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This article is based on a study commissioned by a local authority willing to “evaluate”, in order to improve, its educational policy. This policy consists in an important “project” aiming to group the abundant complementary educational offer available to the schools established in its territory. Study of the conditions of the survey, its results and its reception allows us to question what is now expected (and implied) in such studies: the types of problems that a collectivity such as this allows itself to recognize, and those which it fails to recognize by considering them to be out of its scope of action. It also contributes to explore the relevance, the possibilities and the difficulties for researchers, in this case sociologists, to respond to orders for public studies, which tend to multiply, but which the institutional and academic worlds seem to agree on and resolve to consider as requests for a work of “expertise”.