasized later the refusal of the inhabitants to get involved in such an "expression type" of their local identity13

In Egypt, nearly the same process occurs in the Siwa oasis. In two decades, Siwa witnessed significant changes to the organization of its habitat.14 While a radical change of space distribution of domestic units took place, the materials changed from a salty mud-clay mortar to the squared calcareous gypsum, inducing a fast evolution in techniques of construction. Although these two materials are both of local origin and production, the shift from one to the other is not without impact on the design of the habitat and the social uses of the dwellings. The argillaceous material seems to have regained favor by (political and commercial) promoters of the "traditional." The salty mud has been chosen to give a visual identity to Siwa, as a marker of the "traditional" for tourism purposes. Oases are artificial landscapes shaped by local people and environment conditions, but they are also shaped by external ideas, values, and expectations, and in this respect tourism has had a major impact, especially in recent years. The landscapes desired by tourism, compatible with the icon of the timeless "oasis," become increasingly a marketing feature; thus tourism is shaping the oasis landscape in its image.

  " That understanding has a positive value for tourists: they travel less to see exotic places than to experience authentic "exotic cultures." For the Tunisian agriculture engineer, this traditional quality has a more a negative value, and he's paid to change it: jerid oases should take part in the modern agriculture project and provide currencies by exporting to Europe the most prized dates, the deglet en-nOr variety.

  Males meeting to drink palm wine in the gardens under the palm dates Tourist actors do not come to intentionally transform the oasian landscape in its material dimension-on the contrary, their first concern is to engage with an idealized past in the desert, a remote harmony with nature. Nonethel�s, they transform oasian landscape in two ways: directly by spreading new ways to think about the relation to nature, and indirectly through the services and infrastructures organized to welcome them.

  also clear in the new strategy given to the agriculture administration: preserve the "oasian aspect." A recent official tendency is interest in conservation of biodiversity, after having long encouraged the monoculture of the deg/et en-nOr. Plantations organized by the state have been directed to have no more than 70 percent of groves in deglet en-nOr. The objective is to try to preserve the diversity of the Tunisian cultivars, in case the catastrophe scenario comes true: the Bayoud (a cryptogamic disease that ravaged Moroccan and Algerian palm groves) comes across the Algerian border and devastates the Tunisian oases. Therefore one can preserve at least the dominant visual aspect of oases even without an (exportable) date production.

  Reversing the usual process-by accommodating the reality to the copy-is not a new idea. Philippe Descola noticed that two tales of Edgar Allan Poe present this same reversal: The Domain of Arnheim and Landor's Cottage15 In these two stories, protagonists discover a piece of nature (a large domain in the first, a secret valley in the state of New York in the second) and dedicate themselves to landscaping their environment, to smoothing and transforming it until it becomes a "real landscape"-a succession of scenes, bearing the illusion of a Romantic painting.

NOTES1

  Vincent Battesti, ]ardins au desert, t:volution des pratiques et savoirs oasiens: ]erid tunisien (Paris: f:ditions IRO, 2005); and "De !'ha bitation aux pieds d'argile, des vicissitudes des materiaux et techniques de con stru cti on a Siwa (f:gypte)," Journal des Africanistes 76: 1-5ahara: identites et mutations sociales en objets (2oo6), 165-185. 2 Vincent Battesti, "Les oasis du jerid, des ressources naturelles et ideelles," in Michel Picouet, Mongi Sghaier, Daniel Genin,A.Abaab, Henri Guillaume, and M. Elloumi, eds., Environnement et societes rurales en mutation: Approches alternatives (Paris: tditions IRO, 2004), 201-214; andjardins au desert. jean-Claude Chamboredon, "La 'naturalisation' de Ia campagne: une autre maniere de cultiver les 'simples?" in Anne Cadoret, ed , Protection de Ia nature: histoire et ideologie, De Ia nature a l'environnement (Paris: f:ditions I'Harmattan, 1985), 1.3 8-151; 142. 4 Gerard Lenclud, 'L'ethnologie et le paysage, Questions sans reponses," in Claudie Voisenat, ed., Paysage au pluriel, Pour une approche ethnologique des paysages (Paris: Maison des sciences de l'homme; Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique, 1995), 5-17; 14. 5 Augustin Berque, 1993. 6 Vincent Battesti, "'Pourquoi j'irais voir d'en haut ce que je connais deja d'en bas>' Com prendre !'usage des espaces dans !'oasis de Siwa," in Vincent Battesti and Nicolas Puig, eds., Terrains d't:gypte, anthropologies contemporaines (Cairo: CEDE), 2006b), 139-179-7 A. Mamou, "Oeveloppement des zones sahariennes en Tunisie et son incidence sur les res sources en eau;" in Les oasis au Maghreb, Mise en valeur et developpement, Actes du seminaire Gabes, 4, 5 et 6 novembre 1994 (Tunis: Cahier du C.E.R.E.S., 1995), 71-86; 73. 8 Michtt!l Richter, "Les oasis du Maghreb: typologie et problemes agro-ecologiques," in les oasis au Maghreb, 29-56; 42. 9 Lenclud, 'L' eth nologie et le paysage, Questions sans reponses," 14. 10 Edgar Morin, Le paradigme perdu: Ia nature humaine (Paris: tditions du Seuil, 1973). 11 Nicolas Puig, "Entre souqs et musees: Territo ires tau ristiques et societes oasiennes a Tozeur en Tunisie," Espaces et societes, tourisme en villes 100 (2000), 57-80 12 Ibid. 13 Farid Abachi, Les banlieues perdues ou Ia ville enfouie: Tozeur(Tunis: These d'architecture, lnstitut Technologique d'Art, d'Architecture et d'Urbanisme de Tunis, 1991), 139. 14 Battesti, "De !'habitation aux pieds d'argile, des vicissitudes des materiaux et techniques de construction a Siwa (f:gypte)." 1S Philippe Descola, "Postface: Les coulisses de Ia nature," in Adel Selmi and Vincent Hirtzel, eds., Gouverner Ia nature (Paris: L'Herne, 2007), 123-127. Henri Duveyrier, La Tunisie (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1881). Rene Pottier, Au pays du voile bleu (Paris: Nouvelles ed. Ia tines, Fernand So riot, 1945).