Introduction

This chapter focuses on policy process studies as they emerged and developed in France from the 1950s to the early 1980s. During this pivotal period, the conditions for their creation were favourable. Their establishment within academia became clearly visible in the late 1980s when the first French manual of public policy analysis was published by Meny and Thoenig (1989). The concluding remarks of a review of the manual published in the Revue française de science politique (Baudouin, 1990) asked the following question: ‘Ultimately, can one claim that a new discipline has emerged?’ The response to this question was provided following the review of the same manual in the Politiques et Management Public (PMP) journal that had been created a few years earlier: ‘Policy analysis has gained respectability. It has now become a Themis.’ Themis is a reference collection by French universities and its acceptance by French universities marked a major step forwards. Many other milestones were also achieved during this decade: the creation of the first French journal focusing on public policy (PMP) in 1983; the creation ex nihilo of a public policy laboratory by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (the Public Policy Analysis Group) in 1984; the publication of an entire volume of Political Science essays (Grawitz and Leca, 1985) focusing on the analysis of public policies; the aforementioned manual by Meny and Thoenig, and Pierre Muller's (1990) Que-sais-je? which focused on the cognitive approach to public policy. These markers of institutionalisation reflected the beginning of the integration of policy process studies within French academic research, as an autonomous ‘branch’ of political sciences compared to other policy approaches developed in economic and legal disciplines.

To better understand how the establishment of policy process studies within academic research has taken shape, it seems necessary to trace the institutionalisation trajectory. This trajectory developed within the academic world but also largely outside it, alongside it and in direct interaction with it. Indeed, the institutionalisation of specific academic knowledge centred around ‘policy process studies’ while ‘policy analysis’, that is, the knowledge produced and the methodological tools developed to collect and analyse this knowledge in order to respond to public issues, remained largely the product of state expertise.