Introduction

In this chapter, we address the role played by non-governmental (NGOs) and civil society organisations (CSOs) in the development of policy analysis in France. A brief overview of the existing literature about the French context suggests that these organisations have an ambivalent relationship to the policy process. Scholarly work paid little attention to these actors until relatively recently. Two major reasons were repeatedly brought forward in order to account for such mutual disinterest (Callon et al, 2013). First, forms of decision-making and state–society relationships in the context of the Fifth Republic offered little opportunities for non-state actors to shape policy-making. CSOs and NGOs were primarily considered as service providers at policy implementation stage, by contrast with the formal role granted to workers’ unions and professional organisations in the policy process after the Second World War. Second, the French neo-corporatist model of policy-making favoured the participation of a limited number of organised CSOs to policy formulation (Hayward and Watson 1975), whereas the vast majority of CSOs and NGOs occupied marginal positions in the policy process and preferred other forms of interests’ representation, such as protest (Wilson, 1983). While the former were often referred to in scholarly literature as policy insiders and were, as such, the focus of much attention in scholarly work about the functioning of the state and policy-making in France, the latter were considered as policy outsiders and only included in policy studies insofar as they acted as veto-players or as agents of policy change. Decentralisation reforms somewhat confirmed this division of tasks. Following the 1982 laws, the generalisation of ‘public policy by delegation’ (Lorrain, 2005) strengthened the critical role of non-state actors – both private and non-profit organisations – in the development of policy offer and the provision of public services at the local level (see also Gaudin, 2007). Yet the formulation of public policies themselves, and the production of policy analysis, remained concentrated at the national level and in the hands of higher civil servants – generalists and/or specialists – and professionals (Douillet et al, 2012). As a result, until recently, the relationship between NGOs and policy analysis was characterised either by a mutual lack of interest or by strong distrust.