The (de)politicization of local public policy makers : levers and constraints of policy innovation

Drawing from the contribution of public policy analysis to the analysis of institutional change and stability, this paper investigates how elected municipal officials in small (< 3 500 inhabitants) French municipalities navigate rural revitalisation through the development of local commercial equipment for economic change. Benefitting from the same fiscal autonomy and administrative capacity to develop public policy as larger European municipalities, the institutional specificities of small cities allow this paper to highlight alternative factors for municipalities to be agents of change in a comparative approach with the larger (global) municipalities investigated by the literature. The paper focuses on a specific policy program aiming at opening multiservices bar/restaurants in rural areas and implemented between small municipalities (<3 500 inhabitants) and a NGO, ‘1 000 cafés’. As it aims at tackling the structural economic constraints upon traditional business models in rural areas, this program could politicize the interrelationship between political and economic social spheres of activities or the merits of commercial equipment politics regarding rural revitalisation. Yet, my argument is that the program remains consistent with rural commercial development policies implemented over the last forty years in France at the national level and is thus an example of policy stability at the municipal level. The goal of the paper is to conduct a micro and meso-level analysis of the factors constraining policy makers to innovate at a municipal level through the prism of sociology of work. In that way, mainly drawing from Andy Smith’s work, it focuses on two types of working activities to interrogate how work politicizes political and policy workers and binds their political agency : political work produced by elected municipal officials as they organize the cooperation between private agents and local government bodies ; and policy work produced by the ‘1 000 cafés’ employees as they produce a set of technical expertise and tools to support shop managers. At the intersection of public policy analysis and sociology of work, it raises two bodies of questions. First, how does political work politicize elected municipal officials : what are the technical skills, views of politics and approaches to change developed from practicing as an elected municipal official, and how does it impact their ability to innovate ? Second, what does salaried work in NGOs do to the process of policy making ? How is salaried work a constraint to the politicization of policy making, framing actors’ capacity to innovate ? The paper thus focuses on two factors of institutional change and stability - actors and ideas - to analyze the constraints on innovation inherent in municipal public action itself. Data is retrieved from a work-in-progress PhD thesis : a one year-long ethnography of the salaried work in 1 000 cafés as an employee ; a one month-long ethnography of a local bar/restaurant part of the program as an employee ; and several interviews conducted with elected municipal officials and NGO employees part of the program.