One - Policy analysis in France: introduction

Summary

Introduction

This book lays the foundation for a more systematic understanding of policy analysis in France. In the French context, understanding ways in which knowledge of and for policies is produced within and outside the state raises two issues that we collectively address in this volume: explaining the process by which studies for policy process have been strictly separated from the study of policy process and providing some explanation as to why this fundamental distinction still holds – even though it was regularly challenged by successive generations of scholars and practitioners. We argue that in the French context, this remaining divide results from the specificity of the politico-bureaucratic system, the structuring of the academic sphere as well as the functioning of the policy-making process.

One of the main difficulties was to define what kind of knowledge can be considered as ‘policy analysis’ and what cannot (Hassenteufel and Zittoun, 2017). In the French context, civil servants were the first to develop policy analysis as an autonomous field of expertise within the state apparatus. From the eighteenth century onwards, several ‘Grand Corps’ contributed to mapping out the extent of the state's intervention in various policy areas as well as providing some suggestions on how it could be enhanced. One of the most internationally-known examples is the comparative study done by Tocqueville on prison policies in France and the United States in 1833 (De Beaumont and De Tocqueville, 1845). Since this period and until the 1980s, policy analysis was mainly developed as practitioner’s know-how within the state, that is, as studies for policies, and only drew on academic expertise on rare occasions.

It was only much later on, during the 1970s and 1980s, that policy studies emerged as an academic field within political science and administration studies (Leca and Muller, 2008). They favoured the development of a comprehensive knowledge that would enable them to grasp the policy process and the role of bureaucratic elites in producing policy studies for the policy process (Zittoun and Demongeot, 2010). This historically-situated process explains why and how ‘policy studies’ is now understood in France – and in most public policy textbooks – as an academic field and not as applied research.