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Reviewed by:
  • Les territoires vécus de l’intervention sociale by Maryse Bresson, Fabrice Colomb, Jean-François Gaspar
  • Loïc Trabut
Maryse Bresson, Fabrice Colomb, Jean-François Gaspar, eds., Les territoires vécus de l’intervention sociale [Implementing social policy at the territorial level], Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, Le regard sociologique, 2015, 272 p.

This collective work examines the role of territories in social policy implementation and how the various actors use the territories. In the first section, “Social policy implementation and analytic scale diversity,” the authors work to determine the right or relevant territorial scope for public action. They question both the scale at which public policies tend to be implemented in France and the scale at which they are assessed and analysed.

Chapter 1 “examines the framework in which local-level policy systems develop and presents theoretical and methodological tools for understanding those systems” (p. 22). Alberta Andreotti and Enzo Mingione highlight strong regional disparities in Italy. The vertical subsidiarity principle in social policy there seems adversely affected by the loose national framework and differences between territories’ own capacities, a situation that deepens social inequalities. Given current reductions in Italian state funding and the absence of a strict national framework, the various territories end up competing with each other for resources – increasing existing inequalities. Chapter 2 also critically examines the question of scale, focusing on scientific social policy analysis and assessment. For the author Olivier Giraud, public policy implementation in nation-states is presented in the comparative literature as a recurring process applied in standard fashion to different fields of social action. He shows that in fact, comparative analysis of states is no longer relevant today given the internal complexity of the different territorial echelons and the increasing heterogeneity of the resulting national territories.

In Chapter 3, Martin Goyette and Mélody Saulnier focus on youth policy design and implementation in Quebec. They show the need for multi-scale analysis that will take into account both the Quebec province framework and how youth policy is implemented in the province’s different territories.

Chapter 4 studies policy for older people in France at the different territorial echelons. For Dominique Argoud, while ageing policy was initially developed at the territorial level and began rising to the national one, French decentralization policy halted that process at the département level. This created a mosaic of situations that differ from one département to another. Population and territory heterogeneity is in fact making it more and more difficult to define a target population. This new situation has led territorial policymakers to approach the ageing question from a broad social perspective – in contrast to national-level [End Page 362] policy, which targets specific populations to increase policy effectiveness but in so doing stigmatizes those populations. Ageing policy in France thus provides an opportunity to observe two distinct visions of social action operating at two different scales.

In Chapter 5, Émilie Balteau studies urban renewal policies and arrangements for achieving “neighbourhood democracy.” She notes that while, predictably, local politicians and grassroots actors do not perceive things the same way, there are greater divergences between those two groups on the one hand and the groups directly affected by the proposed policy on the other. She uses this example to show how the goal of social mix as understood by politicians induces policy “users” to withdraw into the domestic sphere.

In Chapter 6, Carole Tuchszirer and Jules Simha study occupational training programmes in the Ile-de-France administrative region, observing a change in how territories are defined: it is now the region that decides what territory is “relevant.” The territorialisation process has worked to break down dividing walls between policy areas and to organize public policy implementation on a contract basis. This in turn has resulted in a division of policy space into three dimensions: political-administrative, actor groups, and projects. Community and region-level actors have contrasting views of the territorialisation process: the former may not be strong enough to get certain projects on the agenda while in other cases, territorialisation is perceived as the region taking over community initiatives again.

The second section of the book...

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